Nature as Sacred Ground: A Metaphysics for Religious Naturalism 9781438459295, 9781438459318, 2015008204

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1 Being and Nothingness
The Transcendent Ground View
The Immanental View
Universe and Multiverse
The Role of Time
Chapter 2 One and Many
The Either-Or Approach
The Both-And Approach
Defense of the Both-And Approach
Chapter 3 Permanence a nd Change
The Lure of the Immutable
Arguments against Ultimate Immutability and the Denial of Time
Possibility and Change
Chapter 4 Causality, Novelty, and Freedom
Causality
Novelty
Freedom
Freedom and Human Experience
Chance and Science
Chapter 5 Matter, Life, and Mind
The Nature of Matter
Matter and Life
Matter and Mind
Chapter 6 Good and Evil
The Natures and Relations of Goods and Evils
The Metaphysical Basis of Moral Good and Moral Evil
Additional Questions about the Metaphysics of Moral Good and Evil
Chapter 7 The S acred and the Profaned
What Sacredness Means
The Sacredness of Nature
Human Profanations of Nature
Chapter 8 Summing Up
Notes
Works Cited
Index

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Nature as Sacred Ground

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Nature as Sacred Ground A Metaphysics for Religious Naturalism

Donald A. Crosby

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Cover image: Bigstockphoto / © pic.r Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2015 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Diane Ganeles Marketing, Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crosby, Donald A. Nature as sacred ground : a metaphysics for religious naturalism / Donald A. Crosby. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5929-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4384-5931-8 (e-book) 1. Nature–Religious aspects. 2. Metaphysics. I. Title. BL65.N35C764 2016 202'.12—dc23 2015008204 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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In Memory of Mary Lou and Jack Ever Loving and Forever Loved Parents

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CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Chapter 1

Being and Nothingness

1

Chapter 2

One and Many

19

Chapter 3

Permanence and Change

37

Chapter 4

Causality, Novelty, and Freedom

57

Chapter 5

Matter, Life, and Mind

87

Chapter 6

Good and Evil

109

Chapter 7

The Sacred and the Profaned

127

Chapter 8

Summing Up

147

Notes

157

Works Cited

177

Index

183

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his book is the fifth in a series of volumes in which I explore various aspects of what I call Religion of Nature. The first of these, A Religion of Nature, is a general introduction to a religious outlook on nature in which I lay claim both to the religious ultimacy of nature and to its metaphysical ultimacy, that is, nature’s entitlement to wholehearted religious commitment and to acknowledgment of the totality of its processes, patterns, constituents, and interrelationships as the final reality. The second book, Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil, investigates Religion of Nature’s interpretations of and responses to the presence and threat of systemic natural and human evils in the world. The third book, The Thou of Nature: Religious Naturalism and Reverence for Sentient Beings, is a plea for religiously inspired, deeply respectful attitudes, treatments, and policies regarding nonhuman forms of sentient life in their natural environments. The fourth book, More Than Discourse: Symbolic Expressions of Naturalistic Faith, discusses the crucial role of nondiscursive symbols in the discernments and practices of religion in general and Religion of Nature in particular. The present book probes and defends in more detail than these earlier ones the metaphysical aspect of Religion of Nature, that is, its vision of reality and its central contention that nothing exists beyond, beneath, or above nature in its manifold guises and continuing transformations. And it exhibits the intimate connection of this metaphysical claim with the religious outlook of Religion of Nature. With this background in mind, let me suggest the following scenario as a way of directing forceful attention to the basic theme and concern of this book. Suppose I were to come to you with a proposal. I claim to have in my possession a powerful technique that can eliminate ix

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all of your potential anxieties, uncertainties, sorrows, pains, sufferings, and the like and enable you to live for the rest of your life in a dream world of perfect peace and contentment. But in order to do this, I must surgically, chemically, and irrevocably alter your nervous system and have electrodes permanently implanted in your body at critical places. All that would be “real” for you in this new situation would be in fact unreal, but you would not know that or have any perceived need to know it. I indicate to you that the procedure has already been employed with other people many times, and that there is no chance of its failure. Having explained all of this in careful detail, I now invite you to undergo the treatment I have described. Would you accept the invitation? Why or why not? If you refuse to accept it, a basic reason for doing so might be this: you prefer to live in the real world, with all of its risks, uncertainties, frustrations, sufferings, and the like, and you do not want to sacrifice reality for illusion—however sweet and untroubled the illusory state might be. I suspect that many if not most of us would feel the same way. Implicit in this scenario is the distinction between what is real and what is not, and the singular importance of this distinction. What is the distinction, and how can we go about drawing it out in a systematic and satisfying manner? Among the ways of trying to do so is the philosophical way called metaphysics. Metaphysics can be defined as study of the most general or pervasive types, traits, and structures of reality and their interrelations. Everyone has metaphysical beliefs of some sort, whether these beliefs are explicitly recognized, questioned, or critically reflected on as such. Metaphysical beliefs are convictions about the fundamental character of reality and the place of human beings within reality. Among the things such beliefs may center on or adumbrate—as the chapter titles of this book indicate—are broad topics such as being and nothingness; permanence and change; causality, novelty, and freedom; matter, life, and mind; good and evil; and the sacred and the profaned. Philosophical metaphysics seeks to investigate in systematic fashion topics such as these and their interrelationships with one another. The Greek philosopher Aristotle in the fourth century BCE conceived of metaphysics, or what he sometimes called “first philosophy,” as inquiry into the nature of what is “really real” (Greek: ontōs on) and into the basic types of existence derivative from, referent to, or dependent on the really real.1 In the eighteenth century, German

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philosopher Immanuel Kant was convinced and confidently announced that he had found the definitive and finally adequate way of dealing with metaphysical problems, insisting that approaches to them were inescapably conditioned and limited by fixed structures of the human mind. This meant for him that it is impossible for humans to know what reality is like in and of itself.2 His was a bold (if deflating) claim whose principal features some later philosophers were strongly inclined to accept but which other philosophers were adamantly critical of and unwilling to endorse. In the twentieth century, to cite another prominent example, the English philosopher, mathematician, and logician Alfred North Whitehead defined metaphysics as identification of the generic categories of reality and the systematic study of their exemplifications, applications, and patterns of relationship. The generic categories are those present in each and every kind or instance of experience. They are by definition invariably present, and this requirement gives us the test of whether such proposed categories are truly generic. For Whitehead, these categories refer to such things as actuality, possibility, relation, process, continuity, novelty, subjectivity, and objectivity. He also gives a prominent place in his metaphysics to a particular conception of God and of God’s relations to the world. Whitehead insists that a system of metaphysics, in order to be plausible, must pass the muster of criteria such as consistency, coherence, logical reasoning, adequacy to all kinds of ongoing experience (including aesthetic, moral, and religious experience), and unfailing exemplification or necessity of its claimed generic categories.3 What is real? What is most fundamentally or generally real? How do the basically real features of reality relate to one another? Is there a hierarchy of types of fundamentally real traits of the universe? Are minds or spirits separate or separable from bodies? Is the future fixed or open? Is there such a thing as indeterminacy or chance, not just as a limitation of present human knowledge, but as a pervasive trait of objective reality? Are we humans free or causally determined in every part of our actions? Did the universe come into being at some point in the past or has it always been in existence? Will it come to an end? Are space and time primordial or derivative? What is the status in reality of so-called natural laws? Do values and disvalues exist in the objective world or only in us humans? Does the universe have a purpose? How do we human beings fit into the general scheme of things? To what extent can the

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universe be accurately known in its own right, and not just as a construct of human experiences, conceptual schemes, languages, and cultures? What, if anything, within or beyond the material universe is deserving of unqualified religious reverence, devotion, and commitment? These are typical metaphysical questions for which philosophers over the millennia have offered various answers and argued in support of their answers. Philosophers have long been specialists in systematic forms of metaphysical inquiry. But metaphysical ideas and beliefs have many other sources, references, and implications than in explicitly philosophical ways of thinking, including the natural and social sciences, religion, morality, the arts, and day-to-day experience. No one, seasoned specialist or not, holds a monopoly on assuming, wondering about, or speculating about the basic character of reality and the place of human beings within reality. As we read the history of metaphysical speculation and of various proposed metaphysical theories, we soon come to realize that the content of the theories varies widely. There are materialists, mind-body dualists, idealists, and panpsychists, for example, and there are causal determinists and proponents of free will. There are those who give a prominent place to a conception of God or gods and those who do not. There are some who confidently affirm an afterlife for human beings and conceive of another, more fitting order of existence than this earthly one, and some who do not. The abundance of differing metaphysical perspectives gives notice that no one can decide these issues for someone else in a definitive, conclusive fashion. Each person must in the final analysis think for herself or himself if she or he happens to take strong interest in metaphysical issues and wishes to find at least tentatively satisfying resolutions of them or insightful approaches to them. This book is the result of one philosopher’s attempt to do just that and to present the results of his inquiries for consideration by others. In doing so, I make no claim to dogmatic certainty or finality of result and know that it would be naive and even absurd to do so. But sometimes the concerted efforts of philosophers in the direction of metaphysical clarity and understanding can prove to be of benefit to others—whether they are philosophers or not—as these others raise their own questions and seek their own answers. In this spirit, I present this book for consideration in the hope that it may help to clarify some of the relevant alternatives,

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propose some answers to metaphysical questions worth considering, and shed some useful light along the way. Does metaphysics have any practical value? Or is it just a purely theoretical enterprise? My response to the question is basically this: beliefs about the character of reality profoundly, even if often only tacitly, inform our commitments. And our commitments affect the course of our day-to-day lives. The main practical value of careful thought about metaphysical issues, as I view it, is that such thought can help to give greater clarity of awareness and conscious purpose to our lives by pointing to optional visions of the world among which our freedom of thought and action can be exercised. It can do so by reminding us that the conception of reality with which we may have more or less unconsciously lived in the past should not be unquestioningly assumed or taken for granted. It is not the only way of viewing the world and perhaps not even the best way of viewing the world. Our presumed worldview should be subjected to ongoing inquiry and evaluation because what we believe to be real is bound to have a profound effect on what we strive and hope for, how we respond to various situations and experiences, what we need to be on guard against, and how in general we live and think we ought to live. But it is not only the case that what we believe about metaphysical matters makes a difference; it is also the case that what we are justified in believing (or not believing) makes a critical difference. The history of metaphysical thought and our own active engagement in such thought can bring forcibly to our attention that there are ways of understanding the world that differ in varying degrees from our own, and that we have the freedom to inquire into, carefully examine, and take into account these alternate ways as we seek to arrive at our own vision of reality. Perhaps the best way to put this point about the practical importance of metaphysics is to say that investigation of metaphysical theories of various types can help to enlarge our sense of responsibility and freedom by making us more fully aware of the optional and debatable character of what we may have formerly and unquestioningly taken to be the basic features of the real and the relations of these features to one another. Thinking along metaphysical lines can help us to critically examine our beliefs about reality for their truth or falsity, for their value or disvalue, and for their suitability or unsuitability as bases for fundamental purposes and meanings in our lives. Such thinking can help us to lead more reflective and purposive lives. It may even lead, over

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time, to radical new ways of seeing ourselves and the world, and thus to no longer being restricted to seeing only what unexamined habits of thought had formerly led us to expect. Such new seeing can open up new possibilities for enriching the quality of our lives and of our contributions to the world. As this book’s subtitle indicates, the metaphysics to be outlined here will be naturalistic. This means that it does not rest on any kind of alleged supernatural revelation or the unquestioned authority of a particular tradition of thought, but on reason and experience working with the general resources of past and present human cultures. Also implied by the term naturalistic is the fact that this metaphysics does not posit any kind of reality other than nature in its various forms and manifestations. There is nothing in the metaphysical outlook to be defended here, in other words, that makes reference to anything outside of nature. Nature has a dynamic, evolving, selfsurpassing side, as we shall see, but everywhere and at all times what evolves and unfolds is new forms of nature itself, not something other than nature. I endeavor here to describe salient general features of reality as viewed from a wholly naturalistic perspective. Included in my discussion of these fundamental features is the defense of what I regard as the inviolable sacredness of nature, a sacredness that it is not derivative from something else or from some other realm but is inherent and sufficient in nature itself. This book’s penultimate chapter highlights the sacredness of nature and shows the critical connection of the metaphysical ultimacy of nature with its religious ultimacy. From a religious as well as a metaphysical perspective, then, nature is enough. It is all there is and all there needs to be. A central task of this book is elaboration and support of this claim. My writing of this book has benefited greatly from the support and the critical comments and suggestions of two anonymous readers for the State University of New York Press. Senior acquisitions editor Nancy Ellegate and others on the staff of the State University of New York Press have provided courteous and helpful guidance in shepherding the book through the stages of its production, and I express here my gratitude to them. My wife Pamela has read through the chapters of earlier drafts of the book with me and provided continuing invaluable advice about its style, organization, orientation, and character. As is abundantly evident from the “Works Cited” section, I have sought in the book to enter into dialogue with many

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writers of ancient, modern, and contemporary times—in areas of the sciences as well as the humanities—agreeing with some and disagreeing with others. In either event, I am indebted to these writers for addressing or adumbrating metaphysical and religious issues of enduring importance. “No man is an island,”4 and no responsible philosopher, male or female, can pretend to write from scratch or stand alone. I am entirely responsible for this book in its final—but hardly finally adequate—form.

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Chapter 1 Being and Nothingness Thus far we have spoken as simple physicists: now we must advance to metaphysics, making use of the great principle, little employed in general, which teaches that nothing happens without a sufficient reason; that is to say, that nothing happens without its being possible for him who should sufficiently understand things, to give a sufficient reason to determine why it is so and not otherwise. This principle laid down, the first question which should rightly be asked, will be, Why is there something rather than nothing? For nothing is simpler and easier than something. Further, suppose that things must exist, we must be able to give a reason why they must exist so and not otherwise. —Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz1

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he seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz assumed, as the epigraph to this chapter shows, that there is a sufficient reason or explanation for each thing that exists and for the exact character, at any given time, of each existing thing. This principle also requires for him that there be a sufficient reason for the existence of the universe as a whole, with all its diverse traits and properties as these unfold through time. Not anything, therefore, including the universe as a whole is contingent, accidental, or arbitrary. Everything without exception is explicable in principle through and through, even though we humans with our limited understanding are not able to comprehend the why and wherefore of every aspect of the universe in its multifarious detail. In keeping with these ideas, Leibniz also assumed that the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a perfectly

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intelligible as well as urgently pressing question, one that demands an answer. Part of his reason for thinking so was the further assumption that “nothing is simpler and easier than something,” which means that sheer nothingness to his mind requires no explanation, while the existence of a vast universe of innumerable “somethings” emphatically and inescapably does. Because nothing at all is the simplest and even most natural state of affairs, why does anything exist? Leibniz’s thought along these lines lies in the department of philosophical thought called metaphysics. Metaphysics as I shall define it is the quest for a systematic understanding of the most basic aspects of reality and of the relations of these basic aspects to one another. By most basic I mean the most general and pervasive features of reality, ones that characterize it in each and all its manifestations. This quest includes, among many other issues, as Leibniz acknowledges, the question of whether the universe not only has had but also had to have had an absolute beginning, and if so, how or why it came into being. This question occupies us in this chapter. Why being and not mere nothingness? is one way of putting the question. This is but one of the major metaphysical topics or issues with which I deal in this book, as the titles of subsequent chapters indicate. Before going any further, however, I need to clarify one point about the term metaphysics. As the shelf label and the books contained thereon of a number of large bookstores implies, metaphysics is often assumed to refer to religious, spiritual, or mystical matters and perspectives that lie beyond the physical, in other words, in some extraordinary realm independent of, or at least radically different from, the mundane material realm of day-to-day experience and thought. But I am assuming throughout this book on metaphysics that the area of philosophy under investigation is a study of reality in its most general forms and manifestations. It is not by nature opposed to the possibility that these forms and manifestations might all be exclusively material at their base. Thoroughgoing materialism is thus a significant metaphysical option, not an unquestionably distorted, incomplete, or unsatisfactory view of things that a reasonable metaphysics is by its nature required to reject. It is true that not all metaphysically minded philosophers are materialists. To cite some metaphysical thinkers of Leibniz’s and earlier times, Plato, René Descartes, John Locke, George Berkeley, and

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Leibniz himself assuredly were not materialists. But Lucretius, Thomas Hobbes, Paul Henri Thiry (Baron) d’Holbach, and Julian Offray la Mettrie just as assuredly were. And this second group is every bit as entitled to be recognized as thoughtful metaphysicians, quite worthy of notice and response, as is the first one. Furthermore, there is no necessary opposition between being a materialist and being deeply moral, religious, or spiritual in one’s outlook on the world. The terms materialist or materialistic are sometimes used in this sense, as when we say of someone unduly preoccupied with the acquisition and possession of material things that he or she is “too materialistic.” But this is not the metaphysical meaning of materialism as one way of conceiving the fundamental character of the world. There are a number of ways of responding to this chapter’s concern with the existence or possible nonexistence of the universe. One way is to argue, as Leibniz does, that the universe had an absolute beginning and that divine creation accounts for its coming into being. Leibniz insists in The Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason (1714) that only one of the many possible universes can exist, and that the universe in which we live is the best of all possible ones. As such, it is the only one that a purely beneficent God would have chosen to create. God created it in order to bring into being something that mirrors, even if only in a fallible manner, God’s own limitless perfection. Thus, one answer to the question regarding the status of being and nothingness is that God has created the universe. This had to be the case, for the universe obviously exists and nothingness is the default state—the only conceivable one for Leibniz not necessitating an explanation. But if so, how did God do it? One response is that God did so out of God’s own substance. This is the emanationist view of divine creation, championed for example by the third-century CE EgyptoRoman metaphysician Plotinus in his book The Enneads. Another answer is that God created the universe out of some kind of preexistent something, such as a primordial chaos, watery darkness, or indeterminate Platonic “receptacle” (chora).2 A third answer relating to God is that God created the universe out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo). The emanationist view has the virtue of allowing for a clear basis for relationship between God and the world, while the more austere notion of God’s having created the universe out of nothing does not. I return to this point later in this chapter.

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Another option makes no reference to God but contends that the universe spontaneously and without cause (contra Leibniz’ principle of sufficient reason) arose either from sheer nothing or from some kind of indeterminate something, for example, the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander’s “Boundless” (apeiron) into its present form. An additional option is that this universe came into being on the basis of or as the transformation of an earlier universe, and that one from a still earlier one, and so on back into an infinite past. Hence, a succession of universes has always existed, the earlier ones giving way to the later ones, down to the present world. A further option is that this universe is only one of a large if not infinite number of universes existing along with it. Finally, we might conceive of the universe in its present character as having always existed and therefore requiring no explanation for coming into being. This view was espoused by Aristotle.3 A related issue is whether the universe, either created or always existing, is capable of existing on its own or requires some independently continuing basis or ground for its ongoing existence, such as God. In other words, is the universe capable of maintaining itself or must it be maintained by something other than itself? These are large and formidable questions, and I do not presume to be able to offer anything like absolutely satisfying answers to them. But I propose answers that seem, on balance, most reasonable to me and explain why I think them to be so. That is my strategy and procedure in this chapter and throughout the book. My general thesis is that a naturalistic metaphysics—that is, one requiring no cause, ground, or explanation for nature beyond itself when nature is properly conceived—is most probably true. So I describe what a naturalistic metaphysics amounts to and discuss and defend some of its main topics and outlines as I proceed. The focus of this chapter is partly on the issue of whether the universe had an absolute beginning, that is, whether its being arose from, or in the context of, absolute nothingness. The chapter’s focus is also on the issue of whether anything other than the immanent principles, powers, and resources of nature is required to account for nature’s continuance in being, its persistent existence in some shape or form through all time. In other words, is nature self-sufficient or is it crucially dependent on something other than itself? In the next section, we consider arguments for the view that nature is not self-sufficient and requires a basis or ground beyond itself to

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account for its origin (when it is believed to have had an origin) and for its ongoingness.

The Transcendent Ground View At the heart of all of the arguments to be considered in this section is the conviction that the universe as a whole is contingent. A contingent universe is one that is dependent on something else for its existence. It is also one that could conceivably not have existed. Contained within it is neither explanation for its origin nor for its continuing existence. Its coming to be and its continuing to be require explanation beyond itself. Such an explanation would constitute its ultimate reason or ground for being. And it must have such, according to thinkers like Leibniz, in light of two considerations. The first one is the principle of sufficient reason, namely, the view that everything, including the universe as a whole, is fully and completely explainable. Nothing happens by chance, spontaneously, or out of the blue. The second consideration is that the only conceivable situation (apart from God’s existence) exempt from the principle of sufficient reason and thus requiring no explanation is the situation of sheer nothingness. Nothingness is for Leibniz and many others who think as he does, the default state, and it is such because it is assumed to be the simplest state, the one requiring no explanation because there is nothing to be explained. In other words, being of any contingent kind cries out for explanation. Nothingness makes no such plea. Neither an origin nor an ongoingness of nothingness need be accounted for. By this reasoning, even if the universe in some shape or form always has existed and therefore had no beginning, it would be incapable of providing, in and of itself, an explanation for its continuing to exist throughout all time. This would be so because the fact of its existence is deeply problematic—or poses an intractable problem of sufficient explanation—in a way that sheer nothingness does not. To say that the fact of an everlasting universe is problematic is the same thing as saying that such a universe is contingent, that is, that it crucially and inescapably depends on something else for its existence. That something else would constitute its ground or its ultimate and final explanation for being. But what of the supposed ground? Would the same reasoning not apply to it as to the universe it supposedly has brought into being

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and/or continues to sustain in being? Would this line of reasoning not involve us in an endless regression of supposed explanations, with no final resting point? Would it not be contingency all the way down? The answer to this question usually given is that the existence of the ground is not contingent but necessary. It is conceivable that the universe not exist because its possible not-being is the default and readily imaginable state, but it is not conceivable that the ground not exist. By its very nature, it has to exist and it could not cease to exist. Unless we posit such a ground, or so the argument goes, we can account for neither the origin of the universe nor for its persistence through time. In the West, this supposed necessarily existing ground is generally regarded as God, and it was so regarded by Leibniz. If we protest that if necessary existence somewhere is required to account for the universe’s existence, then why not conclude that the universe, in some shape or form, has always existed and always will exist? In other words, let us just say that the universe requires no ground beyond itself and is its own ground because it is that which exists not contingently but necessarily? By this reasoning, sheer nothingness may be the default state as an imagined possibility, but it is countered by the brute fact of the universe’s everlasting existence. The assumed givenness of this existence is no more intellectually reprehensible than the assumed givenness of some sort of ground beyond the universe. If the supposed ground’s existence requires no explanation, then it is conceivable that the existence of the universe does not. In this case, the need for a transcendent ground can be set aside. Explanation has to stop somewhere if it is to be adequate and sufficient. Why not stop with the universe itself? A possible answer to this question, and one proposed by the great philosopher and theologian of the High Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas, is that the universe as we experience it gives every evidence of being contingent through and through, and thus of lacking the necessary existence which would allow it to be its own ground. Each part of the universe, by this reasoning, is dependent on other parts, meaning that the universe is a tissue of contingencies, the whole of which is therefore contingent. And each phase of the universe, if we go back into infinite time, is contingent or dependent on the phases preceding it. So the problem of contingency is not avoided by assuming that the universe or some version of it always has existed.4 A problem with this line of reasoning, however, is that the contingency or dependent relation of each of the parts or phases of the universe does

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not logically imply that the universe itself, as the overall system of such interdependent parts and phases, must be itself contingent. To regard such an outcome as logically entailed is to commit the fallacy of composition. However, if we assume infinite time, as we must if the universe’s existence is necessary and it never had a beginning, then another argument claims this would have been enough time for all the possible perturbations and changes of the universe to have already occurred and thus to have been exhausted, in which case there would be no mutable universe now existing.5 The universe is an arena of ongoing changes, but the supply of such possible changes is finite, not infinite. If we respond that the whole thing could then just begin all over again, and the succession of already realized changes start again, then the answer would be that such repetition is itself a kind of change, and all change has by now been foreclosed by the aforementioned process of reasoning. Therefore, not even a cyclically recurring everlasting universe can escape the charge of inherent contingency and thus the need to be explained on the basis of something beyond itself. But we should take note of a critical flaw in this argument, namely, the assumption that the supply of possible changes in an infinite past must be finite. Why could it not also be infinite? And once again we must ask, “Would not the same sort of reasoning apply to a presumed ground of the universe as a whole?” If God, for example, is assumed to have existed everlastingly and to have undergone changing states of any sort, including the changing state of first not having created and then creating the universe as a whole, could not the presumed necessary existence of God be dismissed on the same basis? Would not all of the possibilities in God already have been played out, in which case God would no longer exist? The usual answer to this kind of question is that God is eternal and thus outside of time, so the idea of change in God does not apply. The problem with this response, however, is that if God is outside of time, how is it possible for God to interact with events in time, either to affect or to be affected by them? How is it possible for God to decide at some point to create the universe in the first place or to continue to sustain its changing existence over time? God’s assumed nontemporality and the temporality of a changing universe do not jibe conceptually. A dualistic gap between the one and the other yawns and seems to be unbridgeable, which means that the proposed explanation pointing to God or some other supposed radically transcendent Ground of the

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universe fails. This is to say nothing of the religious problem posed by an aloof, impassible, and thus religiously unavailable God—a God for whom any sorts of genuine interaction with creatures in time must be deemed logically impossible or inexplicable. A similar problem of the divine-world connection is posed by the idea of creatio ex nihilo, which suggests that God and the world have essentially no reciprocal relation with one another or, in other words, that God’s existence is in no way dependent on that of the world, even though the world is critically dependent on God. The emanationist view I mentioned earlier has at least the virtue of preserving an essential relation of reciprocity between God and the world. The world proceeds from God’s own substance instead of being something totally other than God. The panentheistic idea that the world is God’s body or that it is contained within God, even though God is more than the world, has this virtue as well. We also need to think critically about two other issues implicit in the “Why do some things exist rather than nothing?” question. The first issue is Leibniz’s appeal to a principle of sufficient reason. And the second one is the notion that nothingness is the default option, that is, the one that is simplest and easiest to imagine and would thus require no explanation. If we assume the principle of sufficient reason, would it not also apply to God or some other kind of transcendent ground, meaning that the process of explaining could never culminate or come to an end? And why must we assume that everything can be exhaustively explained, including the very existence of the universe itself? This assumption implicitly denies the possibility of objective chance or real randomness to be a feature of the universe. The assumption proclaims that every last thing that happens does so for a cause or reason (or set of such) that is fully adequate to explain in even the minutest detail where and when it happened in the way that it did. We are bound to wonder about the strength of warrant for positing such an all-inclusive, rigorously restrictive, tight-laced principle, a principle that denies any possible role for objective randomness or chance. The second notion, that nothingness is simple and easy to imagine, is also not beyond question. In ordinary parlance, nothing is the absence of something, not a positive something in its own right. It is not a state of affairs but the absence of any state of affairs. It is only because we have experienced states of affairs (and are here to do so) that we can begin to conceive or talk about their absence.

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Furthermore, sheer nothingness cannot give rise to something or be the basis of something. Even to speak, as have religious philosophers in the West, of divine creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) makes it sound like nothingness is some sort of blank field, container, or external means used by God to bring the world into being. It would be less misleading to say that God required nothing other than God’s own self-contained resources to bring the world into being. At any rate, in the creatio ex nihilo scenario, before the world existed God is assumed to have existed. There never was a state of absolute nothingness. Thus, nothingness is not a thing, nor is it a state of affairs. It is not some kind of reservoir out of which the world cascaded into being. It is deceptive and misleading to reify the privative conception of nothing (that is, the absence of something) by calling it nothingness. Also, to say “There once was nothing” is a confusing way to make use of the verb was. Nothingness does not and did not ever exist; it is the imagined absence of any kind of existence. Another way of putting this point is that the absence of something is not the replacement of something by something else with the name of nothingness. It is only the denial of the existence of a particular something (or ensemble of somethings) at a particular place and time. The upshot of this reasoning is that the idea of nothing is intelligible only when we have experienced something that exists and then (and only then) proceed to deny that the something or something else exists. Nothing is parasitical on something. Sheer nothingness is unintelligible because its intelligibility always presupposes the idea of something. Somethingness is conceptually prior to nothingness. Let us accept this line of argument so far. Let us endorse the idea that it is our experience of things that are real that enables us to imagine their unreality. Could we not then reject in our minds the existence of all such things and thus imagine the universe’s unreality? Perhaps we could, but the major point still stands. Our experience of existing reality is the basis for our imagining its nonexistence. We do not start with nothingness and then proceed to fill it with somethingness. This way of thinking warrants us in questioning whether the supposed “state” of sheer nothingness is as simple and nonproblematic as Leibniz and others have believed. Its supposed logical priority to somethingness and the latter’s requiring explanation in a way that the former does not, can no longer be taken to be self-evident. In fact, absolute nothingness may finally be little more than a verbal

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construct, not an intelligible description or name for some kind of supposed situation or state. Perhaps, then, the existence of something or other, whether in the form of our world or in some other possible form, is not the great puzzle it is often portrayed to be. Something or other is in all probability bound to be the case, or at least is much more likely to be the case, than sheer nothingness. Moreover, to endeavor to explain the universe or any possible universe on the basis of a putative God, ground, or some kind of transcendent principle may finally amount to replacing one assumed mystery for another, namely, the felt (but perhaps dubious) sense of an indecipherable conundrum prompted by the existence of a world, with the even more enigmatic character and role of an alleged necessarily existing transcendent ground. Maybe we are more warranted in seeking to explain some things in terms of others we find within the universe, rather than trying to explain the universe itself on the basis of something presumed to lie beyond it. Our explanations would then be exclusively immanent ones, ones in terms of the laws, principles, powers, events, or constituents (and their intricate patterns of relationship) we find to exist within the universe. We should not dismiss too quickly or out of hand the possibility that the universe is wonderful enough, resourceful enough, dynamic enough, and fecund enough in its own right to eliminate the need for appeal to a transcendent ground to which it is avowed to owe its existence and support. Of the various options I have indicated for thinking about the relations of being and nothingness, this one seems to me to be the least gratuitous and most plausible. I explicate and defend a version of it in the next section.

The Immanental View The immanental view to be discussed and defended in this section can also be called the naturalistic view of being and nothingness. Simply put, it is the view that nature is enough or that nothing beyond nature is needed for a comprehensive and entirely adequate metaphysical outlook or general vision of reality as a whole. Reality is nature in all of its manifestations. My endorsement of this noncontingent and entirely sufficient view of nature throughout this book shows me to be in firm agreement with the thesis of philosopher Loyal Rue enshrined in the main title of his book Nature Is Enough

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and in equally firm disagreement with the negative answer theologian John F. Haught develops to the question raised in the main title of his book Is Nature Enough?6 I now show why I think as I do, why my sympathies and reasonings lie with Rue and not with Haught. I make mention of their two books here not in order to weigh at this place in any detail the merits of their specific arguments and counterarguments, but only to pose vividly for examination the starkly opposing views concerning the existence and present character of the universe framed by the titles of their two books. For Rue, as for me, the sheer fact of a universe’s existence in some shape or form is to be expected and is therefore not problematic, although its existence is indisputably awe-inspiring and wonderful. For Haught the universe’s existence is a profound mystery—one that for him is inexplicable without belief in God. The emergence of life, consciousness, and purposiveness on earth from initially dead or inert matter is especially astounding for Haught and demands for him explanation on the basis of a primordial ground and lure other than the physical universe itself—a divine creator, director, and sustainer of incomparable power and wisdom, fully alive and actively conscious for all eternity. Only by recourse to such a transcendent mental, nonmaterial ground, Haught contends, can we avoid having to consent to the incredible notion that “something less has given rise to something more.”7 Only in this way can we adequately account for the emergence on earth of multiple forms and degrees of life and consciousness whose most complex level of attainment is the human species, with its insistently inquiring and inventive subjective awareness and its richly varied histories, cultures, symbolic capabilities, and technological accomplishments. I respect the sincerity and conviction of Haught’s outlook on the world, but I am not swayed by this general line of argument for it. In the previous section I took issue with some arguments offered in support of the need for a transcendent ground of the universe. I now make a fuller case for the contention that no such ground is required and that the universe or nature is sufficient in itself.8 The specter of absolute nothingness need not haunt us because the universe’s existence and persistence over time is the primordial, all-encompassing realty, neither derived from nor critically dependent on some more fundamental principle, presence, or power. We can thus confidently endorse the principle—first suggested by the astute reasoning of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, who

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argued against the very meaningfulness of the notion of absolute nothingness—and later proclaimed in the form of the Latin apothegm ex nihilo, nihil fit (out of nothing, nothing is created, comes to pass, or comes into being). In other words, we need to resist the temptation to think that absolute nothingness is some kind of primordial situation or state from which, out of which, or before which the fulsome somethingness of a universe or even the earliest stages of a universe either can or must spring into existence. Sheer nothingness is not some kind of conceivable or existent reality but a mere will-o’the wisp. This point is tacitly acknowledged by physicist Lawrence M. Krauss, despite the misleading title of his book A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing. Kraus’s socalled nothing is in fact a particular sort of something, namely, the restless flutterings of “empty space” or of a “quantum vacuum” that he alleges to precede and give rise to the emergence of a spatio-temporal, law-like universe with its innumerable somethings.9 The upshot of these musings can be expressed as follows: All creation is transformation of something already existing. The present adds to the past in varying degrees and sometimes in strikingly innovative or novel degrees. But it never leaves the past entirely behind or occurs in the absence of some kind of past. Thus there is no such thing as de novo, noncontextual, unconditioned creation, emergence, or coming into being of anything, including the universe as a whole. The new can only build on the old, and the old is a necessary condition for the emergence of the new. I spell out this important idea at greater length in chapter 4 on causality, novelty, and freedom, and I argue for it more fully there. When this idea is applied to the notion of an entirely immanent universe, that is, one in which all reality is contained in nature in some shape or form and there is nothing behind, outside of, or beyond nature, then the everlasting existence of nature can be confidently affirmed. If no God or some other kind of nature-transcending being, presence, principle, ground, or power is required to account for the universe’s existence, then the ongoing existence of the universe in some manner is left as the only remaining plausible alternative. But what about the remaining possibility of a spontaneous generation of the universe as a whole at some point in the past? My answer to this question has already been given in the previous paragraph. I indicate there that all change is transformation and that there is no such thing as spontaneous eruption of anything into

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existence. To think of the universe as springing abruptly into existence out of nowhere as a spontaneous, contextless, unconditional, once-for-all event, is staggeringly unlikely and should be dismissed as a radically implausible alternative. Furthermore, such spontaneous origination of the universe presupposes the intelligibility of the notion of an anterior “state” of absolute nothingness, a notion I have previously brought under critical scrutiny and rejected. In accordance with this line of reasoning, then, there is then no absolute beginning of nature and no conceivable absolute ending of nature, because the first assumes the conceivability of spontaneous, de novo eruption at the beginning and both assume the intelligibility of absolute nothingness at either the beginning or the ending. The ongoing history of nature should thus be viewed as a dynamic series of relative beginnings and endings, evolutions and devolutions, speedings-up and slowings-down, comings and goings, but as involving no absolute start or final stop. Nature or the natural universe as thus conceived is its own ground and reason for existing and continuing to exist. Nature is the primordial given, and all descriptions, arguments, and explanations involve the study of characters and relations within this given. We can endeavor to explain the why and wherefore of events within nature but there is no need or requirement for us to attempt to explain the whole of nature in all of its sizes, forms, or manifestations in the past or present. In the contest of being and nothingness, nothingness loses out to being. It is a forfeit or no-show. Or to change the metaphor, in the trial between the two, sheer nothingness is forced finally to plead nolo contendere.

Universe and Multiverse The simplest imaginable universe of the ones formerly envisioned in the West is that conceived by Aristotle and most of the ancients. It is earth-centered, finite, has always existed, and undergoes no fundamental change in its basic processes and patterns. But I spoke in the previous paragraph and elsewhere of various possible sizes, forms, or manifestations of the universe as a whole in the past or present. In doing so, I am leaving open the possibility that there have been or now are various kinds of universe in addition to the kind in which we currently find ourselves to be living. If we accept—at least until

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convincing evidence for something different is found—the standard cosmology of contemporary physics and affirm the reality of a Big Bang as the origin of the present universe, it follows from the reasoning outlined earlier that the supposed Big Bang was a transformation of something already existing and not a spontaneous, uncaused eruption out of nothing. And the incredibly dense, astoundingly tiny nugget from which the Big Bang is currently said by physicists to have emerged would presumably have resulted in its turn from something other than itself, for example, a Cosmic Crunch of some previously existing form of the universe. This prospect puts us in mind of an endless succession of universes, the earlier ones giving rise to later ones or the seeds of later ones. And the earlier ones may have been different in significant respects from the later ones, with at least somewhat different laws, principles, constants, constituents, and the like. No absolute beginning at any point would then be required or implied, but important and even far-reaching possible differences among the successive universes would be allowed. The Big Bang model in its current form also requires the evolution over 13.7 billion years of our currently experienced universe, an evolution that includes the formation of fields, forces, particles, atoms, stars, planets, galaxies, heavy elements, and myriad forms of life, at least here on earth. So the current picture of the universe is a dynamic, evolving one, not the static one of Aristotle and most of the ancients—a static view that persisted, at least in Western thought, to the nineteenth century CE, when intense study of the evidences of massive geological changes throughout a remote past and Charles Darwin’s and Anthony Russel Wallace’s theory of natural selection and the evolution of biological species by natural selection came to the fore. In the twentieth century, the Big Bang cosmogenesis, accompanied by the evidence for an expanding universe, completed the story of change as the name of the game, a vision of change that could now include the idea of earlier forms of the universe as having given rise to this one. In addition to this notion of successions of multiple universes with no absolute beginning or end, today’s physicists have also begun to entertain the possibility of multiple universes existing here and now, a possibility based in theories such as quantum mechanics, string theory, the version of string theory called brane theory, as well as in evidence for the continuously accelerating expansion of the universe.10 But in both the successive universes idea and the multiple concurrent or parallel universes idea, there is no requirement of

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beginnings from sheer nothingness or endings into sheer nothingness. From the standpoint of a credible physics, something is always assumed to have been around to give rise to something else. So once again, everlasting being of some sort must be affirmed and the notion of absolute nothingness denied. I should note here that when I use the term being in this chapter, I do not mean for it to exclude or to be sharply distinguished from becoming. The latter is a kind of being or somethingness, as I use these terms. In fact, I reject the notion of static being altogether, except as it may be said to be exhibited and imagined in realms of abstract, formal thought such as logic and mathematics. The specific idea of becoming and its necessary place in all types of being will be discussed in detail in chapter 3 on permanence and change.

The Role of Time The mention of becoming in the previous paragraph brings immediately to mind the question of the role of time as it relates to this chapter’s topic of being and nothingness. Does time come into being or can it cease at some point to be? Or to put the question somewhat differently, is a timeless universe plausible or conceivable? To ask the question still differently, is time ultimately an illusion, and this universe or all possible universes finally outside of time or entirely independent of the passage of time? Augustine of Hippo famously argued in his Confessions that time began with the creation of the universe by God, who is outside of time.11 Contemporary philosopher of science Adolf Grünbaum concurs with Augustine to the extent of insisting that with the origin of the universe in the Big Bang, time became real but was unreal before that event.12 Physicists Brian Greene and Julian Barbour, along with others, argue that the supposed flow of time does not really exist and that this realization is implicit in the mathematical formulations of major physical principles and laws.13 But in my view, as indicated earlier, the notion of static being must be rejected, meaning that all being presents itself in the form of becoming and that nothing real is exempt from change. But change itself is not possible without the lapse of time. It takes time for something to undergo a process of change. Something continues through any conceivable process of change and may do so over long periods of time, thus sustaining a particular character or manifestation, a

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kind of ongoing stasis. But the stasis is not static, nor is it everlasting. Everything that has come into being and exists for a relative period of time, is also doomed eventually—even though at radically different rates of change—to pass away and to be transformed into something else. I believe that this statement applies to the whole of the present universe as we know it or claim to know it. It too shall pass away and be transformed into something else, another universe. And it is the transformation of a previous universe. The passage of time and the inevitability of change are closely related. Change is a manifestation of the flow or passage of time, and the ineliminable, inexorable nature of time is manifested in the relentless subjection of all things to change. There is no absolute beginning or end of the universe, as I indicated earlier. But relative ones are apparent all around us. And these will be exhibited in universes prior to or concurrent to this one, if there be such, just as they are in the present universe. The essential point is that time is an everflowing stream in all conceivable or probable worlds. The rate of measurable and experiential time varies with velocity, as Einstein informs us. And he was convinced that time is ultimately an illusion.14 But this would mean that change is an illusion, and that only static being, so-called, can be said genuinely to exist. To my mind, this is as pernicious a rejection of pervasive experience as anything we could imagine, and it should be rejected on that ground alone. It takes time to envision, formulate, revise, and test a theory scientifically, and it took time for Einstein himself to come into being, live, work, grow old, and die. He and his thought are more than static images on a timeless screen. Both took time to unfold. To deny this fact is to take away all that gives intelligibility, value, and importance to life. It is true that science has had great success in taking us behind the stage of many of our everyday experiences and assumptions, showing these to be different from what we had previously imagined, but to deny the reality of time is like the snake eating its own tail. Time is an indispensable part of the character of life and experience, as well as of the world we live in and experience. It does not come into being or pass away, nor is it illusory. So-called tenseless time is an illusion, an imaginary freezing into a solid block of what in reality is an everflowing river. If anything is real, time is real. Physicist Lee Smolin argues convincingly against the notion of a timeless universe and associates it with the Platonistic (or Pythagorean) idea that the universe is ultimately mathematical and thus nontemporal, like all the

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possible moves in a game of chess envisioned at once.15 This kind of Platonism is dangerously seductive for mathematical physicists, because mathematics has such a prominent place in their thinking and reasoning. But the absence of time would be the absence of existence or being as we experience it on every hand, and the absence of being is inconceivable, as I have argued earlier. Just as absolute nothingness is unintelligible and does not exist, so timelessness and the absence of change do not exist anywhere but in our imaginations, especially when those imaginations are beguiled by the static abstractions and relations of mathematical systems. Premise-conclusion (or axiom-theorem) relations are not the same thing as cause-effect relations. The former may take time to grasp clearly, but they do not exist in time. The latter require the passage or flow of time and are involved fundamentally in our experience of time. In this chapter I have disputed the notions of absolute nothingness and of spontaneous, de novo eruption of being of any sort out of nothingness, including the being of the universe as a whole. I have argued for a rigorously immanental view of nature, meaning that no external origin, ground, or basis for its existence is required. I have allowed for the possibility of multiple universes (or multiverses) existing here and now but have also given reason to regard as highly probable the view that the universe in which we presently live was produced by or a transformation of the most recent one of an earlier succession of universes stretching back into endless time, and that this universe will be succeeded by an equally endless emergence of ones subsequent to its demise. I have contended that all being is processive or becoming, and I have taken strong issue with the notion that the universe as a whole is ultimately static and timeless. I have warned against the seductions of mathematical thinking or mathematical models that might bewitch us into endorsing the idea of socalled tenseless time or of the universe as at bottom timeless. Most importantly, I have argued that being trumps nonbeing or nothingness, and that, when pondered carefully, there is no great mystery about the fact of being in all its manifestations as over against the ill-conceived idea of absolute nothingness. The fact of being, however, must be conceived as the fact of pervasive and endless becoming.

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Chapter 2 One and Many Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of the world’s unity. We never hear this definition challenged, and it is true as far as it goes, for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things its interest in unity. But how about the variety in things? Is that such an irrelevant matter? If instead of using the term philosophy, we talk in general about our intellect and its needs, we quickly see that unity is only one of these. Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned, along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable mark of mental greatness. —William James1

H

ow much unity is there in the world and how much diversity? And how do the unity and the diversity relate to one another? Perhaps there is ultimately only unity and no real diversity, or perhaps, alternatively, there is no real unity and in the last analysis only a fleeting mélange of ephemeral, unorganized, disconnected entities. I first take note of some examples of this last mentioned dichotomous approach to the problem, namely, that we must opt for the one or the many and cannot expect to speak meaningfully of the one and the many. In other words, the choice must be either-or and cannot, on reasoned analysis, be both-and.

The Either-Or Approach For the fifth-century BCE philosopher Parmenides, at least by one interpretation, only unity exists, in the form of an undifferentiated 19

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sphere of pure being.2 The third-century CE philosopher Plotinus argued that everything in the universe stems from the One and is reducible to the One.3 The eighth-century CE Indian philosopher Shankara contended that only Brahman without qualities, traits, or distinctions (Nirguna Brahman) is finally real, and that all else that may seem to be real is only maya or appearance. For example, the seemingly independent human self (jiva) is in fact a universal, allinclusive Self (Atman), and Atman and Brahman are one and the same. Everything is but one thing.4 The seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict Spinoza contended that everything that exists is either an attribute or mode of one substance, meaning that everything is ultimately one thing that he called God or Nature.5 Nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer defended the notion that behind the seemingly diverse and independent things of the phenomenal world there is one and only one true reality, the restless Cosmic Will.6 Philosopher F. H. Bradley marshaled intricate arguments toward the end of that century in defense of the thesis that only the Absolute exists and that it exists in indivisible unity.7 So, as this partial list of historical figures suggests, the notion that the many are ultimately delusionary or unreal and that reality is finally single, unmixed, and devoid of discriminations of any kind, has had a long history. An opposite view from this one seems to have been upheld by the philosopher of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, Heraclitus. While Parmenides (and his followers Zeno and Melissus) seem to have been preoccupied with the notion of unbroken, motionless unity, Heraclitus insisted that everything is everywhere in flux, so much so that it is impossible to step twice into the same river. There is for him no such thing as the same river, whether we have in mind a literal river or the river of time, because everything, moment by moment, is changing from one thing, form, or manifestation into another. Because nothing remains the same for even brief periods of time, there can be no such thing as a continuity or unity among particular changing things, to say nothing of an overarching oneness or unity of the world as a whole. Names, universal terms of all kinds, and concepts must finally deceive us, because nothing remains long enough to be grouped with anything else as the same or repeatable thing. The many are so inexhaustibly and irrepressibly many that the possibility

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of any sort of unity is swamped and overridden by the fleetingly abrupt comings and goings of every new moment. The many reign with no rival; there is no such thing as enduring oneness anywhere in the world.8 The Buddhist doctrine of pratityasamutpada (dependent origination or arising) denies to anything an independent, substantialist, essential existence. There is no inherent nature or individual integrity to anything. And, as with Heraclitus, everything is fleeting, evanescent, nonenduring. There are no independently existing “ones,” and there is no enduring one world. The position of the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume is that fleeting impressions of sensation and reflection constitute the entirety of the experienced world, and that this world has no enduring status or character because there are no experienced connections or relations of these momentary impressions. So as with Buddhism but from different premises, there are no persistently existing entities or substances, only evanescent impressions, and there is no unitary world because there are no real connections among the impressions. Each stands alone as a kind of independent substance.9 Both the Buddhist denial of anything other than dependent relations and the Humean denial of anything other than discreet impressions devoid of relations end up dismissing enduring substances or an enduring unitary world. In either case—whether of intricately entangled, ever-changing relations without enduring things related, or of independently existing, radically disconnected, momentary impressions—the many take complete precedence over the one. There are in either case no enduring ones and no enduring one world. Relations without persistent relata (Buddhism) or transitory relata without relations (Hume) conspire together to deny any sort of enduring elemental or cosmic oneness. A world of genuine, meaningful relations requires both the enduring integrity of things related and the unimpeachable reality of what binds them together. With these few examples on either side of the issue, then, we witness the extreme ends of the spectrum of the one and the many. On the one hand, everything is reduced to one thing. This view can be termed radical monism. On the other, enduring oneness of any kind is swallowed up into shifting, kaleidoscopic patterns of dependence with only momentary flashes of what is said to be dependent, or into isolated, atomistic, nonenduring bits with no essential relatedness to

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one another. This view can be termed radical separationalism. The opposition between the two views is stark and unqualified.

The Both-And Approach In contrast with the extreme, radically opposing views outlined earlier, philosophers, theologians, scientists, and theorists of every stripe have typically sought for an underlying unity amid the diverse things of the world, while at the same time seeking to do full justice to the reality and integrity of their diversity. As the nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosopher William James observes in this chapter’s epigraph, some thinkers will specialize in exploring the unity and others, the diversity, but the ideal intellectual enterprise, he insists, is that of bringing the two into proper balance and relation without losing sight of either. How to do so in a way that concurs with the complexity of experience and the elegance of theory is a daunting task. I should note at this point that it is in the very nature of description, explanation, and evaluation—at least as commonly understood—to carry out this task to the greatest possible extent. We generally assume that every explanation, for example, in order to succeed as such, must balance the demands of coherence and adequacy, simplicity and completeness. To explain something is to reduce the complexity of its aspects to relative simplicity of form, while still comprehending within that form all of that something’s relevant aspects. The task of explanation is reconciliation of the one and the many. Similarly, an adequate description of a phenomenon or event is not just a bland itemization of its aspects but a bringing of these aspects into some kind of coherent, unifying narrative or form. And an act of evaluation requires, more often than not, subsumption of the details of a given situation under a general valuational scheme, assumption, or set of such assumptions, whether the latter are explicitly acknowledged as such. In fact, every time we perceive, think, or speak, we reduce implicit multiplicity into unity—the unity of common perceptions, general concepts, or linguistic universals. There is no escaping the problem of relating the one to the many, and the many to the one. The current search and hope among some physicists for a “Theory of Everything” is a version of addressing this problem, an attempt to bring all experienced phenomena—or at least those falling within the

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competence of physics—under the umbrella of an all-inclusive, relatively simple theoretical understanding. Reduction of the four major physical forces—strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational— into one would be an essential part of such a theory. Unification of Einsteinian general relativity theory with quantum theory in physics would be required. The doctrines of mechanistic materialism and the causal closedness of the physical, endorsed by many scientists today, are other ways of claiming to reduce to comprehensive unity the multifariousness of the experienced world. The attempt to reduce all phenomena, for example, matter, life, and mind to principles and laws fully described or describable by the disciplines of physics, chemistry, and biology is for a number of scientists a hoped-for outcome. To see the world as a unified whole and not just as an aggregation of separate, independent parts is what these endeavors among some current scientists and others in sympathy with a rigorously reductionistic program amount to. But to what extent is the world a unity? How amenable is it to holistic descriptions and explanations such as Albert Einstein’s Unified Field Theory, which he sought for unsuccessfully throughout his life, or the so-called Theory of Everything hotly pursued by some current physicists? A special form of this question is the one addressed by philosopher Thomas Nagel in a book that has exposed him to sharp criticism by many contemporary physicists and biologists because he questions some of their most deep-rooted assumptions and approaches.10 The question is how do life, consciousness, and the rational, evaluating mind fit into or relate to the descriptions and explanations offered by physicists and evolutionary biologists? Can the former be convincingly reduced to or subsumed under the latter? Nagel strongly doubts that they can. He questions the competence of physics and biology in their current forms to provide adequate explanations for life, consciousness, reason, knowledge, purposiveness, and value, and he contends that some kind of teleology and not just efficient causality must be built into nature’s fundamental constituents and laws in order to account for these phenomena of everyday human experience. The efficient-causal closedness of the physical must also be denied, he argues, in order to allow for the workings of such teleology. He insists that without such a teleological principle, factor, or function being assumed at the outset, not even the descriptions, explanations, or evaluations offered by scientists themselves can be accounted for or comprehended. For such descriptions,

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explanations, or evaluations are unfailingly teleological, that is, ineliminably goal-directed and as such plain manifestations of a purposive activity that is inexplicable on the basis of efficient causality alone. What is of most interest to me in the context of the present chapter is that Nagel assumes the need for and the possibility of a comprehensive account of the universe that would include the phenomena he thinks to be left out of account by current scientific ways of thinking. That is, he expresses in many places in his book the pressing need for a comprehensive, all-inclusive mode of explanation. Anything less than this, he asserts, would be a less than adequate explanation. He has no doubt that what is required is a coherent and adequate philosophical theory of everything, and he states that such a theory would have to explain “not only the emergence from a lifeless universe of reproducing organisms and their development by evolution to greater and greater functional complexity; not only the consciousness of some of those organisms and its central role in their lives; but also the development of consciousness into an instrument of transcendence that can grasp objective reality and objective value.”11 The universe for Nagel, then, is presumed to be an intelligible whole, and we should not abandon our inquiries into it until we arrive at comprehension of it as an intelligible whole, revising the character of those inquiries and their underlying methodological and metaphysical assumptions as needed. All of the universe’s parts need to be fully respected as well as fitted together, he argues, and they will not be so, he claims, until teleological laws and principles are given their proper place in an overall explanatory scheme. It is his assumed need for both respecting the integrity of the parts and fitting them together in an intelligible manner—that is, his concern to blend diversity with wholeness in a meaningful way—that concerns me in this chapter. I return to a consideration of his specific arguments regarding teleology in chapter 4. But here and now I register my complete agreement with Nagel’s search for a comprehensive and balanced vision of how the numerous aspects of the experienced world can be brought into relation with the considerable extent to which the world can be rightly regarded as a whole—not, as I argue, as a seamless whole but as universe rather than a mere aggregation of disconnected parts. With Nagel, I regard it as a central task of philosophy to seek to understand as fully as possible the extent to which the world in which we live is

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an intelligible whole. But I do so, as he also presumably does, while doing adequate justice to the major aspects of that whole and the distinctiveness and integrity of each of those aspects. Thus, the unity for which I seek in the chapters of this book and their relations to one another is not a unity at the expense of diversity but a type of unity allowing for maximum real, irreducible diversity. This unity will, therefore, have to be a relatively loose unity of both connections and disconnections, or what James alternatively called a “concatenated unity” or a “pluriverse” that is at one and the same time a genuine “universe.”12 In such a world, it is not the case that everything is snugly integrated with everything else. There are many connections but also many disconnections. Both deserve recognition and respect, and neither is reducible to the other. This both-and rather than either-or outlook seems most reasonable to me, as it did to James. In the remainder of this chapter, I seek to make a case for such an outlook as the proper way of understanding the relations of the one and the many.

Defense of the Both-And Approach Alfred North Whitehead argues in his magnum opus Process and Reality13 that each and every actual entity, the fundamental entities of his metaphysics, is related by its positive or negative prehensions (meaning, roughly, relations) to every other such entity in the past, and that all of its inherent strivings are ordered and directed by an initial aim from God that stems from the ordered realm of pure potentials in the primordial nature of God. Whitehead’s is a much more rigorously ordered, regulated, and integrated view of the world than that of James and much more so than I am inclined to endorse, despite my admiration for some other aspects of Whitehead’s metaphysical system. His view does allow for a degree of autonomy and independence of its actual entities and of the macroscopic entities in which they are organized and contained, but that degree is compromised by too much in the way of overarching unity and tightly circumscribed divine direction. With James, I prefer a looser approach. Such an approach is well laid out and defended by philosopher Justus Buchler, in his magisterial work Metaphysics of Natural Complexes.14 According to Buchler, there is no such thing as “the” order of nature, in other words, no “superorder” within which all the other

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orders of nature are located or contained.15 The unity of nature, if we wish to speak in such terms, just means all of the innumerable “natural complexes” there are.16 He defines a natural complex as “whatever is discriminated in any respect or any degree.” He hastens to add, however, that it does not follow from this definition that “all natural complexes are discriminated or humanly discriminable.”17 So it would be perhaps better to say that all natural complexes are for Buchler discriminable in principle if not in fact. Any such complex, he avers, “is related to others, though not to all others; and its traits are related to one another, though not necessarily each to every other. Whatever is, is in some relation; a given complex may be unrelated to another given complex, but not unrelated to any other.”18 Such relatedness constitutes the “orders” of natural complexes, that is, their being in orderly connection with, and their providing orderly connection for, other complexes. What these ideas amount to is Buchler’s firm declaration of a pluralistic metaphysics. For him, there is no such thing as an all-encompassing order but only a wide-ranging complexity of partly connected and partly disconnected orders, analogous to James’s concatenated unity or pluriverse-universe. The unity of nature is simply the sum total of all such orders, whether possible or actual—possible in the sense of posed as possibilities by existing orders. Buchler insists that nature is not an order because if it were so, it would have to be contrasted to other similar orders, but there is no such contrast available. We can speak, however, of nature as being “present in every instance of experience and every process of experience.”19 This is to say that nature pervades all orders while not being a distinct order within which all other orders are located. Buchler draws a technical and important distinction between world and nature in his essay “Probing the Idea of Nature,” contained as Appendix IV in the expanded edition of his Metaphysics of Natural Concepts (from which Appendix some of the quotations above have been drawn). He associates the term world with the innumerable natural complexes currently existing, and thus with the notion of natura naturata, meaning the complexes of the present world. The term nature can be used in this sense as well, although in its most exact and fullest form it must be interpreted to include natura naturans, meaning the ordinality, providingness, or engendering condition that gives rise to and underlies the present face of nature.20 Nature in this second sense is not something distinct from nature in the first one

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(equivalent to world); it simply calls attention to the restless, dynamic, ever-evolving fecundity of nature. There is thus a kind of clear recognizability to the world (as an aspect of nature) regarded as innumerable natural complexes, none of which are out of relation, but without their all being necessarily related to one another—the kind of loss-knitted, pluralistic relatedness where both genuine connections and irreducible disconnections exist. And there is a pervasive presence of nature in any and all of the natural complexes and their various orders that make up the world. In this view there can be nothing beyond nature and no such thing as nature (or the world) seen as a seamless web of relatedness without disruption, or of absolute unity as over against any kind of plurality or disunity. This vision of the world, at least in its general outlines if not in all its Buchlerian details, is one with which I am in strong agreement. It is a both-and rather than an either-or view of the world set over against the extremes of static unity or fleeting disunity exemplified earlier. According to it, the world is both one in some sense and many in some sense. And it is neither to the exclusion of the other. Buchler’s reference to the two sides of nature, natura naturata and natura naturans, is especially important as a way to approach the extent to which the universe can be viewed as both one and many. The universe is more than a settled set of current laws, principles, constituents, complexes, and the like. Its continuities and unities are constantly, and especially over long periods of time, being supplemented by the emergence of new phenomena that must be taken into account. At one time in the emerging world, for example, there were no atoms; at another, no stars; at another, no life; and at still another, no conscious forms of life. These aspects of novelty or manifestations of nature in its character of natura naturans are not de novo innovations but transformations of already existing features of the world. I argued earlier that this point would apply even to a supposed Big Bang origin of the present world, namely, that it too would need to be seen as a radical transformation of a preexisting world—the outcome, perhaps, of some kind of Big Crunch. So the world as we experience and understand it is a balance of relative permanence and relative change, of encroaching newness and enduring oldness. With the newness, fresh features are introduced into the world, and with them, supplementations or revisions, however slight or major, of the world’s stable orders. In this sense also the world must be regarded as

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both many and one—a generally stable one continually exposed to incursions of new aspects or forms of manyness. I have more to say about the relations of permanence and change in the next chapter, but I stress here its bearing on the issue of one and many. A statement by Buchler gives us an epistemological slant on the issue of one and many. He writes that “nothing as whole can be an object of possible experience or be given, since we must take into account the indefinite spread of its relations and its potentialities.”21 And John Dewey speaks wisely of “that imaginative totality we call the Universe.”22 James adds his voice to these observations when he notes that “[t]here is no possible point of view from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact,” and when he declares that “[w]e have so many different businesses with nature that no one of them yields us an all-embracing grasp.”23 Each of these statements calls attention to the fact that the unity of the universe can be, at best, only an imagined totality. There is no all-inclusive, nonperspectival way of bringing such a totality into direct experiential focus. We can witness orders and relations all around us, but we cannot find a reference point from which to witness a complete integration of all the aspects of the experienced world. There is for us no such thing as a God’s-eye view of the world. We have only the finite perspectives of our finite nature. The degree of unity we are willing to attribute to the world is an imagined adding-up of as many different perspectives as we can envision—personal, communal, historical, scientific, religious, philosophical, aesthetic, moral, and the like. But there is no final or complete integration of such perspectives. Their ineliminable manyness and their inevitable points of incommensurability will always intrude. Difference and diversity are real and not just apparent features of the world. Any claim to the world’s unity must do justice to this fact. This does not mean that the world is in no sense an intelligible whole; it just means that the world is not completely or exhaustibly knowable from any single perspective or ensemble of perspectives. Even the perspective of a putative God on the world would have to be just that: one perspective among others. And this would be so no matter how capacious or comprehensive it might be claimed to be. God’s perspective could not in full or final detail be that of any finite creature, and yet these perspectives and the experiences of them are surely also parts of the world to be comprehended. Nonperspectival perspectivity is a contradiction in terms even for God. And complete

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integration or commensurability of all possible perspectives is impossible so long as they retain the inescapable partiality of distinctive perspectives. Thus, any sort of imagined unity of the world can only be loose-limbed, rough-edged, and pluralistic, because it must somehow encompass all possible perspectives on the world, possibilities that are, as Buchler rightly contends, indefinite—to say nothing of their built-in incommensurabilities. Another way to characterize the one and many issue as it relates to the world is in terms of the debate between mind-body dualism and monistic understandings of the mind-body relationship. One such monistic understanding is idealism, where all that is termed material is in the final analysis ideal. That is, the universe is said to consist only of ideas and of minds capable of entertaining or generating ideas. The eighteenth-century British philosopher George Berkeley, among others, famously defended a version of this view.24 Another monistic understanding of this issue is panpsychism or panexperientialism, where mind and body together comprise the elemental “stuff ” of the universe. Whitehead took this view when he located both mental and physical aspects in actual entities, the fundamental building blocks of his metaphysics. Thomas Nagel also toys with, even if he does not quite endorse, what would seem to be a version of this position in his book Mind and Cosmos.25 The eliminative materialism of thinkers like Paul Churchland is another example of such monism.26 In this view, mind, with all of its functions and attributes, is completely reducible to matter as that is described in current physics. And it is said to be epiphenomenal, that is, the attributes associated with mind have no causal effects on the behaviors of the body and, in fact, no genuine reality in their own right. They constitute an entirely eliminable “folk psychology” with no scientific or philosophical status. I talk in more detail about these options in the chapter on mind and matter. But for now, I focus on the option I support, namely, emergentism, and I make a plea in this connection for a version of nonreductive materialistic or physicalistic emergentism that requires a radical revision in the concept of matter. In other words, I am calling for a kind of materialism as a monistic option in the one and many debate, but it is a radical materialism, not the usual kind of materialism associated exclusively with physics as its basis, and chemistry and biology as its derivative manifestations. I say something about this radical materialism here, in order to exhibit

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its bearing on the central topic of this chapter, but I develop and defend it at greater length later when I inquire into the relations of mind and body. Our tendency today is similar to that of ancient Greek naturalists like Thales or Anaximander. George Santayana’s marvelously engaging Dialogues in Limbo contains this comment by a participant in the dialogue bearing the name of the Muslim philosopher Avicenna (tenth to eleventh century): those early naturalists were at fault in their own sciences because they identified matter with some single kind of matter, like water or air, and made that substance the sole principle of genesis; whereas the distribution, movement, habits, and fertility of all sorts of matter must be taken into account if nature and the soul of nature are to be described rightly.27 In similar fashion, we are strongly inclined today to identify matter solely with its descriptions in the science of physics, and to reduce all material phenomena to those descriptions, thus failing to acknowledge “all sorts of matter” that have emerged and become manifest over the history of the universe and of our own planet. “[T]he matter which exists and works,” as Avicenna in the Dialogues observes, “is matter formed and unequally distributed, the body of nature in all its variety and motion.” This existing and working matter, he adds, “is simply the native plasticity by which matter continually changes its forms.”28 It is the “native plasticity” of ever-emerging forms of matter that many thinkers tend to this day still to minimize and make light of by consciously or unconsciously restricting the concept of matter to its descriptions in current physics. Emergentist materialism is superior to reductive materialism because it avoids a simple reduction of the traits and capacities of mind to matter as described in physics, arguing instead that with higher levels of organization, new properties of matter come into being, and these new properties cannot be resolved into the traits of matter at lower or fundamentally different levels of organization. This is fine as far as it goes. But I contend that the concept of matter itself is in need of radical revision because there is much that is anomalous, confusing, and incoherent about it even at the level of physics. And there is much about the current notions of matter in the

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physical sciences in general that requires revision in order to explain how and why matter at different levels of organization—especially in those bodies that permit of the diverse kinds of life and mind—is able to function so differently from other levels. A richer, more complex, more coherent conception of matter itself is needed in physics, philosophy, and other relevant disciplines, and not just a bland acknowledgment of the fact that matter is capable of performing or behaving in new ways with greater emerging complexities of system and organization. I make common cause here with Nagel’s general position, but with significant differences from it in detail that I delineate and explain in chapter 5 on mind and matter. I do not endorse, for instance, what might be construed as Nagel’s panpsychism or panteleologicism. That matter does so perform and behave is clearly the case, because life forms and those with sentience and consciousness are incontrovertibly physical organisms. How it can do so is the question crying out for explanation. Without a radically revised conception of matter, it will not be possible to account for matter or physicality being able to do so. That at least is my contention, to be defended in more detail in a later chapter. An earlier version of my attempt at such an explication and defense is contained in the final chapter of my book The Philosophy of William James: Radical Empiricism and Radical Materialism.29 I do not claim in that book or in this one to have solved the problem to which I refer—the need for a radically revised conception of matter—but only to defend the urgent need for addressing and seeking to solve it. How does all of this talk of emergentism and radical materialism relate to the topic of one and many? It does so because the universe can be conceived of as one in the sense that it is material or physical through and through. All that is real is material, but in a greatly expanded and enriched conception of what being material or physical can be conceived to mean. The materiality or physicality of the universe, properly understood, permits of astoundingly diverse forms of physical or material entities, ranging from the alleged union of the four fundamental physical forces and the extreme heat and quark-gluon plasma condition of the earliest stages of a supposed Big Bang to embodied beings on earth (and probably elsewhere in the universe) with life, sentience, foresight, purposiveness, and intelligence. Matter is what matter does is my watchword, and in my view, what it does is amazingly varied in its forms of emergent manifestation

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over time. In all of its transformations, it does not cease to be matter, so our conception of matter has to be rich enough and complex enough—while still remaining as consistent and coherent as possible throughout—to permit of this fact. This is admittedly a tall order, but if carried through successfully it is an important way in which we can reconcile a unifying monism—in this case, a radically revised and reconceived materialistic or physicalistic metaphysics—with the multifarious forms of emergent reality stemming from and giving diverse expressions to this one basis. Matter, then, is both one and many, and ours is a material or physical universe. As such, adequate descriptions of the traits, capabilities, and functions of matter cannot be confined to any one discipline in the sciences such as physics, or even to the natural sciences as such. And within the natural sciences, as philosopher Philip Clayton argues, fundamental differences among levels or manifestations of complex material phenomena mean that “no single set of laws will be adequate to the data.”30 My materialistic view of the universe is analogous to Buchler’s in that it does not view the universe as an order among other orders. Because for me all existence is material or a form or function of matter, there is no contrast to materiality as far as actual existence is concerned. Nonmateriality may be imagined and spoken about, or it may be abstracted from in some manner, as in fanciful accounts of purely spiritual beings or free-floating minds, but it does not exist. The material universe is a multifarious collection of orders, not itself an all-encompassing order. There is a huge number of types and manifestations of material processes and entities in a dynamic, ever-evolving universe, including all those that have emerged and will continue to emerge over endless time. These processes and entities are related to one another in diverse ways, but they are not locked together in a single-ordered whole. The many are not finally reducible to the one, nor is a supposed one collapsible into a mere hodgepodge of separate happenings. There is genuine unity, even if the unity must also be recognized to be in significant other ways loose, disjointed, and volatile. Materiality pervades the whole, but the distinct types and functions of materiality are incalculably vast. The nonreductive, revisionary, emergentist way of conceiving of a materialistic metaphysics, a way that I strongly endorse, is adroitly expressed by philosopher James Blachowicz. He writes,

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Diverse physical entities arise as individuating and differentiating constraints act to reduce the possibilities (degrees of freedom) provided by physical law. These possibilities, we may say, provide the common “stuff ” for these diverse entities, but because this “stuff ” does not constitute these entities, their differences are not mere properties of coordinate determinations of something more fundamental, but are themselves differences in what it is that constitutes a physical entity. Qualitative differences between physical entities thus emerge as quantitative differences between levels of individuation and differentiation of physical entities.31 Blachowicz goes on to explain that because the higher levels of organization and structure are more inclusive than the lower ones by virtue of involving more constitutive constraints, they augment the quantity (or complexity) and alter the quality of what lies at the lower levels. All of the levels—in his judgment as well as mine— continue to be physical or material, but in a nonreductive sense of these terms. Physicist and astronomer Joel R. Primack puts this point succinctly and accurately when he says, “To understand how the world works, you have to understand how things behave on different scales.”32 A useful way to conceive of the oneness and manyness of the universe—and with it I bring this chapter to a close—is to compare it with an ecosystem. In the first place, an ecosystem is comprised of innumerable organic beings, each with its distinctive biological character and ecological niche or way of sustaining itself and its progeny within the ecosystem as a whole. In the second place, these beings are interrelated, but not to the extent of each one being directly related to every other one. And in the third place, the very notion of “an” ecosystem has to be qualified to some degree. The boundaries of a supposed ecosystem are not always and perhaps never easy to draw. Botanist Richard Ward suggests that ecosystems are differentiated from each other more along the lines of continua, gradients, or rather rough and indistinct, overlapping and often changing lines of demarcation instead of being confined within strict and definite boundaries.33 The unity of an ecosystem is thus, by this interpretation, only partially that.

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There are numerous interlinkages, but such linkages are not through and through, and the unity they comprise is loose rather than rigid. There is room for disconnections as well as connections in this unity—or for varying degrees of connection and disconnection among its component parts—and the linkages may and often will change over changing times. In similar fashion, the universe is composed of innumerable complexes and orders, in the sense of these terms interpreted by Buchler; the relations of these vary and are never to be viewed as tightly contained within an all-encompassing order; and the very notion of universe has to be qualified by the respects in which it must also be seen as a pluriverse. So, viewed on the analogy or model of an ecosystem, the one and the many of the world can be seen as having a complementary rather than a dichotomous relationship. In this chapter I have presented three main views on the issue of the one and the many. The first one insists that the many are illusory and that only the one truly exists. The second one contends that only the many exist and that there is no true unity to the world. The third one, on whose behalf I have argued, is that there is a respect in which the world can be regarded as one, and another respect in which it can be regarded as many. That is, neither is reducible to the other and both must be given due recognition. There is no such thing as a rigid, through and through, entirely reducible unity of the world, because not only real connections but real disconnections among things in the world must be acknowledged. Thus the universe is both one and many, and it is neither to the exclusion of the other. In making a case for this third view, I have called attention to the goal of coherent and adequate explanations, questioned the sole competence of the physical sciences in their present form to resolve the question of the one and the many, and argued the need for a greatly revised conception of matter in order to allow matter or the physical to be a unifying basis of all emergent phenomena including life and mind, while emphasizing at the same time the incredibly diverse character of all that matter does. I have drawn on the thought of metaphysician Justus Buchler in developing my defense of the one and many view of the universe, introduced the epistemological doctrine of perspectivism in that same regard, and suggested the model or analogy of an ecosystem as a way of explicating the manner in which the world can be conceived as both one and many. In speaking with Buchler of the character of

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nature as involving not only its settled states (natura naturata) but the restless impulse toward transformation and change (natura naturans) that is manifest throughout the history of our present universe, I have noted yet another way in which novel manyness continues to intrude on the universe’s relative unity, stability, and established character. Closely related to this last observation is the metaphysical issue of the relations of permanence and change in the world. Exploration of this issue is the task of the next chapter.

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Chapter 3 Permanence and Change The first of those who studied science were misled in their search for truth and the nature of things by their inexperience, which as it were thrust them into another path. So they say that none of the things that are either comes to be or passes out of existence, because what comes to be must do so either from what is or from what is not, both of which are impossible. For what is cannot come to be (because it is already), and from what is not nothing could have come to be (because something must be present as a substratum). So too they exaggerated the consequence of this, and went so far as to deny even the existence of a plurality of things, maintaining that only Being itself is. Such then was their opinion, and such the reason for its adoption. —Aristotle1

I

n the epigraph, Aristotle presents his intended refutation of the claims of earlier philosophers such as Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus that there can be no such things as change, plurality, or nonbeing, and that only being exists. For these philosophers, as he notes, being cannot come from nonbeing, nor can new things come from being, because being already is. They were right in two respects but radically wrong in another, he states. They were right in insisting that sheer nonbeing cannot give rise to being and that sheer nonbeing is meaningless. (I also argued for these two theses in chapter 1.) But they were mistaken, according to Aristotle, in claiming an unrestricted either-or of being or nonbeing, that is, that the situation must be either one or the other and cannot in some sense be both.

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Aristotle alleges that the situation is routinely both in a crucial sense, namely, that what is not so at one time can be so at another. This “is not” should not be construed in an absolute sense but only in a relative or privational sense, that is, in the sense of what presently is not but has the future potential to become. Thus, the baby rabbit has the potential to become the adult rabbit. As baby, the adult rabbit is admittedly not yet present in actuality but is nevertheless present in another sense as what the baby, as the kind of thing it is, has the privation of or potential to become. A privation or potential, in other words, is a not-being in the sense of not-yet-being, but also something that realistically could be so in the case of a particular thing or is likely to be so for it in the future. An uneducated human child, to take another example, has the potential to be an educated person as an adult. The child is not educated now but has the capability of being so in the future. In developing his case against the aforementioned philosophers, Aristotle also makes the important point that every process or change requires something that persists through the process or change. Without this assumption, he alleges, change would be unintelligible. He cites as examples the seed that changes into the plant or the sperm that changes into the animal. This observation led Aristotle to his notion that what persists through any process or change is, in the first instance, the matter that continues through the process or change and, in the second instance, the substance that continues—as defined by its matter, its essential form, and its contraries of what presently are its traits and of whatever traits in the future it has the capability to acquire (that is, its privations). I am not here concerned with the details of Aristotle’s analysis, nor do I intend to defend his particular theory of change or his historically influential theory of substance. But I do call attention to two things: (1) his notion that change is intelligible only as transformation of something previously existing into something else that comes into existence, and therefore (2) that being and becoming are not opposites but corollaries, or to put the point differently, relative permanence and change are partners, not contradictories. Without something at least relatively permanent or enduring the very notion of change is without meaning. This is another way of making the point I made in chapter 1, namely, that all conceivable change is transformation of something previously existing. Thus, there is no such thing as completely spontaneous, de novo change.

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Something cannot come from nothing, and Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus were well within their rights in holding this to be true. But Aristotle is also right in asserting that the concepts of relative permanence (or persistence through change) and potentiality are the proper ways of reconciling being and not-being and allowing for genuine becoming. These observations raise the critical question: Is there something that endures through each and every change without remainder, that is, something that remains forever unchanged? The Jewish and Christian scriptural answer to this question is that God is this something, the God who is the eternal “dwelling place,” who exists “from everlasting to everlasting,” who “sittest enthroned forever,” who is without “variation or shadow,” and who in Christ is the same “yesterday, today, and forever.”2 Aristotle’s answer to the question is that the universe is what perdures through all change and is the everlasting theater of change. His so-called unmoved mover is best interpreted, in my view, as the essential form or defining trait of the universe as a whole, as well as the ideal toward which all its changes aspire, changes such as the repetitive cycles of birth and rebirth of the species of living beings, the yearly round of the seasons, and the circular motions of the heavenly bodies. Aristotle’s unmoved mover is, as he himself insists, form without matter, because matter would give it potentiality, and it is pure actuality.3 It is thus not truly a substance in his technical sense of that term. This would mean that it is not a substantial being but an ultimate telos or end to which all substantial beings, each in its own fashion approximates and to which they together aspire. In this vision, each aspect of the universe mirrors or imitates as fully and completely as it can, and in its own distinctive manner, the form or ideal of the universe as a whole. And this form or ideal is that of motion or change everywhere being subordinated to and subserving the majestic permanence of the whole. Without these pervasive elements of change, there would be no such permanent whole, and without their interlinking functions, “ordered together to one end,”4 they themselves could not be what they are and have the endless capacity to become. Aristotle seems from our existent texts to vacillate on the issue of whether the unmoved mover is one or many, but he finally reasons that “the rule of many is not good; one ruler let there be.”5 The reason for this conclusion seems to be that if there were more than one, each would have

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the potentiality of being moved by one or more of the others. In this case, it could not be pure, immutable actuality. It would have to contain, at least in some degree, potentiality and thus alterability.

The Lure of the Immutable Aristotle’s fascination with the permanent and unchanging, in his case, the universe itself as “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (to co-opt the biblical phrase) has been carried seductively into the philosophy of the West. The basic character or form of the universe, for him, was beyond all change. There was no such thing as evolution of biological species, to say nothing of ongoing evolution of the earth or the cosmos. Thus, the taunting spirit of Parmenides lived on. Its lure was abetted by religious concentration on the supposed eternality of God or the notion of God as necessarily immutable, and by Aristotle’s teacher Plato, who insisted that only the timeless forms are fully real, and that all changing things in the experienced world shade off from the forms, which they weakly imitate, into descending grades of indeterminacy and unreality. Plato was strongly influenced by the model of geometric reasoning, where sensible drawings of figures such as triangles and circles were, for him, useful but could only approximate to the pure mathematical conceptions of these figures and operations upon them. Paradoxically, therefore, the more abstract a thing might seem from the standpoint of everyday sensate experience, the more real it is likely to be. The mathematical triangle or circle, seen with the eye of reason, is the truly real one; the drawn figure is only its suggestive representation. And the mathematical figure is not only fully real, it is timeless. It cannot be erased or altered in the way that the drawn figure can.6 All of the forms, mathematical or not, are known solely by reason, and they cohere within and attain their perfection for Plato from the highest unchanging form, the form of the Good. So a single static reality reigns over all. This reality is analogous in its character and role to Aristotle’s form of the unmoved mover and to the religious theist’s immoveable God. The highly influential Christian theologian of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, Augustine of Hippo, contributed to this ever more prevailing tradition of seeing the perfect, good, or truly real as static and permanent when he argued, as I noted in chapter 1, that with the creation of the world, God also created time. God himself, according

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to Augustine, is entirely outside of time and thus beyond any kind of alteration or change in time.7 Events that take place for us humans in time, as one of Augustine’s followers, the fifth- to sixth-century philosopher Boethius argued, are for God instantaneous and contained in an eternal “now.” So what for an earthly creature is sequential and changing is for God forever present and unchanging. God did not create the universe at a certain time; he created time when he created the universe.8 To be absolutely real as God is real, then, is to be outside of time and unaffected by time. It is to be unqualifiedly permanent; to be pure being with no taint of becoming. Being was thus given the privileged place in the religious and philosophical worldviews of the West, and becoming was relegated to inferior status. A great chain of being was put in place, its culmination and ultimate focus of tendency or desire regarded as being-itself, a person, principle, entity, or realm far removed from any variation or change. Thus, only the static and timeless can be regarded as finally and truly real. The perfect and the unchanging are assumed to be one and the same. Becoming is deprecated, and being is celebrated. Time is demoted from being the condition or trait of all things and is regarded as the mark of less than fully real or finally important things, and as subordinate to the one permanent, nontemporal, and supreme principle or thing, namely, the unmoved mover, the form of the Good, or God. This unreserved adulation of the permanent and thus of pure being as over against becoming was carried forward into the Newtonian physics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and exerts marked influence on the physics of the present day. I talked about the lure of timeless immutability or tenseless being for mathematical physicists in chapter 1, when addressing the topic of being and nothingness. But I now develop the idea more fully in connection with this chapter’s topic of permanence and change, making reference to ways in which it applies to the physicists of the early modern era as well as to those of the present. One of these ways is subscription to the notion that mathematics itself is the fundamentally reality, a notion that harkens back to Plato’s theory of the forms. Mathematical entities and their relations are purely formal and not temporal, so to view the universe on the model of mathematics or, to use the phrase of the seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict Spinoza, in the geometrical order, is to view the universe as ultimately static and unchanging.9

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This notion of mathematics as the key to the true nature of the universe, thus making the universe ultimately changeless and timeless, is accompanied by the idea of causal determinism, or what today is often called “the causal closedness of the physical.” Isaac Newton was a champion of causal determinism, reasoning that a super-intelligent God would not have created a world of intrusive, disruptive accidental events but would rather create it as a finely tuned, smoothly running cosmic machine. Such a God would also be a superb mathematician, as shown in the successes of Newton’s and other physicists’ mathematical analyses in uncovering the measurable, lawful, mathematical character of events in nature. As one of Newton’s early philosophical explicators and defenders, Spinoza not only viewed mathematical reasoning as the key to the true nature of reality. He also firmly endorsed the notion that the universe is ruled by an iron law of cause and effect, meaning that everything in the universe—all of its supposed but ultimately delusionary “happenings”—are already fully and forever present. We might think that things unfold chronologically, but this is just because we fail to see the whole system of the universe at once, in similar fashion to one who labors from theorem to theorem in an axiological system and fails to comprehend in a single moment how all the theorems follow inexorably and timelessly from the axioms. This “at once” vision of the structures of the universe is for Spinoza the highest level of knowledge, the finally adequate way of seeing the universe as it truly is. His conception of the universe chimes in neatly with Boethius’s eternal Gods-eye view of the world, discussed earlier. For Spinoza, then, all is permanence. Change is an illusion, as is time. The world of sensate experience is not the true world, but only the shadow of that world. His view is thus also notably similar to Plato’s vision of the static forms, accessible to reason but not to sensation, as constituting genuine reality. It might help to dwell a little more fully on the notion of causal determinism or of the causal closedness of the physical (and, therefore, for many if not most past and current physicists, of the universe as a whole) in order to see how it entails the idea that time is an illusion. The thesis of causal determinism is that past events are both necessary and sufficient conditions for explaining the occurrence of present ones. Given a past event or a complex of such events, only one thing can occur as the outcome of the event or complex of events. There are no alternate possibilities in actual fact, no matter how many

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there might seem to be in our imaginations. The new event had to happen as it did happen. It could not have been otherwise so long as the causal conditions that gave rise to it remained the same. Another, more startling way to put the thesis of causal determinism is to note that the future is wholly contained in the past. This means that there is nothing really new, nor could there be. But without new things taking place, there can be no time. Time becomes an illusion, no matter how deep-seated the illusion and no matter how it pervades our everyday experience. If there is nothing new, the supposed present collapses without remainder into the past, meaning that there is no distinction between present and past, and, thus, no such thing as time. Similarly, for real change to occur, something must be different in the present from the past, even if it were nothing more than repetitive transition from the past into the present. But with no time, no genuinely new or different present contrasting, however slightly, from the fixity of the past, there can be no such thing as change. So once again, the permanent trumps the transitory and changing. It wins out decisively over becoming. A metaphysics of pure being is the result. We should also note that in the deterministic view, there can be no real distinction between the future and the past. We could, at least in principle, go as easily from the future into the past as from the past into the future. Physicist Lee Smolin makes the point that when physical phenomena and relations are rendered into mathematical formulae, time tends to drop out. The reason is that causal relations are now interpreted as, and converted into, deductive entailments of mathematical symbols and relations. These mathematical symbols and relations are reversible. This is so because in a deductive system, we can work back as readily from the theorems to the axioms as from the axioms to the theorems. All of the theorems are already implicit in the axioms, and the theorems point back through other theorems to the starting axioms. Mathematical symbols and relations are, in other words, bidirectional and timeless.10 Thus, the supposed present, past, or future—all must exist timelessly or tenselessly. This is what we would expect in a closed causal system, and some physicists of today are quite willing to accept this result. Their theories are often completely reversible or time-independent, so why should not time in its ultimate character be as well? A reversible time is the same thing as no time at all. With it, we could go as easily from putative effect to putative cause as the other way

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around. However, we should note that it does not follow from the earlier noted fact about deductive systems in general or particular mathematical interpretations of physical systems in particular that physical objects (or events) and their relations must be timeless. I remember the occasion, some years ago, that I was able to play a newly acquired VCR tape backward and to watch the events recorded on it run opposite to their intended order. What I saw was startling. Every sequence ran backward, with such things as spilled liquids rushing back into their containers, people running backward into buildings, and talk becoming gibberish. Here effects were converted into causes, and the supposed arrow of time now ran the other way! In this same period, I read Philip K. Dick’s novel Counter-Clock World,11 in which entropy is reversed and everything takes place in what for us, in our entropic world, is in the wrong direction. The dead rise from the grave, for example, and go from old age into adulthood, from adulthood to childhood, and eventually back into the womb. Such imagined time reversal is in reality the destruction of time, the conversion of it into an illusion under which we had previously suffered. It shows presumed temporal unfolding to be in reality a static structure like a map, over which we can range alternatively and freely to and from any direction. Just this last notion of time is defended at length by physicist Julian Barbour. Barbour’s mathematically inspired Platonism is made quite explicit in the following passage from his book The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics first published in 1999: [W]e can do without the fiction of the moving present. The sense we have that time has advanced to the present Now is simply our awareness of being in that Now. Different Nows give rise to different experiences, and hence to the impression that the time in them is different. I need a name for the land of Nows. Plato . . . taught that the only real things are forms or ideas: perfect paradigms, existing in a timeless realm. In our mortal existence we catch only fleeting glimpses of these ideal forms. Now each point—each thing—in these “countries” I have asked you to imagine could be imagined as a Platonic form. Triangles certainly are. I shall call the corresponding “country” Platonia. The name reflects its mathematical

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perfection and timeless landscape. Nothing changes in Platonia. Its points are all the instants of time, all the Nows; they are simply there, given once and for all.12 Barbour goes on to claim that “[t]he points of Platonia—the Nows— are worlds unto themselves. No thread of time joins them up. We must think of Newtonian-type dynamics as something that “paints a path” onto the timeless landscape of Platonia.”13 Each Now, in other words, is separate and discrete. There is no “flow” from one to the other, no movement or advance from past, through present, into future. Time’s arrow is an illusion. All the Nows exist concurrently like so many fixed pieces on a game board, objects that never move or alter their relationships. Whatever game of strategy and movement we might imagine to take place on the board is just that: it exists only in our imaginations. Barbour defends this notion of eternal, unrelated Nows with detailed arguments based in physics, and especially in quantum physics. A development in physics that is of particular importance for him and to which he repeatedly refers in his book is the Wheeler-Dewitt equation, intended to unify relativity and quantum physics.14 According to most physicists, such integration would, in the words of science writer Tim Folger, “describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time.” This possibility is intriguing for physicists in view of the fact that, as Folger observes: “The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward.”15 The seductive lure of the immutable and the dismissal of ultimate time and change live on, therefore, in contemporary physics. In the next section, I take issue with this lure, explaining why I believe it to be a mistaken outlook and ideal.

Arguments against Ultimate Immutability and the Denial of Time In this section I present four arguments against the claim of some contemporary physicists that reality is ultimately static and unchanging and that time is unreal. The first of these is that the case for such a claim commits a fallacy of reduction. The second one is that this case runs against the grain of substantive findings and claims in physics and other natural sciences. The third one is that the case creates a

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rigid and irreconcilable dualism between physics and everyday life, a dualism that arouses—as all such rigid dualisms should—strong philosophical suspicion and objection. And the fourth one calls attention to the requirement of empirical verification for scientific theories of all types. Let us consider each of the four counterarguments in turn. First, physicists Barbour and Brian Greene16 assume that the “really real” or ultimately real exists only as depicted in the domain of physics, or more particularly, in quantum physics. This assumption constitutes a version of the fallacy of reduction, namely, that all reality is finally reducible to or nothing but what is announced as reality in the discipline of physics. But even if a case could be made for the thesis that in realms of reality studied by physics nothing ultimately changes or exhibits a flow of temporal events, it does not follow that this must be so in the realms or aspects of reality studied in other disciplines. What is true of quantum physics, for example, may not continue to be true at other levels or types of existence. And these other levels or types may well be just as fully real in their own right. The macro-world, as complementing or emergent from the microworld, need not be thought to be the same in every respect as the micro-world. It may well be in many ways quite different, as it clearly appears to be. The proposed reduction follows only if we assume out of hand that everything that exists or is real is already exhaustively contained in the phenomena studied or brought into view by a highly abstract, pervasively theory-laden, and relentlessly mathematized physics. In my view, physics tells us one story about our world among others that are needed to complement it and, if need be, to call that story into question and counterbalance it. A claim to physics’ competence in its present form to tell the whole story—whether stated or implied—is dubious at best. This observation raises the question of what we ought finally to trust: the lofty elegance of Platonized mathematics or the nitty-gritty, routine encounters and experiences of life in the everyday world (a point to which I return in the third counterargument later). Are the latter no more than a massive illusion painted by vivid but deluded imagination on the canvass of an inert, timeless universe? Barbour, Greene, and a number of other physicists seem quite content to say yes.17 I just as resoundingly say no. I speak as a philosopher, not as a physicist. But I claim the right of philosophy to enter the lists when it comes to contested claims about the nature of reality, and I do so

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throughout this book. Physics must obviously be taken carefully into account in the metaphysical enterprise, as must many other areas of thought. But physics must not be given an unquestioned hegemonic status or accorded an assumed veto power or right against all other claims, arguments, experiences, and evidences brought into focus by other disciplines and modes of experience and thought. Second, the assertion of timeless reality in physics runs against the grain of many fundamental aspects of physics and other natural sciences, where cause-effect relations and real changes over time are routinely assumed. For example, our present universe is thought by physicists to be 13.7 billion years old, to have resulted from some sort of initial Big Bang, to be expanding at an accelerating rate, and to have undergone many sorts of real and often spectacular cause-effect relations and changes during this lengthy time. In addition, the solar system and the earth on which we live are said to have undergone many formative changes over the past 4.6 billion years. And life is said to have emerged and to have evolved into diverse species over the past 3.6 billion years. Human agriculture and domestication of animals are thought to have begun some ten thousand years ago and to have led to significant changes and developments in human culture. And so on. These are assumed by most practicing scientists to be real changes that have produced real effects. And they are assumed to have taken place in real time. Furthermore, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is so basic in physical theory, tells us that there is such a thing as a unidirectional arrow of time, leading from ordered to less ordered states. In the meantime, the biological sciences, aided by physics and chemistry, inform us that the evolution of living beings on earth has brought about large areas of local negentropy on earth where evolving forms of life bring great and highly varied emergent order out of what would otherwise be a trend toward disorder. Both the Second Law and evolution involve real change, whether it be from order to disorder or from initial relative disorder to greater local order. Nobel Laureate in chemistry Ilya Prigogine argues that the arrow of time is “a source of order” throughout nature rather than merely of disorder, thus suggesting that negentropy may be more like the rule, or at least a parallel rule, in its relation to the Second Law of Thermodynamics rather than a relatively rare exception to that law. In both cases, whether of ongoing destruction or construction of order, irreversible changes—and thus an arrow of time—are implied.18

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How are we to interpret these critical notions in the natural sciences if time and change are said to be illusions by some physicists? Are these other developments in the sciences to be dismissed as finally and truly unreal? Abraham Lincoln made a now famous speech on June 18, 1858, in Springfield, Illinois, when he accepted his nomination as the Republican candidate for the national Senate. It was a time when the United States was being increasingly threatened by the prospect either of civil war or peaceful disunion prompted mainly over the issue of the possession of slaves and the extension of slavery into the new settlements and territories of the country. In his speech, Lincoln quoted the biblical statement that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” explaining the statement as a warning that the nation could not long endure as half slave and half free.19 The pronouncement in physics that accumulated effects of temporal change are at bottom illusory and unreal would seem to introduce a similar fatal disunity or incoherence into contemporary science. Third, and as mentioned in passing in my first aforementioned argument, the contention that the flow of time and changes brought about by that flow are unreal stands in radical opposition to the experiences of everyday life. Organisms, including human ones, are born, grow, mature, decay, and die—if their lives are not cut short by factors other than normal aging. This is as true of Barbour, Greene, and other physicists as it is of the rest of us. If Barbour’s and Greene’s books already existed in some nontemporal state of being, what do we (or they) make of the apparent time and effort it took them to research and write their books and to have them published? Are the books’ seeming existences over apparent periods of time illusions? Was my progressive reading of them an illusion? Will the books in their physical character never really decay and pass out of being, and did they never really have to be printed and bound over a finite span of time? Is my remembered past as a young boy totally disconnected with who I am at present? Or does that young boy continue to exist today? These and similar ones are run-of-the-mill questions, but they need to be raised in the face of denials of the seeming realities of time and change—seeming realities that can involve such apparent things as genuine opportunities for change, demanding challenges, significant accomplishments or failures, and imposing threats and uncertainties over the putative span of a lifetime. The claim that time is unreal sets up a deeply disturbing dualism between it and life as lived. All such radical dualisms are bound to

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raise profound philosophical doubt and to pose the need for more coherent resolutions of the problems they purport to address. Physicists can and may build castles in the air, just as philosophers sometimes (if not often) are alleged to have done. The resources of both disciplines need to be drawn upon, and those of other disciplines are needed as well. The observations, findings, claims, and arguments of one discipline are needed as potential criticisms and correctives of another. I favor a holistic interdisciplinary approach to the major issues of life and the world and reject the idea that any one discipline is equipped to address these problems by itself. Whether time and change are ultimately real or unreal is not a problem that can be left to physicists alone to analyze and resolve, partly because the conclusion that these factors are ultimately unreal introduces radical incoherence into physics itself, into its relations to the other natural sciences, and into its relations to ordinary life. These incoherencies are a sign that more careful thought and analysis are needed. Fourth and finally, the crucial test of a scientific theory, no matter how elegant and convincing its mathematical calculations and formulations may seem, is the theory’s empirical verification. And this requires appeal to the messy, less elegant, time-ridden world of sensate experience, a world that theories such as those of Barbour and Greene brand as unreal. But we must put all scientific theories to the test, and we have to wait to see what happens. The experiments required for verification or falsification are themselves guided and controlled by theoretical design, but they must nonetheless have crucial elements of prediction that are strictly empirical. Otherwise, the theory is not really being put to an empirical test. The irony, then, is that a theory that denies the reality of temporal experience must be tested by that same realm of temporal experience. This final type of incoherence is a sign that something has clearly gone wrong. Empirical support is required for a theory that must, on the one hand, deny the relevance of such support but that cannot, on the other hand, warrant recognition as a confirmed scientific theory until the relevant empirical support has been described and provided. In these four ways, then, I argue against the allegation that only the static and immutable truly exist and that time is ultimately unreal. Implicit in my comments so far is an intimate relationship between time and change. Are the two separate? We commonly assume that a change is a relation of two events, one in the past and another in the present, meaning that we tacitly accept the notion that changes take

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place in time or mark the passage of time. Thus, we commonly indicate the passage of time, and do so with varying degrees of accuracy, by some sort of measurable change, be it the changing hands of a clock or the energy changes of cesium atoms at a temperature of near absolute zero. Isaac Newton believed that the passage of time indicated in this manner is only relative time, and that it takes place against a background of so-called absolute time. Absolute time, as he defined it, is independent of change. That is, it flows whether there is change. If we were to take away all changing events in the universe, his view implies, the flow of time would remain. And for Newton, God lives in such absolute time, forever beyond change. But it is difficult to see what would mark such changeless existence as temporal. A supposed time apart from all change is difficult in the extreme to conceive. I conclude, therefore, that Aristotle was right in defining time as the measure (or detection) of change and that there is no good reason to endorse Newton’s idea of absolute time or God’s time.20 Prigogine puts the point well when he says that “the flow of time depends on a history of events, but Newtonian time is universal and independent of history.”21 We must resist an impression of the reduction of time to space in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. As I commented in note 15 in chapter 1, the key notion of spacetime in the theory does not collapse time into space or into a purely spatial geometry; instead, it maintains the crucial distinction between time and space.22 And when we say, as we commonly do, that such and such occurs in or over time, or when we talk of a length of time, we need to be careful to remember that these are spatial metaphors. Time is not some sort of container or spatial region, nor is it a geometrical line of varying lengths. We can think of some events as taking place (again the spatial metaphor) in the contexts of larger ongoing events, but the irreversible relationships of events or occurrences is not only an indication of the passage of time but what time essentially amounts to. Time is inseparable from change, and change is inseparable from time. This is as true of changing mental states as it is of changing ones in the nonmental world. Neither change nor time is comprehensible apart from the other. In the next section, I address the contention that the realm of possibility must be regarded as permanent and unchanging, and that it is a metaphysical factor that persists forever and independent of time in the midst of all change. I believe that this contention, too, is in error,

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and I explain why I think it to be so. When I have done so, I will with accumulated arguments have defended the central thesis of this chapter, which is that some kind of universe has existed and will always exist, but that the universe (or, more likely, endless succession of universes) has always been and always will be undergoing real change and exhibiting real time. Time is primordial, then, rather than derivative. The only thing that endures everlastingly through time is a dynamic and continually changing universe of some sort, a universe with multitudinous and dynamically interrelated temporal processes. The absolutely permanent or eternal exists only in our imaginations.

Possibility and Change Plato’s theory of forms can be interpreted as an attempt to give metaphysical status to the realm of possibility. He claimed (or seemed to claim) that the forms are the true actualities, not just abstract possibilities, but let’s put that notion aside for the moment. Would it not make sense to argue that at least one major thing is metaphysically permanent and outside of time, namely, possibility, and that all actuality is simply instantiation or actualization of this realm of pure possibility? And, if this is so, would this idea not mean that timeless possibility is prior to or even the basis of temporal actuality? According to this line of argument, it was always timelessly possible that there be such things as stars, planets, and various forms of life, including human beings, even though there were times when these things did not exist. It has always been possible that there be such things as dragons and unicorns, even though dragons and unicorns presumably do not now exist and never have existed. And so on. Creative mathematician and astute metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead argues that there must be a distinct realm of intricately ordered “pure” possibilities that he terms eternal objects, “eternal” in the sense of residing outside of time. Such a realm can explain, he apparently believes, the successful application of sometimes extremely abstract mathematical formulations and theories to the concrete world of sensate experience. If asked where such a realm exists, Whitehead’s answer is that it exists in the “primordial nature of God,” a nature that is outside of time but is forever available for “ingression” in temporal events and affairs.23

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By exploring mathematical relations, then, we expose structures and relations of the sensate world, showing these structures and relations to be patterned after the mathematical ones. The realm of mathematical possibility is the map, as it were, and the sensate world is the territory. When we explore details of the map, we also explore basic patterns and characteristics of the territory. Unraveling a problem in mathematics can lead to unraveling a problem in the experienced world. Assuming such a timeless, forever existing ordered realm of pure possibility can also explain why mathematics is at bottom something we seem to discover and not just invent. The untiring struggle of mathematicians to find and prove complicated new mathematical theories is a case in point. Similarly, the routine applications of mental and linguistic abstractions of all kinds (so-called universals) to the particularities of experience, giving rich conceptual meaning to those particularities and their relations, can also be explained if we presuppose an already existing domain of pure possibility to which the mental ideas and linguistic terms give expression. Possibility needs some sort of metaphysical status, so the reasoning goes, but it is not in time or confined to time, so at least something nontemporal must exist in a deeply significant but nonempirical sense of “exist.” In contrast with this notion of free-floating, eternal, and thus timeless possibility is the idea that possibility resides in the events of the world as these unfold over time. There are no “pure” possibilities in this outlook; there are only “real” possibilities, new possibilities presented to the present by realizations of the past. Thus, what was not possible and one time can become possible at another. Possibilities emerge just as actualities do, and both do so over time. As Smolin points out, “The principles of sexual selection . . . could not have come to exist before there were sexes.”24 And philosopher Holmes Rolston III, a former colleague of mine in the philosophy department at Colorado State University, insists that it is “plausible to argue that new possibility spaces do open up that were not there at the start” of our present universe. “Life is not possible on Saturn but it does become possible on earth,” he observes. “On Earth, it is not possible for trilobites to build jet planes, but that does become possible for humans. . . . Especially in the explosions of biology on Earth, new possibilities seem to open up, dramatically, overwhelming with their increase any old ones shut down.”25 In this view, no ordered realm of pure

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possibility is needed. All that is needed is possibilities posed for the present by actualities of the past. As Justus Buchler observes, possibilities are already real in the sense of being prevalent or available in actualities: “A possibility does not get real when it gets to be actualized, any more than an actuality gets real when it acquires new possibilities.” A real possibility may not yet or ever be actualized, but it is no less real to the extent that it is really resident as a possibility in some actuality.26 So actuality is the basis of possibility rather than the other way around, and because actualities are temporal, so too are possibilities. To take an extreme example, a new universe can arise out of the ashes of an old one because that old one already contained the possibility of at least the earliest stage of the new one. In general, this view of the status of possibility is a restatement of the idea that all change is transformation— transformation of what precedes into what succeeds. I endorse this temporal view of possibility as over against the nontemporal one, but to do so I need to consider three objections to it. The first one is that it does not explain the usefulness of mathematical reasoning in interpreting the world or the sense of discovery in finding new mathematical theories and solving mathematical problems. The second objection is that there is an important sense in which the emergence of life forms on earth, of sexual relations among such life forms, of the creation of jet planes by human beings, and the like were always possible, not just possible at particular points in time. And the third objection is that the fundamental laws of nature provide the timeless framework and eternally normative regulation of anything that happens in the universe. Particular universes may come into being and pass away, but the laws of nature always remain the same. And these laws forever determine what is or is not possible. Let us look at each of these objections in turn. I respond to the first objection by noting that there are numerous structures, patterns, and relationships in nature. Mathematical reasoning and reasonings of other kinds can be extremely useful in fertilizing our imaginations and enabling us to explore many of these possible structures, patterns, and relations. But the proof of their presence in nature must always rely finally on their empirical confirmations, not in their mathematical beauty or elegance. Conceptual possibilities are not real in their own right except as conceptual possibilities. They can provide important clues to the actual but are not in themselves actual existents. Mathematical possibilities are formal

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and ideal. The same reasoning applies to abstractions and universals of all types. The second argument, which contends that whatever is possible must always and forever have been possible in some deep sense, can be interpreted in a logical instead of metaphysical fashion. “Always possible” just means noncontradictory in the relations of ideas. Pregnant virgins are, in the usual meaning of these terms, impossible not only in a biological sense (real possibility) but in a linguistic one as well. Contradictions cannot be countenanced, simply because they are conceptually meaningless. What is not contradictory is possible. And that is the end of the matter. “Always possible” simply means “does not violate the law of non-contradiction as a basic rule of intelligibility.” The contradictory is the nonassertible, and the possible is what can be meaningfully asserted. These observations carry no metaphysical baggage. The third argument is refuted by Smolin, who takes his cue from the nineteenth-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce argues that the laws of nature are not timeless or eternally fixed but evolve. He writes, “Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution.”27 Smolin devotes a considerable part of his book Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe to defending the proposition that “a true cosmological theory” is based on “the principle that time must be real and physical laws must evolve in that real time.”28 Such laws do not dictate what shall be the case from some sort of timeless dimension or realm. Rather, they describe regularities that prevail at particular times but need not be thought of as prevailing at all possible times. These temporally grounded regularities are large-scale contexts within which other things of lesser scale can function with their own characteristic regularities and predictabilities. But all of the regularities without exception are emergent and temporal, through and through. Just as, in the words of the poet James Russell Lowell, “New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth,”29 so new occasions can bring about, over vast periods of time, new physical laws. Smolin connects this idea of evolving laws with the idea of successive universes, an idea I have also favored elsewhere in this book. His contention is that successive Big Bangs or origins of successive universes produce new universes with their own characteristic and evolved laws. The only convincing way to explain the specific laws of

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our universe, he argues, is to invoke “events in the past of the Big Bang. And we can apply the same logic to the causes of the choices made at Bangs prior to ours. There must thus be a sequence of Bangs extending endlessly back into the past.” If we look back to a time prior to the Big Bang that produced our universe, Smolin argues, we will observe its “laws evolving as our present universe is approached.”30 Even the most fundamental laws of our present universe are therefore contingent, time-bound, and time-derived. No appeal need be made to a supposed collection of timeless cosmic laws applying to any or all possible universes. In this regard as in all others, we can say not just that tempus fugit, replacing old things with new, but also that tempus regnet, with all else falling under its uncontested dominance and rule. In this chapter I have taken note of Aristotle’s important arguments to the effect that change is intelligible only as a transformation of something already existing into something else that comes into being, and that being and becoming are corollaries, not contradictories. These arguments then allowed me to raise the question of whether there is anything that endures through any and all changes without remainder, something that remains forever unchanged in its basic character through the whole history of this or other universes. We saw that theologians such as Augustine and Boethius, philosophers like Aristotle, Plato, and Spinoza (who sought to draw out the philosophical implications of Newtonian mathematical physics), and physicists such as Barbour and Greene give a positive answer to this question, framing their answers in different ways. All of them either radically subordinate becoming to being in some fundamental manner or deny outright the existence of becoming and temporal change, thus insisting that only static being is truly real. I presented four counterarguments to the thesis of physicists such as Barbour and Greene that time is ultimately unreal. We also saw that some thinkers, such as Whitehead, contend that an unchanging realm of pure possibility, perhaps residing in the eternal nature of God, must be presupposed in order, among other things, to explain the illuminating application of mathematical and other kinds of abstract concepts and conceptual systems to the changing empirical world. I argued that there is no such thing as a distinct metaphysical realm of “pure,” nontemporal possibility and rather that all possibilities are “real,” meaning that they are contained in the past and made available by the past to the present and future. Those who maintain that the basic laws of nature constitute such a realm of pure possibility

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by which the present universe and all other universes are guided and constrained were countered by the argument that laws of nature, like everything else, are subject to evolution, emergence, and extinction, meaning that they can come into being and pass away. The upshot of all of these arguments is that time and change are primordial, and everything that exists undergoes ceaseless and unrelenting processes of temporal change. Whatever relatively stable being there is at any time and even over vast periods of time is made possible by more pervasive and fundamental becoming. Therefore, there is no being apart from or underived from becoming. The only thing that endures everlastingly through all time, past, present, and future, is the dynamic, ever-changing, ever-evolving, temporally ordered universe itself (which I and Smolin regard as a series of successive universes). But what about God? If there is a God,31 as I explained in chapter 1, a religiously meaningful and available God must exist in time concurrently with the universe and be intimately related to the universe as the latter undergoes and exhibits changes through time. Otherwise, God and the world would have no connections with one another, and relations with God of any sort on the part of temporal beings such as we are would be impossible. Moreover, the arguments of this chapter against some kind of putatively nontemporal realm or type of being, wholly unrelated to and unaffected by any kind of change or becoming, apply as much to a supposed timeless God as to anything else. The concept of a God beyond change is not only a religiously irrelevant God and a God for whom it is hard to imagine any sort of meaningful connections with the world. The concept is also extremely difficult if not impossible to defend on reasonable metaphysical grounds. I have sought in this chapter to show this last point to be the case for all allegedly nontemporal forms of genuine existence. Heraclitus was right in claiming that everything flows. There is relative permanence, stability, or persistence within the flow, as Aristotle rightly observed. But no there is no such thing as absolute permanence or aloof, pure, unruffled being, a supposed domain or type of existence separate from and unaffected by what comes to pass and passes away in an ever-changing world.

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Chapter 4 Causality, Novelty, and Freedom The truth is that if language . . . were molded on reality, we should not say “The child becomes the man,” but “There is becoming from the child to the man.” In the first proposition, “becomes” is a verb of indeterminate meaning, intended to mask the absurdity into which we fall when we attribute the state “man” to the subject “child.” . . . In the second proposition, “becoming” is a subject. It comes to the front. It is the reality itself; childhood and manhood are then only possible stops, mere views of the mind; we now have to do with the objective movement itself, and no longer with its cinematographical imitation. —Henri Bergson1

T

he perceptive reader will have noted that the previous three chapters of this book overlap one another in such a manner that discussion in the one ties in necessarily with discussions in the other two. One cannot address the topic of being and nothingness without also considering the topic of the one and the many, and these topics, in their turn, relate closely to the topic of permanence and change. If only monolithic being exists, the supposed many, and changes involving the many, become illusory. By the same token, time also becomes an illusion. If sheer nothingness is posited ever to have been the case, then, according to my argument, being or existence could not have originated or exist in any form. Not only could there not have been such a thing as pure being; there also could not have been a plurality of beings or changing relations among a plurality of beings. Hence, time could not have existed. Nor, in that supposed event, could there

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even have been such a thing as permanence, because nothingness cannot be meaningfully said to endure. Moreover, if there is alleged to be an ultimate static, timeless realm, principle, or being, it cannot be coherently related to a temporal universe or to temporal events in that universe. The consequence of the impassible gulf between the two realms is that the temporal, changing realm tends to be given short shrift or even to be dismissed as not really existing in its own right. Finally, when the relation of so-called causes and effects is thought to be both necessary and sufficient, the effect collapses into the cause, time ceases, distinctions of all kinds vanish, and we are left with the indivisible unity of an unchanging block universe, a universe devoid of process or plurality. So we are driven back to the idea of single static being as the sole existent. In this chapter, I concentrate further on the theme of efficient causality, discussing its relations to the themes of novelty and freedom. In this way, I can exhibit how the themes of the present chapter relate to those of the earlier three. A fitting way to begin this discussion is to direct attention to the epigraph to this chapter. It contains an incisive observation of Henri Bergson, a French philosopher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The meat of his observation is that we can suppose stoppages in the flow of time if we start with our experiences of the flow of time. But we cannot reconstitute that flow if we start with discrete, disconnected instants. Time is not like a movie film, which is made up of independent frames, which, when played by the camera, create an illusion of continuous change. Rather, it is something whose continuous passage or flow we experience directly and at first hand. We can imagine breaking it up into disconnected points or instants. And it is often useful to do so, for example, in mathematical physics or other attempts to give precise measurement, moment by moment, to fleeting temporal events. Modern digital clocks also create an illusion of time as made up of discrete moments, as did the old school clocks whose larger hand jerked perceptibly from minute to minute. As a grade school student with growing impatience for the start of recess (and lunch) or the end of the school day, I watched the old clocks do so and marveled at the achingly long time each new ponderous movement of the minute hand took to occur. I should never have been seated in direct view of that clock! But the reality of time is that of a smooth passage from the past, through the present, and

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on into the future. We need carefully to draw a distinction that is easy to lose sight of, namely, the distinction between concrete temporal passage as experienced and lived, on the one hand, and abstract time as a conjectured spatial arrangement of stoppages or discrete instants, analogous to the separate frames of a motion picture film, on the other. The conception of time as continuous passage or flow that I, along with Bergson, believe to be the correct one implies that efficient causality cannot be thought of as both necessary and sufficient for explaining temporal changes of any sort, and that the doctrine of causal determinism is therefore false. I discussed this point in the previous chapter but now carry the discussion further. I first explain the interrelations of causality and novelty, and then I proceed to examine the relations of these two themes to freedom.

Causality Because time is omnipresent, stability of whatever sort can only be relative, not absolute. Stability is repetition rather than static being. And repetition is itself part of the flow of time, new moments resembling and repeating older moments. But this resembling and repeating are themselves movement and change, the movement and change from the older moments to the new ones. What is carried forward, therefore, is not a static substance, unchanging in the midst of its changes of accidental qualities. What is carried forward is something that changes but changes in such a manner as to sustain a pattern or continuity that persists through the changes. It is necessary that such a pattern exist as the background in order for other kinds of changes to be possible and perceptible. We say that such-and-such changes. For example, the apple changes color, meaning that other sorts of changes are overlaid upon or take place against the background of the relative stability of repetition that is the persistent pattern of the apple. The change of repetition is, therefore, the necessary background for other sorts of changes. And when we speak of cause-effect relations as necessary ones, leaving aside for the moment, the issue of whether they are also sufficient, we are really speaking in part of the repetition or sustaining of pattern or character that underlies all other sorts of change. The apple may now be red, where before it was green. But it is “the same” apple

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in the sense that its basic character as apple was repeated throughout the gradual alterations of its color. “Sameness” in all cases, therefore, means repetition, which is a kind of change. And all other types of change take place against the background of this repetition. It is necessary that they do so, if these other kinds of changes are to be intelligible as changes of something that is at least relatively unchanging in the midst of the other kinds of change. The difference between the apple and its changes of color as it ripens is not the absence of change in relation to change but rather the difference between two rates of change. The repetitive pattern of the apple does not last forever; it comes into being from a blossom and perishes as part of a living system when it is either picked by a human, plucked by an animal, or falls to the ground. And the repetitive pattern of the apple is made possible by other repetitive patterns that persist through its coming into being and passing away. Examples of such patterns are the limb and the tree to which it belongs, the rain, air, and soil that provide the tree’s nourishment, the ecosystem to which the tree belongs, the regular laws of nature that allow for all biological growth and development, and so on. All of the foregoing is, I submit, part of what is meant by saying that cause-effect relations are necessary relations. They are necessary in the sense that some kind of stability or continuity has to persist through change. Some relative repetition also has to be accompanied by some relative innovation. But nowhere is there a total absence of change. This is a dynamic version of Aristotle’s static conception of unchanging substances as what persists through a process of change. It is also another way of presenting the idea that all change is transformation, that is, alteration in some manner of something already existing. The kind of necessity of which I have spoken so far needs to be supplemented, however, with two other kinds that are of critical importance to our understanding of cause-effect relations. Not only are there (1) always and necessarily relatively stable patterns of ongoing change that persist through relatively less stable and more immediately novel kinds of change such as the changing colors of the apple. It is also the case (2) that the causal past is necessary to provide an array of real possibilities from which the present moment is a selection. As a selection from these possibilities, the present moment is a novel event, an event that transforms the possibilities provided by the causal past into the actualities of the present. And (3) causes are by

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their nature somehow efficacious in producing effects. There would be no effects without the efficacy or impetus of causes. Causes can continue to produce the repetitive patterns that persist through more marked changes, but they can also work to produce the relatively new changes that take place in that context or against that background. Cause-effect relations, then, involve both repetition and novelty, not just repetition. As we saw in the previous chapter, even repetition is a kind of novelty, that is, a new version of an older thing. But are causes by themselves sufficient to produce the novelty, whatever forms that novelty may take? This is the critical question I need now to address, and I do so under the heading of novelty.

Novelty There must be causes in order to have effects. This is not simply a linguistic truth, in the sense that effects would have no meaning apart from causes, since the term effects implies their being resultant from causes. It is also a metaphysical truth. Causes are necessary conditions for the occurrence of effects. But there is something different from the cause in the effect. Were there not, there would be no movement or change from the effect to the cause, and the so-called effect would collapse into the cause, meaning the end of time and change, as we saw in the previous chapter. This “something different” calls attention to a further factor needed for understanding cause-effect relations. That factor is novelty. There is an element of novelty in all cause-effect relations, enabling us to understand how the old cause can produce the new effect. The causal past is necessary for the effect but not sufficient to account for it. Something different must intervene. Novelty is not completely contained in the causal past but is added to it. To put the point succinctly, no cause-effect relation is possible without some degree of novelty, however slight or large that degree may be. Novelty is not a thing, any more than causality is. Both are aspects of cause-effect relations, the two modes of it that are necessary for its adequate description. The situation is confounded by the fact that no particular causeeffect relation takes place in isolation. Combinations of continuity and novelty are taking place all around it, even if only in relatively imperceptible or unnoticeable degrees, and these combinations are

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exerting mutual effects on one another. We can think here of such things as changes in ambient temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, and light; changes of spatial positions and relations, including those of the heavenly bodies in their rotations and orbits; molecular, atomic, and elementary particle (or wavicle) changes; and the like. Nature never stands still. Varying combinations of relative continuity and relative novelty are omnipresent and mutually influential. These observations are closely related to the fact that causeeffect relations are, as already noted, efficacious. This could not be true did they not introduce something new. As Bergson observes, “each [present] form flows out of previous forms, while adding to them something new. . . .” He thus rightly insists that “Time is invention or it is nothing at all.”2 In other words, time is originative, efficacious, and creative (as well as destructive, since destruction is also a kind of novelty or change), and only if understood in this manner can it be the manifestation of ongoing real changes in the world. This means that without some aspect or ingredient of novelty, the flow of time and thus the existence of time would be impossible. Time flows smoothly even as it brings novelty into the world. The causal efficacy or impetus is not, therefore, the same thing as the novelty attained as its result. The impetus opens the way to the novelty but does not entirely account for its resultant character. The causal past and novelty, therefore, are correlative principles. The two are equally primordial and equally dependent on one another. No cause-effect process is possible without both factors being given their due. The past provides possibilities for the arrival of the present and for the distinctive character of that present. And it is a kind of urge toward realization of some part of those possibilities. The present is the actualization of some possibility or complex of possibilities already resident in the past. The process of actualization is the novelty that is added to what is provided by the past, and it is the factor explaining why past causes cannot be both necessary and sufficient to explain their effects. The actualization accounts—in its combination with the repetition of character spoken of earlier, the possibilities for actualization posed by the past, and the urge toward the realization of some aspect of those possibilities—for the flow of time. And it explains why there can be effects that are different from, although undergirded and made possible by, past causes.

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Why are there such ongoing actualizations? The only answer I can give is that it is in the nature of cause-effect relations that there are such, which is also to say that it is in the nature of time that there are such. Causal and temporal relations lie in the very nature of things, in the fundamental character of a dynamically evolving, pervasively temporal universe. They do not derive from something more basic. This also means, if my analysis thus far is correct, that novelty is every bit as primordial as continuity. Having plumbed this far, we can plumb no further. Ours is, at bottom, a Heraclitean world. “Even before our universe was created,” says Ilya Prigogine, “there was an arrow of time, and this arrow will go on forever.”3 I have so far sought to show that it is as true to say that change is the source of stability as it is to say that such stability is the platform of change. There would be no relative stability without repetition as a kind of change, and there would be no other forms of change without a continuing basis of repetition. Neither is possible without the other. And I have argued that without novelty cause-effect relations and change are impossible. In other words, continuity and novelty go necessarily together. And there is a further implication: apart from the presence of novelty—or more precisely, ongoing actualizations of novel possibilities provided by the past—as a pervasive trait of the temporal universe, along with the equally necessary trait of relative stability and continuity, there could be no such thing as freedom because there would be neither open field nor stable context in which meaningful freedom could be exercised. Let us now look in detail at how the principles of causal continuity and novel innovation relate to the nature and exercise of human freedom.

Freedom What is human freedom? I can define it as “conscious, goal-directed choice and action among alternative possibilities for such choice and action.” Implicit in this definition are three essential factors. One factor is stability, another is novelty, and the third is conscious pursuit of a future goal. There must be enough ongoing stability and, thus, predictability in the world to allow for predictable outcomes of one’s choices. If I choose so-and-so, I should be able to expect with reasonable degrees of assurance that so-and-so will result as the consequence of my choice. In other words, meaningful freedom requires

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a regular, orderly, law-like world. But the world must also provide alternative possibilities for choice, meaning that its cause-effect regularities must be loose enough to allow for freedom as an act of consideration and selection of different possible outcomes of different choices. Finally, the free actor must be able to envision a goal and to act so as to realize that goal. The actor must not be simply driven by efficient causes of the past but be consciously lured by possibilities for future realization or attainment and be capable of actualizing one of those possibilities. We are reminded at this point of Justus Buchler’s allegation that while everything has relations to other things, it is not the case that everything is tied to everything else, and of William James’s notion of the world as a concatenated unity or universe-pluriverse with its exhibition of countless discontinuities and continuities, disconnections and connections. I made reference to Buchler and James in this regard in chapter 2. Their views carry the implication that not everything is causally connected with or rigorously constrained by everything else. And as we have already seen, causes condition their effects but do not completely determine them. Were there only one possible outcome, one predetermined consequence, no genuine choice could be made. Causal determinism and freedom as I have defined it are therefore not compatible but radically opposed to one another. If the first is the case, the second cannot exist. The novelty I discussed in the previous section has to be real, and it must be real in the sense of allowing for different outcomes from the same causal past, at least in those contexts that provide basis for freedom of choice and action. There may be some situations that allow, or seem to allow, for only one course of action, but if all situations were like that, there could be no such thing as freedom in the sense of that term I am defending. According to the causal determinist, all situations are like that, meaning that the possibility of free action goes by the board. I can offer, then, a somewhat different definition of freedom than the one offered earlier: “freedom is directed novelty, novelty brought under conscious guidance and control. It is action for the attainment of ends in contexts where different possible ends can be envisioned, selected from, and made actual.” There can also be deliberate choices not to act in given situations. These choices assume selection from the alternative possibilities of action and non-action. In either event, a choice is made. Even refraining from choosing in a

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situation can also be considered a kind of choice—the choice to suspend judgment and remain neutral in the face of alternative possibilities for action. Consciously chosen and goal-directed novelty can be distinguished from the kind of novelty discussed earlier, namely, the relative novelty that intrudes on the relative continuity of repetition but does not result from conscious choice. The latter can also be termed chance. Given this terminology, we can say that there is an element of chance in all cause-effect relations, that is, an element of in-principle unpredictability. This element of chance explains not only how new things can occur without conscious forethought or planning, but how all changes or new things other than repetitions can occur. And even a repetition is a new occurrence of something that has previously been the case. The element of chance may be ever so slight and may in such cases be commonly overlooked, or it may be large enough or noticeable enough to bring about perceptible changes in previous patterns. Moreover, a universe in which causal necessity does not reign, but where real chance is also present, is a universe in which free choices are possible. Such choices are not the same thing as chance, but the presence of chance allows for alternative possibilities of choice, that is, for a looseness or relative indeterminacy of present and future that permits choices among those alternatives to be made. The reality of chance (along with that of efficient causality) is therefore a precondition for the reality of freedom. Time is an actualization of potentialities, meaning that every present fact is a new fact, even if it is only the current replication of a past fact. Potentialities are situations or ranges of possible actualizations available for a specific actualization, and time is the resolution of these potentialities into specific actualities. The arrow of time is the path of resolution of potentialities into actualities. Time is irreversible because once a fact has emerged from an antecedent potentiality it cannot then be reduced to or be returned to the indeterminate status of that potentiality. The potentiality has become actuality; possibility has become fact. And this new fact is now part of the furniture of the universe, an emergent, nonreducible part of the history of the universe. What now is an indisputable fact is not the same as what might earlier, along with other possibilities, have been. Possibility should not be confused with actuality. The conversion from what was only possible to what now is factual constitutes the irreversible flow of time.4

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The quantum theory in physics can provide us with a model for understanding the nature of time and the possibility of free actions in time. As philosopher of science Michael Epperson points out, the Schrödinger wave theory in quantum physics is involves only “probability-valuated potential outcome states”; it does not by itself explain the emergence of discrete actualities. Antecedent facts are presupposed in these valuations because their probabilistic implications are being assessed by the valuations, and new facts can come into being within the ranges of the probability valuations. The presupposed facts and the outcome facts (the latter being the consequences of transformations of indeterminate “superpositions” into determinate facts) are not produced by the probability assessments of quantum theory. Time is not mere potentiality (or probability) but neither is it unreal; it is the conversion of real potentiality into a specific kind of actuality—of a previous factual situation, via the probabilities it poses for actualization, into a new one.5 In speaking of quantum theory as a model for understanding the nature of time, the role of chance, and the possibility of genuinely free actions in time I do not mean to say that quantum theory should be regarded as the ultimate proof or basis for acknowledging the reality of these three factors. I only note it as a suggestive example of how chance or indeterminacy figures necessarily into an adequate account of the nature of time and the possibility of free actions in time. Neither time nor freedom is possible, in my view, without recognition of chance or relative cosmic indeterminacy as a significant feature of reality. The role of chance in natural phenomena is a relative one, ranging from its generally having a small place in ordinary physical events at the macro-level to its having a larger place in sudden or unusual chance occurrences or in deliberate acts of human freedom. And we tend ordinarily not to be cognizant of the necessary place of novelty in all temporal processes. But even in the clash of billiard balls there is some latitude of probability in prior assessment of its outcome, and not an absolute precision and certainty of prediction. The relative roles of causality and chance exist on a shifting scale, depending on the phenomena in question. My thesis is that time and novelty are inseparable. The nonreversible precedence of indeterminate potentiality to determinate actuality is essential. And the forward direction of the flow of time is assured. What already has become is forever fixed and cannot be altered. But it can and does pose the possibility for new things to

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occur in the present and future. And genuinely new things do incessantly come into being. Most importantly for our purposes here, the indeterminate range of prior possibility implicit in quantum theory’s superpositions is a useful suggestion of the room required for the exercise of genuine freedom, for converting the span of “what may become” into the newness of “what now is.” The idea that all-encompassing, all-determining efficient causality, on the one hand, and genuine freedom, on the other, are somehow unquestionably compatible will simply not work. It might be objected at this point that I have not explained exactly how this purported freedom works. More particularly, I have not explicated how it relates to the materialistic or physicalistic metaphysics that I defend in the next chapter. How do the brain and other parts of the human nervous system produce a self that is capable of free and self-directed action, an action that involves consciously envisioning, deliberating about, and resolving into actual choices an initial putative indeterminacy of available in-context alternatives for choice? Part of my answer to this question is my argument in the next chapter that we need radically to reconceive and revise the concept of matter along lines that I indicate there. Such a reconception gets rid of the timeworn association of matter with causal determinism or the so-called causal closedness of the physical. It refuses to restrict descriptions of matter to those provided in the single scientific discipline of physics. My answer also takes firm issue with the old notion that matter and mind are opposed to or radically distinct from one another, thus failing to recognize the fact of radically new emergent properties of matter at different levels of organization and complexity. In its place, this reconception acknowledges that mind, including conscious mind, is a function of the nervous system in its relations with other parts of the human body and the world external to the body, a function made possible by that system in as yet unexplained ways. We are not our brains, and we do not consciously experience our brains. We consciously experience by means of our brains and other aspects of our complex bodily makeup in its interfaces with the world. These observations can serve to remind us that we do not fully understand how the function of consciousness is made possible by complex bodily structures. Nor, by implication, do we fully understand how the capability of consciously and freely choosing and

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acting is enabled by those structures. Consciousness and freedom are intimately related to one another, and our present failure adequately to explain the first should warn us against assuming that we are in a position adequately to explain the second. I do not presume sufficiently to explain either, but I do claim to describe them in a manner more in keeping with routine experiences of conscious acts of freedom than the manner alleged by various forms of eliminative materialism or advanced in the claim by many of today’s scientists and philosophers that causal determinism and human freedom are somehow completely compatible with one another. Many thinkers in the field of neuroscience or philosophy of mind who try to understand both consciousness and freedom seem to be caught between the Scylla of a mechanistic view of matter and the Charybdis of a Cartesian homunculus or some kind of disembodied spiritual substance. Not wanting to opt for the dualistic picture of the homunculus in its relation to the material body and wanting to be consistent materialists in their approach—to this extent I can commend them—they opt uncritically and often unconsciously for the idea that brain and nervous system are simply the workings of very complex machines. They do not bring sufficiently into account the critically important fact that highly ordered, emergent, farfrom-equilibrium dynamic systems can be capable of functions that do not and cannot be the operations of mere machines. Such systems are able to possess brand new traits and exhibit radically new capabilities, including those of life, consciousness, and freedom. The fact of these three capabilities in systems such as those constituting the bodies of human beings casts into severe doubt the adequacy of the machine mode of understanding, with its deterministic commitment, for describing human bodily processes and their enablements such as consciousness and conscious acts of freedom. A radically different conception of matter than that taken for granted by Isaac Newton and René Descartes in their times is required. Am I whipping a dead horse here? I do not think so. Let me cite the example of the eminent brain scientist Antonio Damasio. Damasio’s explorations into the structures, systems, and functionings of the human brain are widely acknowledged and respected. At one place in his book Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, he notes a number of analogies and one significant disanalogy between

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living organisms and engineered machines. After listing some of the analogies, he calls attention to the difference between the material components of living systems and those of engineered machines. The difference is that the former are “naturally equipped with global homeostatic rules and devices,” and what is true of them as organic wholes is also true of every one of their constituent cells. The structure of such an extremely complex and awesomely organized machine as a Boeing 777 airplane and of its constituent parts, he argues, is therefore fundamentally different from the structure of living bodies and their component cells.6 Yet—and here is the rub—Damasio continues to use the metaphor of the machine throughout his discussions of the human nervous system. A few examples from his book will suffice to make this point. On pages 50 and 51 he talks about the “complicated neural mechanics” whereby living systems maintain the value of their existence and survival. He then asks, “Where is the engine for the value system?” and begins to inquire into what he calls “important parts of the machinery of value.” On page 56 he speaks of “incentive mechanisms” that “are necessary to achieve successful guidance of behavior,” and on page 58 he asks, “What did all the machinery achieve?” (the emphases are mine; for further examples, see pp. 186, 187, 193, 195, 225, 251, 254, 265, 277, 298, 308). Is Damasio so enamored of the analogies of biological systems and machines as to forget the critical disanalogy (and there are others, as I indicate in note 6 of this chapter) to which he has called such forceful attention? I suggest that a root of this apparent inconsistency is unconscious resistance to the notion that there can be any element of objective chance or fundamental emergent differences in the notion of materiality or material functioning and that all reliable explanation must be efficient causal explanation where no element of novelty, to say nothing of genuine self-directed novelty or freedom, is allowed to intrude. In other words, I am suggesting that an older Newtonian and Cartesian notion of matter—and with it a commitment to mechanistic conceptions of its operations and capabilities—continues to bewitch and constrain the thinking of Damasio and a sizeable number of workers devoted to neuroscientific and philosophic investigations into the natures of mind, consciousness, and freedom. This is a striking example of how bad metaphysics can fatally infect good science and philosophy. I do not foolishly claim in this book to have finally arrived at the “right”

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metaphysics, but I do hope to contribute to clarifying and emphasizing the crying need for a more adequate metaphysical outlook than the mechanistic, deterministic, lifeless, and altogether too linear one that continues to dominate—consciously or unconsciously—much of today’s thought. Biological anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence W. Deacon argues in his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2012) that the ratio of stricter degrees of causal regularity and predictability, on the one hand, and a more open-ended capacity for chance, self-direction, self-awareness, and freedom, on the other, varies in direct relation to types and levels of organization. He contends, moreover, that there are no such things as inert substances or pure, unchanging simples. Every type of reality, from the simplest to the most complex, is both systemic and processive in its character. Emergence over time from lower forms of organization and process to higher or more complex ones is made possible in part by constraints imposed by the more complex levels on the lower ones. These constraints restrict some of the traits and functions of the lower levels in order to allow for actualization of new traits and functions at the higher levels. There is thus more variability, unpredictability, and chance in the behavior of an amoeba than there is in the character of a rock, more of these factors in a fox than in an amoeba, and so on, up to the extremely complex organization of human bodies with their nervous systems and brains. Traits of lower levels of organization are constrained, harnessed, or redirected in order that new types of organization and process can come into being. New kinds of top-down causality result and work interactively with bottom-up kinds. An increasing amount of teleological and consciously goal-directed behavior is made possible over the span of evolutionary time, therefore, by the emergence of highly organized forms of life and mind. The higher forms are dependent on the lower ones but not reducible to them or restricted to the more limited capacities the latter would have outside of the complex systems in which they are now embedded. I am convinced that Deacon is correct in making these observations.7 What would our lives as humans be like if there were no such thing as freedom in the senses I have defined? Let us try to imagine such a prospect. By doing so, we can cast further light on the extreme implausibility of causal determinism. This implausibility is

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undergirded further when we reflect on determinism’s rejection of genuine chance anywhere in the universe and when we reflect on the consequences of this rejection for scientific thought as it exists at present. In the remainder of this chapter, I first assess the implications of causal determinism and the alleged absence of freedom for everyday human experience. Having done so, I turn to scientific thought in order to point up implications of causal determinism and the consequent denial of chance in that domain. I contend that both of these topics, when properly analyzed and appraised, expose the bankruptcy of causal determinism and amount to a kind of reductio ad absurdum that follows from its advocacy. If this is so, we are entitled to affirm both the reality of freedom and that of chance, the second being, as I indicated earlier, a precondition for the first.

Freedom and Human Experience In my examination of the deterministic rejection of freedom in its relations to everyday human experience, I focus on the moral, epistemological, and existential dimensions of human experience. I begin with the moral dimension. If determinism is true, moral praise and blame are simply recognitions of inevitabilities. Saint Francis of Assisi was fated to be an Italian saint, and Benito Mussolini was fated to be an Italian tyrant. That is the end of the matter. Neither deserves praise or blame because neither is ultimately responsible for his choices or actions. Each is like a marionette controlled by the strings of causal necessity. The marionette may seem to be free and to move of its own accord, but this is a clever illusion created by the puppeteer. The puppeteer is the inexorable efficient causal forces of the universe, forces that conspire to produce whatever happens in the experiences and acts of human beings. Routine judgments in courtrooms become a farce when based on the mistaken claim that the humans in the dock could have done otherwise and that their failure to do so makes them guilty of actions they could have avoided performing. Guilt and innocence lose their meanings. Moral or immoral behavior is the outcome of causal determinants, not freedom of choice, and the punishment of criminals becomes a punishing of them for having the bad luck to have been born with a particular character, temperament, and disposition that

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were bound to produce particular actions in particular circumstances. The characters and actions of all human beings without exception are deemed to be the inevitable result of their genetic makeups and environmental conditionings. There is no third factor of freedom capable of alternative actions within those two contexts. And there is no such thing as character transcending actions. One is not truly free to act differently or to redirect one’s life. Causal circumstances might sometimes bring about such a result, but no one has real freedom to produce it. “What will be, will be”: this phrase is as true of human actions as of anything else in the universe, according to the doctrine of causal determinism. There is no point in regretting events of human history such as World Wars I and II with their tens of millions of deaths, atrocities, sorrows, sufferings, and losses because these events had to occur just as they did occur. Regret about one’s own past actions makes no sense either. And there is no real hope of bringing about outcomes of the future by conscientious moral consideration of and actions in light of different possibilities in the present, because there are no alternative possibilities for action in the present. The present is nothing more than a conjunction of inescapable causes. Individuals, groups, institutions, and nations act as they must. They are determined to do so by existing causal circumstances within and beyond themselves. I do not wish to be misunderstood in making these observations. The free actions in which I firmly believe and which can be convincingly argued for always take place within causal contexts, and they are profoundly influenced by those contexts. Factors such as the genetic makeup of an actor, his or her past environmental conditioning, and the distinctive circumstances of an action have to be taken carefully into account when seeking to give a full account of the action. And it is certainly true that some people find it easier to act morally in some situations and at particular points in their lives than others do. The causal conditions underlying actions need to be factored in. A large part of the meaning of compassion is taking all such factors into account. Possibly mitigating circumstances must not be overlooked in assessments of the morality of specific actions (or inactions) in circumstances calling for moral choices and actions. But if the element of freedom is dismissed from the reckoning of the moral quality of actions, what is left of that moral quality? In my view, it vanishes without a trace. Immanuel Kant was right to claim

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that moral experience and freedom go necessarily together.8 There can be no genuine responsibility for actions if an actor is not free to deliberate and choose among alternative courses of action. Marionettes cannot be said to have acted morally, no matter what the consequences of their alleged actions may turn out to be. A puppet show might conceivably have the consequence of altering the life of someone in the audience, or of causing that someone to act morally in some situation. But the marionette did not intend or choose this action. It did not have the ability to do so, nor did it have the ability to assess morally the available courses of action before it. If determinism is true, then all of us are marionettes, and the possibility of moral experience and moral action has to be dismissed out of hand. Causes pull the strings, and we react accordingly. In fact, all of our so-called actions are nothing more than reactions, automatic responses to cause-effect relations that hold us hopelessly in thrall. Similar incoherencies result from belief in causal determinism in the area of epistemology. The appeal to reason as something distinct from causes is an illusion. Supposed justification of a position is nothing other than being caused to take a position. Arguments become causes. In arguing my position as against yours, I am simply pitting my caused assertions against yours. My arguments may seem ever so sophisticated, but they are at bottom nothing more than expressions of what I am caused to say. And so long as the causes remain the same, my arguments will remain the same. I cannot know that I am justified in making my arguments and claims, nor can I know myself at some point to have been mistaken in making them. If my arguments seem to persuade you, it is only because new causes have been introduced into the panoply of causes that prevailed in your mind before, and these new causes have tipped the balance in their favor. There would seem to be no such thing as persuasion as we normally interpret its meaning. Neither of us has the ability to weigh in the balance the rational merits or demerits of particular claims. Our seeming freedom to do so is illusory. All arguments and counterarguments turn out to be instances of the argumentum ad baculum or “appeal to force” fallacy in logic. The “force” of contending arguments is literally that: one causal force arrayed against another. If I disagree with you, it is because causes force me to do so. Alleged reasons, if thought to be different from causes, have nothing to do with the matter.

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Ironically enough, arguments for or against causal determinism itself are then of this kind. Even if determinism is true, there would be no way for anyone to show it to be true in the sense of providing convincing reasons or justifications in its favor. If you believe it to be true and I do not, it is because we are caused to take our respective positions and to develop and defend them with what seem to be but cannot really be rational arguments. Neither of us can escape from the iron cage of causality. If this is our true situation, we cannot know with deliberated and justified confidence whether the thesis of determinism is true or false. I am causally determined to believe what I do when it comes to the issues of causality, novelty, chance, and freedom, and you are as well. We might as well stop arguing and go home. Each of us is hopelessly stuck with what he or she happens to believe. My writing this book would seem then to be an exercise in futility, as are all attempts at rational discourse, dialogue, and argumentation. I make these and other similar observations in order to peel away the wrappings of apparent rationality that cling to the doctrine of causal determinism. To strip them all the way down is like peeling an onion; nothing is finally left of rationality, at least in my judgment. Rationality collapses into causality, something very different. If rationality is real, freedom must be real and determinism false. If determinism is real, the situation seems to be hopeless as far as any attempt at reasoned justification of belief in it or anything else is concerned. Thus, not only is morality rendered incoherent by the doctrine of causal determinism; attempts to arrive at rationally adjudicated claims to knowledge—even those in defense of causal determinism itself—become incoherent as well. These two points lead necessarily to the final one that I make about determinism in its relations to everyday human experience. This last point is an existential one. It is the observation that if determinism is true, the human situation in all of its dimensions is reduced to seeming radical incoherence. It is surprising to me how some thinkers can be cavalier in their defenses of causal determinism, even to the point of insisting unhesitatingly that human beings are nothing more than complex machines. An example is the philosopher Daniel Dennett, widely known for his investigations and writings in the field of philosophy of mind. Dennett was quite content to announce in a recent interview that (quoting cartoon character and pop philosopher Dilbert) we humans are all “moist robots.” Dennett continued by exclaiming, “I’m a robot,

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and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions.” He then asked rhetorically, “Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?” At an earlier place in the interview, Dennett dismissed as sheer illusions all qualitative aspects of supposed subjective experience, implying that direct experiences of color, pain, and the like are nonexistent if we mean by them something that is inaccessible to external, objective, scientific, behavioral analysis. If there is no way such phenomena can be scientifically verified to exist, he argues, we can safely conclude that they do not exist.9 In his book Consciousness Explained, Dennett insists that supposed qualia are nothing more than dispositional responses to stimuli, whether these are in the brain, in other parts of the body, or in the world beyond the physical body. As such, they are electro-chemical reactions and responses in the brain, regarded as a complicated, computer-like machine, to stimuli of various sorts. Dennett dismisses out of hand Thomas Nagel’s contention in his article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” that it would be impossible for us humans to experience the world precisely as the bat does. Dennett responds that there is no such impossibility. The more we can learn about the physical makeup and behavior of the bat, the more fully we can comprehend scientifically what it is like to be a bat.10 Dennett dismisses the putative distinction between understanding the causal conditions or correlations in the brain and other parts of the bat’s body that underlie bat-like experiences and the environmental conditions with which it must contend as a particular form of life, on the one hand, with its firsthand having of those experiences, on the other. The latter is the focus of Nagel’s discussion. Dennett wants, if I understand his reasoning correctly, to reject as illusions or misconceptions the idea of having such experiences privately and at firsthand and to argue that, because they cannot be studied scientifically or behaviorally, it is pointless to insist on their reality. Nagel assumes the reality of this notion and bases his claim about our not knowing what it is like to be a bat on this assumed reality. Thus, for Dennett, our being robots is not at all troublesome, given that everything about us is at least in principle explicable by external analyses of our behavior, brain machinery, physiochemical reactions, and the like, and the same would be true of robots. Since we are nothing but causal machinery in the final analysis, the issue of freedom—regarded as a capability of consciously choosing and acting that is conditioned by

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but not wholly determined or explicable by causal factors—does not arise. If we are robots, if our supposed inner lives have no reality or real significance, and if an objective world of causal determinism and relentless mechanistic processes is all that is truly real, how can Dennett or others who think as he does claim that humans can have lives of genuine dignity, purpose, value, and meaning? How can we be said to be ultimately responsible for anything, including our claims to truth or falsity? How can we be calmly content to be mere machines? I do not see how any of these allegations about human life and experience could be true. Dennett’s notion that scientific explanations must lead to the conclusion that humans are robots or machines is also highly questionable. One does not have to dismiss the freedom or the intentional efficacy of inner lives of human beings in order to be scientific. In fact, it would be unscientific to do so, in my view. The sciences may currently have no convincing account of how physical processes can give rise to such things as consciousness and freedom. But this is a limitation in current science, not a virtue. And science can proceed very well without having to assume at the outset that everything in sight is causally determined and machine-like. There are cause-effect relations of many different kinds to be explored and explanations aplenty to be founded on them. This is so whether or not rigorous causal determinism is true. Causal determinism is an extreme position. Even one chance event or free choice in the universe would be sufficient to falsify it. Given this fact, how do we know that it is true everywhere and everywhen? And if it is true, as I argued earlier, we are in no position to show that it is true, because showing it to be true in a rational manner would require that we be free. The quest for causal explanations in science does not depend on the wholesale thesis of causal determinism. There can be causal explanations in abundance without the need to reduce the whole universe to a closed causal machine. A significant part of the story need not be the whole story. Causal explanations would require causal determinism only if we assume them to be the only kind of legitimate explanations and assume further that the principle of sufficient reason—in this case, causal explanation—that we talked about in chapter 1 holds true. Were that the case, the universe would be a closed causal system and the task of science would be to assume and seek to show the irrelevance of any other kind of putative

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explanation than the causal one. But could robots carry out this task? It is not at all clear that they could. They, too, would be in the grip of total causality with no freedom to inquire, argue, or convince, and other robots would be in no position to assess the truth or falsity of their claims. Psychologist Daniel M. Wegner writes a long, carefully argued book defending the thesis that, while we certainly feel ourselves to be free, we are in no way capable of being so. His book is appropriately titled The Illusion of Conscious Will.11 According to his argument, what we mistake as freedom is in reality the mechanistic, automatic functionings of our bodies, functionings over which our conscious minds have no ultimate authorship or control. His entire book is therefore, at least by his own reckoning, the output of a machine. His conscious mind in the meantime is a mere epiphenomenon, not a center of conscious direction and control. His book was written by a robot. And we who seek to respond to it, as I am doing now, are also robots. But robots do not write books. If one were to seem to do so, we would be correct in thinking that it has been consciously programmed to do so. Programmed by what or whom? By another robot? If so, we are bound eventually to find that the programming was done by a human being, capable as humans generally are of genuine intelligence, creativity, adjudication, thought, and freedom. Robots do not have such capacities. Yet people such as Wegner and Dennett insist on claiming that robots do—or, more accurately, give the appearance of doing so—and that we are all such robots. This claim defies belief. The very act of their writing such books and defending their theses at great length, and with multiple citations of evidence and detailed presentations of argument and counter-argument, shows their authors to be far more than robots or machines. Even more to the point, it shows these authors to be tacitly assuming what they have set out so boldly to disprove. Did they not assume it, the very notion of “disprove” would lose its meaning. New and more complex things such as life, consciousness, and freedom may emerge from a background of causal processes, and it should be the task of science, among other fields of thought, to analyze and seek to understand them. Scientists should above all be wary of the fallacy of confusing the bodily processes that produce the conscious functions, including the function of conscious freedom, with the functions themselves. The one can be examined from an objective

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empirical standpoint; the other is ineluctably subjective and subjectively directed. Subjectivity and, with it, subjective agency are parts of the reality of the world and neither should be made light of or read out of court. Here are important, inescapable kinds of data that need to be taken carefully and fully into account. How these crucial subjective functions are made possible by the bodily processes—or how they have come to emerge from them over evolutionary time—is far from being presently understood, as I noted earlier. They will be forever opaque to understanding if we insist on reducing reality to what can be comprehended by the selective and restricted competence of theoretical physics. Philosopher Nicholas Maxwell puts this point well when he writes, if there are aspects of reality . . . which can only be known about via the having of special sorts of experiences, and if, furthermore, no reference needs to be made to such aspects in order to complete the predictive program of theoretical physics, then even a complete theoretical physics would make no reference to such aspects of reality. There do indeed appear to be such aspects of reality! Colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile qualities, as we experience them, are all good candidates for such aspects, as well as our inner experiences, our feelings, desires, pains, and pleasures.12 Maxwell refers to such inner aspects as experiential realities, and argues that external scientific explanations must be complemented by internal or experiential ones if we are adequately to understand mental phenomena, including the experience of freedom of the will. The current scientific method of external observation and explanation is limited, therefore, despite its undeniable importance, and it should not be assumed to be competent by itself to provide sufficient explanation for or understanding of firsthand mental experiences. The latter should be regarded as having a critical importance and nonreducible explanatory role in their own right. Maxwell does not espouse metaphysical mind-body dualism, but he does endorse a complementary relationship of these two explanatory approaches to the functions of the nervous system and of an ongoing search for correlations between the externally observable and the inwardly experienced aspects of that system.13 I am convinced that he is right in

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taking this position, and that Dennett is wrong in thinking that scientific explanations alone can or will suffice to explain (or explain away) firsthanded experiences of mental phenomena. Let me use an analogy to make this point and perhaps to make it a bit clearer. When I was a young boy, I could not understand how it is possible for birds to fly, to say nothing of enormously heavy airplanes. I could not see the air and therefore assumed that it was insignificant and certainly incapable in itself of supporting anything heavy in midair. But when a hurricane struck our town in Northwest Florida, I became instantly aware of how powerful the air can be when churned into a ferocious wind. My not seeing the air when it was relatively quiet and undisturbed led me unthinkingly and naively to assume its unsuitability or irrelevance as a possible bearer of weight. But being jolted by air in the character of a raging hurricane, a quite different way of experiencing it, made me suddenly cognizant of the air’s power under certain conditions easily to lift heavy objects aloft. Birds and airplanes, by exerting their own force against the resistance of the air and by being suited aerodynamically to do so in appropriate ways, are thereby enabled to fly! They can ascend, descend, swoop, glide, and turn through the medium of air just as fish swim and swerve at varying depths and speeds through the medium of the sea. For a young boy, this was a marvelous new insight and discovery. In similar fashion, approaching mental phenomena solely from the perspective of externally accessible modes of experiencing and testing them might lead us to a conclusion about these phenomena akin to that arrived by Dennett. But when we approach them from within as well as from without, we are brought to a different conclusion. The two ways of experiencing are then seen as complementary and mutually important. The two perspectives are not opposed, nor can the one simply be ignored in favor of the other or reduced to the other. Just as still air and turbulent air are manifestations of the same air, so the physically and mentally experiencable—the external and the internal—are complementary aspects or functions of the living human body. Neither should be dismissed or ignored in our attempts at adequately taking into account, explaining, and understanding the powers and actualities of that body. These comments can serve as introductory to the next section, in which I say some things about the role of chance in scientific thinking. But before turning to that topic, I make one last comment about how the doctrine of causal determinism can make everything look

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opaque and incoherent that formerly seemed to make sense. According to this doctrine, nothing fresh, new, or genuinely novel can ever occur. All that occurs is timelessly fixed and foreordained, as I argued in chapter 3. By implication, this is as true of human attempts at creativity and innovation as of anything else. The Mona Lisa is always there complete and self-contained in what erroneously appears to us to be the causal past long “before” Leonardo da Vinci imagined it or committed it to canvas. The same is true of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, James Watt’s much improved and more efficient steam engine, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the Wright Brother’s airplane, Einstein’s Special and General Theories of Relativity, and any other notable human accomplishment we can think of. As I observed earlier, time stands still and a block universe (or universe of disconnected, unchanging blocks) results if neither metaphysical chance nor metaphysical freedom exists. The seeming incoherence of these and other observations in this section should encourage us to stand up and take notice, and embolden us to take issue with the doctrine of causal determinism. Let me now begin my discussion of the relations of the idea of chance to the enterprise of science as we witness it and understand it today. This investigation, too, calls into serious question the idea of causal determinism.

Chance and Science The reality of time and change depend critically on the reality of chance, as I have sought to show. I have defined chance as a kind of indeterminacy and novelty that occurs in all natural processes at least to some degree and that does not require human intentionality or control (even though, if freedom is also real, alternative possibilities provided by chance or indeterminacy can be brought under human intention, selection, and control). Without this element of chance, I have contended, there would be no movement, change, dynamism, or process anywhere in the world. There would then be no distinction between past, present, and future, and the world would be rendered tenseless and timeless. Moreover, if the natural sciences be defined as the study of physical processes and changes, including those of the micro-world as well as of the macro-world, the latter being inclusive

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of such things as life and mind as well as of lifeless matter, and there are in reality no processes and changes, the whole enterprise of natural science becomes moot. In addition, the whole idea of evolution has to be dropped out of the scientific picture. If there is no chance or indeterminacy, there can be no such thing as change. And if there is no change, there can be no evolution. Evolution, however, is a central idea in the current natural sciences. Cosmologists study the evolution of the cosmos; geologists study the evolutionary changes of earth; biologists study the evolution of life forms and adaptations to and effects on natural environments; neurobiologists study the evolution of nervous systems and brains; and so on. All of this becomes inexplicable if time and change, in their critical dependence on chance, are claimed to be unreal. Quite a different story can be told about ourselves and the universe in which we live if a significant role for chance or indeterminacy is not only allowed but insisted on in all of the natural sciences. The processes of the universe are not then strict causal necessities with a consequent collapse of time into an ultimately static “now,” but probabilistic events with varying but never entirely absent degrees of chance. And by chance I mean something different from ignorance of underlying causes or so-called hidden variables. I mean something that is objectively present in the universe at every moment in the manner I explained earlier, an element of in-principle indeterminacy, however slight, in everything that happens. Scientists of our day are beginning to take this idea seriously and to move away from the idea that the universe is a closed causal system in which objective chance has no role to play. Ilya Prigogine is one of the influential scientific leaders in developing this critical attitude toward the older idea of causal determinism. He does so by placing strong emphasis on the notion of far-from-equilibrium systems whose inherent fluctuations or instabilities have a decisive role. In such systems, bifurcations take place, and these require selections from among available alternatives. The more such selections that occur, the more complex the system becomes and the more probabilistic, rather than certain, the path of its development must be seen to be. Here is how Prigogine states the matter: [N]ear-equilibrium fluctuations are harmless, but far from equilibrium they play a central role. Not only do we need irreversibility, but we also have to abandon the

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deterministic description associated with dynamics. The system “chooses” one of the possible branches available when far from equilibrium. But nothing in the macroscopic equations justifies the preference for any one solution. This introduces an irreducible probabilistic element.14 This probabilistic element is none other than the role of objective chance in the selection of one path of bifurcation rather than another. The bifurcations are, Prigogine states, “the source of diversification and innovation” in the universe, and they allow for the evolution of self-organizing dissipative structures.15 He contends for “deterministic processes (between bifurcations) and probabilistic processes (in the choice of the branches).”16 I argue that repetition tends to dominate in the in-between periods, while greater novelty intrudes at the point of bifurcations. This novelty is augmented with further bifurcations, and so on. But nowhere in this process is there a total absence of probability and novelty. If there were such total absence, there would be no cause-effect relations at all, as I have sought to show. A dissipative structure is one that continuously incorporates energy from the environment at the expense of exporting entropy. It achieves subsistent internal order while contributing to general disorder and thus does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As philosopher Alicia Juarrero explains, a dissipative structure is a “local sink of macroscopic order” within an overall context of increasing disorder. Such structures can be selforganizing when, again in her words, “[t]he dynamical organization functions as an internal selection process established by the system itself, operating top-down to preserve and enhance itself.”17 In her book Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System Juarrero provides a thoughtful analysis of intentionality, making reference throughout to the ability of complex dynamic systems, acting as wholes, to act upon their parts so as to constrain, guide, and direct them in holistic, top-down fashion. This is a promising approach to explaining how freedom of action as I defined it earlier in this chapter is possible. Not only are such far-from-equilibrium dynamic systems pervasive in nature and account for its movement from comparatively simple structures to more complex ones such as we observe in forms of life and mind, it is likely the case that the present universe itself is

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the outcome of probability rather than necessity. The Big Bang resulted, in Prigogine’s account, from “an instability that is analogous to a phase transition or bifurcation.” “From the start,” he writes, the universe was “a thermodynamic system far from equilibrium, with instabilities and bifurcations.”18 This instability lay in the perturbations of the so-called quantum vacuum preceding the birth of the present universe to which I referred in chapter 1. Therefore, chance has a significant role to play at the very outset of the present universe as well as in its subsequent developments. Chance is far from being something like an occasional exception to otherwise rigid causal necessity or from being nothing more than human ignorance of underlying, all-controlling, time-eliminating causal continuities. Prigogine regards the laws of nature themselves as statistical probabilities or as expressive of selections from possibilities rather than as rigid certainties.19 This point reminds us of Lee Smolin’s contention, indicated in chapter 3, that the laws of nature are outcomes of evolutionary development and change rather than being eternally fixed frameworks and determinants either of this universe or of all possible universes. A probabilistic world such as the one portrayed by Prigogine provides ample opportunity for science to do its work of investigating and finding generally accurate and illuminating causal explanations for phenomena. It also helps to overcome the stark dualism of a quantum micro-world of uncertainties and indeterminacies, on the one hand, and a supposed macro-world of inexorable causal certainties and determinations, on the other. By allowing for the evolution of complex self-organizing systems, the key notion of a probabilistic world can contribute importantly to our comprehension of biological evolution and the development and expansion of its teleological functionings, and, ultimately, to understanding of our capacity as human beings for self-organization, self-direction, and goal-directed, purposive freedom. This last point is closely connected with the evolution of consciousness and thus with the topic that concerns us in the next chapter, namely, the natures and relations of matter, life, and mind. In this chapter I distinguished three senses in which efficient causes are necessary for the occurrence of their effects. One of these senses is that a pattern of repetition must persist through other sorts of change, a pattern that plays the role assigned by Aristotle to his conception of substance. The second is that the cause provides real

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possibilities as the necessary context or occasion for the emergence of the present moment, which is a selection from those possibilities. And the third is that causes are efficacious or provide impetus for producing their effects. But we also saw that the causal past cannot tell the whole story of cause-effect relations or be sufficient for producing new effects. The effects, being different from the causes, introduce something novel or new. Sufficiency is given to the cause-effect relation, therefore, only when the role of novelty is recognized. This novelty can vary greatly in degree, but it is always present to some extent, even in patterns of repetition. So continuity and novelty together provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for change of any sort and for the reality of time. With Bergson, I observed that time is not reducible to a static collection of stoppages or spatially arranged nows, as some physicists and others claim, but flows smoothly from the past, into the present, and on into the future. The role of ever emerging novelty in the flow of time insures that time is not reversible but is uni-directional. I then directed attention to the issue of freedom. I provided definitions of freedom and showed why, if genuine freedom is possible, it requires a stable world of predictable and realizable possibilities as well as a world that provides alternative possibilities for choice and allows for free selection from and actualization of one (or one set of) the possibilities present in every situation of choice. I then proceeded to show how bizarre human morality, epistemology, and existence would look if genuine freedom were denied. Radical incoherencies in the experiences and practices of everyday life give notice that something has gone badly wrong when efficient causes are regarded as both necessary and sufficient for their effects and the doctrine of causal determinism is affirmed. The arguments in this section of the chapter, if they hold, amount to a reductio ad absurdum resulting from the thesis of determinism when we consider its relations to the experiences and practices of everyday life. The deterministic thesis would also appear to undermine the routine practices of scientists themselves. In the last section of the chapter I noted the radical incoherencies produced in the overall outlook of the natural sciences and in their investigations and arguments when determinism is affirmed and showed how affirmation of the reality of chance as a fundamental feature of the universe can avoid such incoherencies. Prigogine’s concept of dissipative structures and self-organizing systems and his illustrations of how they are

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operative in many different aspects of the present universe as well as in its very origin and in the probabilistic developments of its natural laws, were brought into discussion in order to show how natural science can get along perfectly well without having to assume a causally closed universe or one in which time and change are alleged to be ultimately illusory. I showed, in fact, how science can get along much better. I am aware that the line of argument I have developed here goes against the grain of assumption and belief of many of today’s scientists. But I think it needs to be taken seriously by both scientists and philosophers, at least in its general tendency and character and in the face of the problems of seeming incoherence it brings into view. I invite such thinkers to consider the arguments I have presented and to think about how they would respond to these arguments and others similar to them. I assume that they wish as much as I do to avoid radical incoherencies in human thinking and acting. I also cannot help but assume their freedom of thought and action in seeking to do so, even when they assume causal determinism or present arguments intended to support its truth. Causal determinism may be true, and we may be duped into believing in chance and freedom and into having to act as if they had significant roles to play when they do not and cannot. But if so, we should be well aware of the troubling consequences that follow from its alleged truth. Frank willingness to acknowledge and affirm stark incoherencies in determinism—assuming for the moment that I am right in claiming there to be such—and to be entirely content with recognizing them, is probably rare. Even Albert Einstein, scientist par excellence who was famous for his outright denial of both chance and the reality of time, was not altogether satisfied to do so. According to philosopher Rudolf Carnap, Einstein once “explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur in physics.”20 Einstein was convinced throughout his life that physics as he conceived it tells the finally accurate, even if deeply disturbing, story of human life—the story of rigid causal necessity, the eclipse of freedom, and the ultimate unreality of time. What price do we pay when we sacrifice the “something special” of which Einstein speaks for the sake of a deterministic view of reality? Are we really willing or even able to do so? And does the

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extraordinary price actually need to be paid? Can we not—in our thinking about the world and ourselves as part of it—give chance a chance, and along with it, genuine, noncompatibilist freedom? I have raised these critical questions in this chapter. They can help to frame and prepare the way for the next chapter in which I discuss the intimate connections of matter, life, and mind.

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Chapter 5 Matter, Life, and Mind Biology is really not just physics. Nor are organisms nothing but physics. Organisms are parts of the furniture of the universe, with causal powers of their own, that change the actual physical evolution of the universe. Biology is emergent with respect to physics. Life, agency, value, meaning, and consciousness have all emerged in the evolution of the biosphere. . . . —Stuart A. Kauffman1

W

hat is matter, and why does it matter? If we assume, as I do, that everything that happens in the universe has a material or physical basis and gives expression to potentialities of matter at various stages of its development, it matters a great deal. I believe that there are plenty of cases of matter without mind, for example, but no such thing as mind without matter. In other words, there are no freefloating minds or spirits detached or detachable from bodies. However, such metaphysical materialism or physicalism makes sense only if we think historically or in evolutionary terms of how matter can proliferate in its forms of manifestation over time. As it does so, new possibilities and not just new actualities are brought into being— possibilities that were not there at earlier stages of development but that emerge over long periods of time. These new possibilities and the actualities they allow to occur are functions of different levels and kinds of organization of matter, including those that permit of the emergence of life and mind. These genuinely new types and patterns of being cannot be understood, as theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman rightly contends, just in terms

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of physics alone, because physics looks at matter from one limited perspective, while many other perspectives both within and beyond the natural sciences are required even to begin to do justice to the behaviors, actions, and capabilities of material beings in all of their incredibly diverse forms as these have developed over time. As biological evolution takes place, for example, new properties of matter loom into view, many of which could not have been imagined or predicted at the earliest stages of the process of evolution. In other words, genuinely new things occur. The primordial character of novelty, along with that of causal continuity, makes itself strikingly known. Matter is not left behind, but it is radically redirected and altered from its earlier modes of manifestation. An extremely complex and rich conception of matter is needed to take into account all of the things matter has historically shown itself to be capable of doing. This conception must encompass the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of the world as we experience and interpret it, from subatomic physics, to macrophysics, to complex chemical reactions and developments, to organisms and their ecosystems, to the presence of mind, to humans and their cultures and technologies, and to cosmology and cosmogenesis. It must include such things as anti-particles, forms of energy without mass, solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasma states, fractals, far-from-equilibrium dynamic systems, dark matter and dark energy, primitive living systems, sophisticated living systems, and consciously living systems, and it must seek somehow to provide a coherent account of how all of these things relate to one another. It matters a great deal, therefore, how we interpret the histories of material change and development. How does matter evolve into forms of life, for example, and how does it evolve further into consciousness and mind? In such questions, time plays a central and ineliminable role, as does matter itself. Matter does not have a fixed nature but a protean nature, the full range of which cannot be encompassed by physics alone. This is the central thesis of biologist Stuart Kauffman’s book Reinventing the Sacred, and it is one in which I strongly concur. He points out in this chapter’s epigraph that biology, for instance, “is emergent with respect to physics,” meaning that it is something radically different and new, something not reducible to physics. My way of putting the point is that we have tended in the past to operate with a much too limited view of matter

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and thus have been far more tempted than we should have been to a reduction of all material phenomena to descriptions of them in physics. We have wanted to reduce the complex to the supposedly simple, and we have had too simple a vision of the nature and capacities of material phenomena. We have confused this simple vision of matter with what matter “really” is in its own right, discarding from our vision all that matter has clearly shown itself capable to become—including us humans as well as all other embodied forms of life. In this chapter I first look briefly at the question of the nature of matter, then at how life can have evolved from matter and at why its evolution cannot be adequately explained in terms of the laws of physics alone. Finally, I discuss consciousness and mind as further stages in the evolution of life. In all these cases, I insist that matter is all that matter does and that its potentialities and properties should not be limited to or reduced to what they were at their earliest stages of historical development or to what lies in the competence of physics by itself adequately to describe and explain. The physicist’s account of matter is of incontestable importance, but I contend, in agreement with Kauffman, that it should not be viewed as all-important, allencompassing, or all-sufficient. The full extent of matter’s manifestations and developments on earth is too complex and wide-ranging to be neatly packaged into the methods and theories of any single discipline.

The Nature of Matter The nature of matter and the usage of the term matter are contested issues in current physics. I make no pretense of doing justice to the issues involved in that discipline in this brief section. But I suggest a broad vision of matter through its various stages of change and development here on earth that is to my mind a plausible way of conceiving metaphysically of its character and roles. For my purposes here, I define matter as what is made up of atoms and molecules and their subatomic constituents (e.g., quarks and leptons), viewed as systems of energy and in terms of their influences and effects in the world. Matter in this sense is present throughout the universe and takes innumerable distinctive forms. It is present at the subatomic and

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microscopic levels, in all things within the range of unaided human detection and experience, and in all astronomical phenomena. More generally, it is that of which all things are made. Matter in whatever forms it takes is in all cases, however, a dynamic system rather than an irreducible, inert substance. Whatever stability there is in such systems, large or small, it is stability of repetitive patterns rather than of stasis. In all parts of the universe and in the universe as a whole, there is no such thing, as we have seen, as absolute stillness or absence of change. This last point is given vivid expression by nuclear physicist John A. Jungerman when he observes that according to today’s physics, “so-called solid matter is just emptiness, except for a dance of virtual particles. The mass in matter occupies an extremely miniscule volume.” He continues in this vein, indicating that, apparently solid matter is really space filled with an unimaginable number of events—not only those from spontaneous particle pairs but also from the virtual photons, gluons, bosons, and gravitons that are the force carriers. . . . [T]he hydrogen atom is held together by a trillion virtual photon exchanges every second. To hold together the quarks that constitute that atom’s proton requires the exchange, the birthing and dying, of a trillion trillion gluons every second. Thus, the world at its most elementary level is really the realm of events, not substances.2 We should not restrict the concept of matter, therefore, to substantial entities or to some kind of static, tangible stuff. The latter, too, is matter, but it is far from being all that matter can rightly be understood to be. At bottom, matter is dynamic processes and intricately interactive systems of volatile events. Physicist and essayist Chet Raymo provides a stirring summation of the adventures of atomic matter in our universe over its vast reaches of space and time. At the time of my writing this book, there are 118 chemical elements, not just the 92 indicated by Raymo and 98 of these are found naturally on earth. But with this modification his general description still holds true. Give me the ninety-two elements and I’ll give you a universe. Ubiquitous hydrogen. Standoffish helium. Spooky

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boron. Promiscuous oxygen. Faithful iron. Mysterious phosphorus. Exotic xenon. Brash tin. Slippery mercury. Heavy-footed lead. Imagine, if you will, a chemical storeroom stocked with the ninety-two elements. Pop the corks, open the valves, tip over the boxes and canisters. Watch what happens. What a to-do! Energy released and absorbed. Atoms linking valancies to make molecules. Simple molecules reassembling their parts to make complex molecules. Sparks, flames, and flashes of light, a commotion of combination and alliance. These are elements with a rage to order. These are elements with a zest for life.3 I quote Raymo’s lyrical passage at length here because it runs the gamut from the distinct chemical elements, to their restless combinations and separations, to their diverse types of established order, and to the multifarious forms of emergent life to which they have given rise. Most of all, the passage captures the irrepressible creativity of the chemical elements and the energies they embody. In my view, there is no need for any additional kind of fundamental existent than matter as so defined, along with the restless energy to which it gives expression, to account for all the panoplied richness and wonder of the universe in which we live. In this view, mind or spirit are not separate existents but are among the functions or traits that matter, through its evolutionary transformations and resulting extremely complex forms, has acquired. And there is no need for some kind of disembodied spirit or God to have brought the present creative universe into being, to sustain it in its being, or to preside over its processes. Mine is a materialistic metaphysics and a naturalistic one— “naturalistic” meaning that there is nothing beyond, behind, or above materialistic or physical nature in all its guises. But nature is by no means devoid of moral, spiritual, or aesthetic values. In fact, it is replete with all three. The material, the conscious, the valuable, the meaningful, the spiritual, the purposive, and the free are compatible and closely linked notions, the first having given rise to the others and continuing to do so through the ages. All the functions of mind and spirit are made possible by their embodying matter. The systemic and dynamic characters of mind and spirit reflect the systemic and dynamic character of matter. It is systems all the

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way up and all the way down. Whatever exists is a complex that is part of an order and in relationships with complexes and orders of various types, as we saw in chapter 2 when describing the metaphysical outlook of Justus Buchler. In other words, nothing does or can stand alone. Nothing is “simply located,” to use Alfred North Whitehead’s felicitous phrase.4 Ours is a radically interdependent world of physical systems and of such systems within systems. Even the chemical elements or fundamental types of atom are intricate systems in interaction with numerous other systems in their natural environments. “Matter” can be taken to include the elemental forces in nature as well as those things which are affected by, implement, exhibit, or produce those forces. Dark energy, as the posited force accounting for the expansion of the present universe, would in this way be considered matter. Dark matter is matter that does not emit or reflect light but is still a form of matter. Dark energy is today supposed to constitute 68.3 percent of the energy in the universe, while dark matter comprises another 26.8 percent (leaving ordinary matter at less than 5 percent). Antimatter, which has the same mass as the constituents of ordinary matter but is the opposite of them in its charge and spin, is also to be considered a form of matter by this rendering, despite its name. The same is true of black holes. Bosons, as carriers or mediators of the four forces of electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force, and gravitational force, would also be included in the definition I am proposing, as would the Higgs Boson, the alleged source of mass for other particles. The same is true of fermions, of which all matter possessing mass is said to consist. Thus, I do not draw the distinction proposed by philosopher Lawrence Cahoone between the material and the physical.5 These two terms can be regarded as interchangeable and thus with the same basic meaning, as I am using them here. And it is matter (or the physical) that I am claiming to be that out which, or on the basis of which, all aspects of the universe are made. I am therefore a materialist, metaphysically speaking. Different aspects or levels of material phenomena ranging from the relatively simple to the more complex can be listed as follows: fields and forces created close to the time of the Big Bang; elemental particles or wavicles such as electrons, neutrons, and protons; light atomic elements such as hydrogen and helium, and the entities made

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up of them; heavy atomic elements such as carbon and iron created in massive stars or resulting from the explosions of supernovae; material entities comprised of both kinds of atoms and molecules; the rise of prokaryotic and eukaryotic life forms from complex molecules containing various combinations of atoms; multicellular life forms; diverse species of plant and animal life; species of animal life exhibiting sentience; and more complex species exhibiting higher degrees of consciousness and self-awareness, including the human species. All of these phenomena are material through and through, in my sense of that term. But the types of material and of materialistic systems of which they are composed vary widely and have come to do so by virtue of evolutionary emergences in which natural laws, causality, chance, and the passage of time have had critical roles to play. The result in complex organisms with nervous systems of different kinds and different degrees of sophistication is a capacity for varying amounts of consciousness and freedom—and in the case of human beings a striking amount of innovative, constructive, and imaginative ability that moves far beyond mere instinct even as it depends crucially on it in other ways. The high levels of organization in all living systems entitle them to the name organisms, and important aspects of their bodily systems are properly termed organs. As I have indicated earlier, everything that exists is a system of some sort functioning within and intimately related to other systems, but biological systems are especially noted for their complexity of organization and interrelatedness. What about space and time? Do I also regard them as material? I do, because both are relations of material entities or, more properly, material processes and systems, to one another. Remove all material processes and systems, and there would be no such thing as space. This point is reminiscent of my earlier argument against the idea of sheer nothingness. Similarly, if changing relations within or among material processes and systems were removed, there would be no such thing as time. Neither space nor time is absolute, in the Newtonian sense of that term.6 Both are relations of material systems, subsystems, and processes to one another, not independently existing entities, systems, or containers in their own right. Moreover, both space and time in the present universe are in my view entirely local, not global. That is, mass, length, and the rate of

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temporal change vary in the presence of different amounts of gravitational force or at different rates of acceleration, most notably to the extent that the latter approach the speed of light. There is no universal, substantive space, time, or spacetime. These are relational properties, not independent existences. Hence, there is no ultimate reference frame for the present universe as a whole, no absolute space, time, or spacetime. The issue of whether spacetime can be regarded as something substantive or independently existing is an open question in the physics of today. I propose that we take the relational view of it, in which case neither space nor time is something that exists independently of matter, physical processes, or mass-energy. Time is the variable rate of material change in different reference frames. Space as distance from or to, as shape or orientation, or as height, width, and depth, is the variable relation of material objects, processes, or events to one another in different reference frames. As reference frames change, so also do space and time or spacetime. No spooky, diaphanous, warpable, or allegedly substantive “fabric” of spacetime is required. What is a useful mathematical construct or metaphor should not be confused with something independently real. Space is contextually or relationally real, and the uni-directionality or nonreversibility of time and of cause-effect relations are similarly real, but their particular characters and measures are relative to particular reference frames.7 But are relations independent of things related, and if so, are relations themselves immaterial? They are not in concrete fact, because relations, whether internal or external, are constituted by the very mode of existence of material things as inherently systematic and thus irreducibly relational. There would be no things without relations, and there would be no relations without things. The two are inseparable from one another in reality, even if distinguishable in abstraction. Whitehead’s observation in this regard holds true: “just as the relations modify the natures of the relata, so the relata modify the nature of the relation. The relationship is not a universal. It is a concrete fact with the same concreteness as the relata.”8 To be is to be a system, and to be a system is to exhibit relatedness within and to effect and be affected by various kinds of relatedness without. Both relations and things related are material in their metaphysical status, character, and effects. No matter, no real relations, and no real relations, no matter. There are no bare metaphysical relations and no

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unrelated bits of matter. Everything that exists is either matter or a function of matter.

Matter and Life How does matter give rise to life? Before approaching this crucial and difficult question, I propose an answer to the question of what it means for something to be alive—or to put the question somewhat differently and in more explicit materialistic form, in what critical respects does living matter differ from nonliving matter? There are at least six basic respects in which this difference holds true. Unlike nonliving matter, living matter exhibits inwardness, self- subsistence, self-direction, two-sided environmental adaptiveness, reproductive capacity, and susceptibility to natural selection. I describe each of these notions in turn, showing them all to be critical for an understanding of the nature of life. Self-organization is a seventh trait shared by life forms and some nonliving things as well, so it is not exclusive to life, but it is nonetheless an important trait of life, and I say something about it before describing the other six traits. Self-organization can take place in nonliving phenomena such as snowflakes and other kinds of crystal formation, Bénard cells, and the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (B–Z) reaction, as well as in living systems.9 It is most notable in far-from-equilibrium, highly ordered dynamic systems such as those characteristic of all forms of life. Such systems can be seen as autocatalytic, that is, as systems where the earlier product of a process becomes a catalyst for, contributor to, and innovative element within a developing process10 and where a novel organized whole may emerge as a consequence of the roles of this and other products that have become catalysts—a whole that is not just the sum or aggregation of its parts but affects, as a highly organized whole, the behavior of its subordinate parts. A pile of sand or bag of marbles is not such a whole; a biological cell is. Kauffman asserts that a living cell is a “collectively autocatalytic set of thousands of molecular species. No molecule in it catalyzes its own formation. The cell as a whole collectively catalyzes its reproduction.”11 A functioning organism made up of such cells and their interrelations is such a selforganizing whole as well. Self-organization, then, is a basic trait of life. Inwardness is one of the most conspicuous and impressive traits of living matter, distinguishing it fundamentally from the mere

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outwardness or externality of nonliving material types of existence. Biological organisms of all types have what philosopher Evan Thompson calls an internal cognitive or sense-making capacity, that is, the ability to register, acknowledge, or experience from within themselves aspects of their environments critical to their survival and to make appropriate responses to these aspects.12 Unlike billiard balls, they are not simply acted on from without but, as self-organized systems, are able to act from within. The permeable membranes of their cellular structures allow not only for inputs but also for outputs of influence. In making use of resources provided to them by their environments through their internal metabolic processes, organisms are able to maintain themselves in existence. They are thus not only selfordering but self-subsisting, capable of keeping themselves in farfrom-equilibrium, highly ordered conditions over periods of time. The result is islands, so to speak, of vibrant, far-from-equilibrium order in a surrounding sea of the present vast universe as a whole that is claimed to tend toward maximum equilibrium or thermodynamic disorder (that is, toward an ongoing depletion of usable, work-producing energy). Living systems export disorder in order to maintain themselves as orderly beings. They buy internal negentropy at the price of and by means of external and extruded entropy, thus functioning as dissipative systems.13 Living beings are also self-directing, meaning that they act in such a manner as to determine and fulfill, within the bounds of available possibilities, their own distinctive kind of life. Each of them has a kind of inner-directed telos or career of growth and development that is characteristic of their particular species of living beings. But more than that, they also exhibit in varying degrees a capacity for choice among alternatives. The choices may be more guided by instinct rather than reason in the cases of most types of organisms, but they are directed by the organisms themselves and are not simply the inevitable outcomes of external causal factors. The choices operate within the context of causes, to be sure, but they are not wholly determined by mechanically acting causes. There is discernible latitude of behavior here similar to the unpredictability of bifurcations in all far-fromequilibrium systems, including living ones. The higher the degree of complexity in such systems—and especially in their neuronal components—the higher their capacity for self-direction and freedom of choice. Some degree of self-direction

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goes necessarily with the presence of life, meaning that organisms are not machines. Some of their processes are invariable to a high degree; others are not. As Kauffman points out, even a bacterium swimming up a gradient in order “to get” sugar can be meaningfully described in teleological language. Its behavior is different from that of a ball rolling downhill. We would not say of the latter that it is rolling in order “to get” downhill.14 Self-direction is a key to the distinction between life and nonlife. Self-organization, inwardness, self-subsistence, and self-direction combine to give an organism the capacity for two-sided environmental adaptiveness. It can register and be affected by features of its environment, but it can also exert significant responsive influences from within itself to those environmental influences. Its internal responses can even have the effect, in many cases, of transforming and adapting features of the environment in ways that assist its own life processes. The roots of growing trees on rocky hillsides, for example, can transform the rock into soil conducive to the trees’ own nurture and survival. Environments and organisms within those environments can develop and change together. The direction of influence is not oneway, as it is in cases of nonliving entities in their environments. A swiftly flowing stream may have to flow around a rock in its path and be altered and affected in that way, but the rock does not exert selfdirected influence on the stream. The rock’s influence is mechanical, not teleological.15 With biological phenomena, a new kind of explanatory factor responsible for change is introduced, a teleological kind not entirely explicable in the language of physics.16 Living matter also has a capacity for reproduction. It can make versions of itself that will exist in the future after its earlier versions have died. This feat can be achieved asexually or sexually, depending on the species of life under consideration, and it ensures the preservation and continuation of the species over multiple lifetimes. Finally, living matter is susceptible to natural selection, a process where organisms interact with their environments in such a manner as to bring about new biological species. This evolution of species can be the result of mutations, for example, whereby variant traits are introduced into some organisms and their progeny. The organisms with variant traits may, due to changing environmental conditions, survive and reproduce more offspring than those with other traits. Over time, the result of genetic changes and changes in the population of a type of organism can be the arrival of a new species of life.

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The seven defining characteristics of living matter we have considered assume the existence of life, but scientific evidence indicates that life has not always existed on the face of the earth. How did it arise in the first place? How can the existence of life itself be accounted for? There is no consensus among theoretical biologists today on how to answer this question. One possible answer is the notion that RNA molecules were somehow formed that contained genetic information and were capable of acting as catalysts, and that these RNA molecules were the precursors for DNA molecules. These two types of molecule in combination are then said to have allowed for reproduction and development of forms of life—most crucially, its cellular character with enclosing but permeable membranes. Another tentative answer is that the genetic molecules of RNA and DNA were preceded by the emergence of simpler autocatalytic molecules or sets of such that produced them. Still another possibility is that a combination of these two developments gave rise to life. Life is said by various scientists to have begun in hydrothermal vents in the sea, in cracks or cavities deep within the earth, in bubbles of ocean foam, in mineral crystals in clay, as the result of flashes of lightening, or even in outer space, whence it came to earth in the form of organisms such as bacteria residing in meteorites or in the form of building blocks of life present in cosmic dust. For my purposes here, I make no attempt to evaluate these or other hypotheses about the origin of life on earth proposed by scientists. I emphasize that all these hypotheses presuppose that life arose from matter as I have described it, and not out of, or by the agency of, some alleged nonmaterial substance, process, being, or power. Somehow, in ways at present not fully understood, the powers resident in matter itself at complex levels of intramolecular and intermolecular organization, have given rise to primitive forms of life and thence to ever more complex forms of life. With each new level of complexity, new possibilities are presented for even higher levels of emergent life, and certain of these possibilities are made actual by such things as mutations within the population of an organism, natural selection operating on the mutations, genetic drift, or migrations.17 What would happen if we could go back in time and start the process of biological evolution on earth a second time? Would everything turn out the same way? According to the doctrine of causal determinism, the answer would have to be yes. Kauffman gives a negative answer to the question, however, and his answer is more

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persuasive. In defending his negative answer, he cites, among other things, the example of the swim bladders in fish that enable them to adjust their buoyancy in the water. These bladders originally, according to paleontologists, grew as outpouchings of the gut and served as lungs in oxygen-poor waters. By swallowing the water, the fish were able to absorb air bubbles in the bladders—then serving as primitive lungs—making them better able to survive. But once the swim bladder had arrived to serve this function, its use for the new function of giving fish the capability of adjustable buoyancy in water was made possible. Kauffman notes that this new function also made possible the evolution of new species of fish and the coevolution of other species with the new ones. These evolutions, in their turn, had effects on the further evolution of the biosphere. Darwin referred to emergent features that turn out to have useful functions different from their original ones as “preadaptations.” Such preadaptations or novel functionalities, as Kauffman terms them, could not have been specified in advance, because in order to specify them we would “have to prestate all possible selective environments. Yet we have not the faintest idea of what all possible selective environments might be. More formally, we have no way to list all possible selective environments with respect to all causal features of organisms. How could we even get started on creating such a list?”18 The point is not only that such preadaptations could not have been predicted in advance, but also that they could well have been different. Each preadaptation has a ripple effect, meaning that with different ones different effects would have followed for other organisms, for the possible emergences of new organisms, and for whole natural environments. Evolution and unpredictable novelties go naturally together, in other words. This scenario of in-principle unpredictability and emergent novelty is qualified somewhat by the phenomenon of convergent evolution. This concept calls attention to the fact that similar kinds of evolution have occurred at different places and times throughout evolutionary history. The implication of this fact is that separate pathways of evolution have been laid down with similar outcomes even though the pathways have no connections with one another. That is to say, they have evolved independently. Richard Dawkins directs attention to such phenomena in his book The Ancestor’s Tale. Bats, whales, dolphins, oilbirds, and cave swiftlets have independently developed the technique of echolocation, for example. Separate

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evolutions of various kinds of eyes, of venomous stings, of electric fields for navigation, of jet propulsion, and of flapping flight are other examples cited by Dawkins. Since some version of the eye has been estimated to have evolved separately 40 to 60 times, says Dawkins, “[i]t seems that life, at least as we know it on this planet, is almost innocently eager to evolve eyes.”19 So perhaps it would have been possible to predict some general lines of evolution, given the obvious usability of such adaptations, but not all of its fine details. General principles could thus have been laid down, but not all of the different outcomes of these principles. Some things remain basically the same, while other things change within their existing contexts, parameters, or constraints. Continuity and novelty are thus shown, in a different fashion, to work in concert, as I noted while discussing causality, novelty, and freedom in the previous chapter. I should also observe, as Dawkins does, that some evolutionary adaptations, such as those of the bombardier beetle, the archer fish, and the bolas spider (each of which he mentions) have occurred, so far as we can tell, only once, meaning that they would have been notably unpredictable in advance of their emergence.20 Life, then, is an emergent, extremely diverse, and wholly materialistic phenomenon. And it involves complex interweavings of causal continuity and innovative novelty as these transpire over time. We humans would not be here to contemplate the relations of matter and life had not a long path of previous evolutionary changes, including copious extinctions of previous life forms, lain behind us. There is no impassible gulf between matter and life any more than there is such a gulf between matter and mind. Huge differences have emerged over eons of time involving incremental critical steps along the way. New possibilities, and with them new actualities, have come into being. But all are outcomes and manifestations of powers latent within matter and emergent from matter at its various stages of evolutionary development. In my view, all of nature, including us humans, is made up of matter and expresses the emergent potentialities of matter. Material nature is all that there is, but it is not less sacred or wonderful because of this fact. Materiality in all of its aspects is something to be honored and celebrated rather than belittled or deplored. There are perils, pains, and losses to which embodied living beings are susceptible, and all flesh, like the grass of the field, is temporary and perishable, as

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the words of the prophet Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible rightly point out.21 But there are also incredibly diverse and marvelous ways in which embodied beings, with their emergent powers, have managed to survive, flourish, and propagate their species in their respective ecological settings. These emergent physical powers include, as I now proceed to emphasize, the remarkable powers of mind.

Matter and Mind The thesis I endorse in this section is that mind is a function of matter, not something separate from or independent of matter. The thesis is widely held, even though it is disputed in some quarters. However, scientists, philosophers, and others are nowhere near understanding or being able to explain in satisfactory detail how matter is capable of producing mind or how mind is capable of influencing and acting on matter. Thus, neither the full story of the upward causation of mind by the material body in its interactions with the extra-mental world, nor of the mind’s downward effects on other functions and aspects of the living body and, through them, the surrounding world, is well understood. One way of approaching this problem is to argue that some kind of teleology is built into our universe at the outset. We saw in chapter 2 that the philosopher Thomas Nagel insists that we cannot make sense of life and mind without assuming that there are teleological principles or laws driving the universe from its start toward levels of being that exhibit varying versions of “for the sake of which” (final causal) behavior, in contrast with “by means of which” (efficient causal) behavior.22 I take issue with his view by arguing that teleology is not a primordial feature of the universe but an emergent one. As such, it is a function of complexity of material organization and becomes both possible and actual only when sufficient complexity has been realized through long-term evolutionary changes. But genuine teleology does eventually become actual, and I agree with Nagel that its present reality needs to be given prominent attention. I also agree with him that teleology cannot be simply reduced to efficient causality or to linear causal developments. Nonlinear dynamics and the development of far-from-equilibrium dissipative systems must be taken fundamentally into account. And the basic

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role of novelty as chance, especially notable in the unpredictable bifurcations and phase transitions basic to the emergence of the earliest living systems, must be given its due. Among the new and irreducible things that emerge is teleology or goal-directed behavior. Another philosopher who argues, like Nagel, that teleology is present in our universe from the outset is Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead contends that there is both a teleological (he terms it mental) and a physical (efficient causal) pole in every concrescing “actual entity,” and that such entities comprise the basic realities out of which everything else is made or comes into being. Every actual entity is thus “dipolar.”23 Without such primordial teleology, he claims, nothing could exist, and with it we have a way of explaining why teleological phenomena such as life and mind exist in the universe. I argue for the primordial character of novelty, as indicated in the previous chapter, but novelty and teleology are not the same. A novel event need not be goal-oriented or goal-directed. I have argued that causality, change, and time are incomprehensible if we fail to recognize that causal continuity and novelty are correlative principles, each requiring or being dependent on the other. But this position is not the same thing as giving a primordial place to teleology in the way that Nagel and Whitehead do. Matter has the capability over time and with sufficiently complex types and levels of organization to give rise to teleology, but both the possibility and the actuality of teleology are, in my view, emergent phenomena, not ones that must be presupposed at the earliest stages of the universe’s development. With reference to Whitehead, in particular, I believe the basic role he assigns to his “category of the ultimate,” namely, “creativity,” and which he also refers to as “the principle of novelty,” is sufficient, along with causal continuity,24 to allow for the emergence of teleology at later stages in the evolution of our universe. But we should remember that the “creativity” of cosmic and biological evolution has required much destructiveness of existing nonliving systems and the extinctions of huge numbers of biological species in the past. Creation and destruction have gone hand-inhand throughout both kinds of evolution. I argue that it is in the nature of matter as a dynamic and fecund principle and of the material universe as a whole that all this be so. In thinking of materialistic nature, we must think not only of its present relatively settled state (natura naturata) but of the volatile processes (natura naturans) that produced it and continue to underlie and alter

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it. These processes may also eventually undermine the entire present state of nature, replacing this universe with another one subsequent to it. From the standpoint of metaphysical naturalism, no guiding hand of God is needed to initiate or direct these ongoing processes. With these ideas in mind, the basic role I give to matter in all of its forms can be upheld. Teleology is derivative, through evolutionary emergence, from highly organized forms of matter. It is not something that has informed the universe’s development through all time, as Nagel contends, nor is it resident in a reality metaphysically more basic than matter such as Whitehead’s dipolar actual entity. What is mind? I can define it partly as an inwardly felt perspective on, and inward sense of relation to, the outward world. It is also the capacity of a physical organism to affect from within or from its own felt standpoint, through directed functions of its body, events in the outward world, and to respond to such events through the medium of its bodily system. With this definition, even an amoeba reacting to a prod under a microscope has rudimentary inwardness and responsiveness that can flower into greater mental consciousness and capacity with the emergence of organisms that have evolved increasingly sophisticated neuronal systems. The sentient abilities of organisms, that is, their ways of detecting and responding to the outer world, probably began with the proximal senses of touch and taste and developed later into the more remote senses of smell, hearing, and sight. With the development of these five senses, acuteness and scope of awareness increased, and with that, the ability to exert influences on the world in a more deliberate, self-directed, resilient fashion. Some species of organism developed as their most keen and reliable sense smell, others, hearing (as in echolocation), others taste, and still others sight. Versions of the sense of touch, we can surmise, have remained basic to all species. Some species also developed sensitivity to the magnetic field of the earth, a sensitivity that enables them to migrate to their breeding grounds or orient themselves in other ways suitable to their and their species’ survival. Passive or active electrolocation, electroreception, or electrocommunication are means by which some species of animals and insects can detect the presence of food or prey, avoid predators, or find sexual partners. All biological species have at least a rudimentary semiotic sensitivity, that is, the ability to interpret one thing as a sign of something else. A smell, for instance, can be the sign of nearby food, and a

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sudden movement can be a sign of possible danger. Prairie dogs and other biological species exhibit semiotic ability with their voiced warnings of nearby predators, the signs to beware and take cover. Honey bees display it in the dance that alerts other bees to the distance and direction of flowering plants. Humans have developed semiotic ability to an extraordinary degree. Their creation of elaborate and widely varying semiotic schemes of language and culture has greatly enhanced such things as their adaptations to their natural environments, the subtlety and depth of their conscious awareness, their ability to imagine and construct in mental and extra-mental domains, their recollection of past accomplishments and ability to build on these and to learn from their past mistakes, and their range of envisioned possibilities for future choices, actions, and achievements. Also enhanced has been the ability of humans to bring woeful evil and destructiveness into the world—the other side of the coin of the technological acumen and other creative abilities made possible in large measure by their semiotic capabilities, systems, and accomplishments. Memory, anticipation, projection, planning, resourcefulness, and sensitivity to alternative courses of action have grown apace with developments such as the ones I have mentioned, as has intense awareness of requirements and constraints of the surrounding environment and of the possibilities it provides for flourishing and survival. Experiences of pain and pleasure have played a major role in this regard, as have those of alertness and fear. In all such cases of emergence and development, we witness the growth of greater degrees of felt inwardness, awareness, and mental capacity. Such growth has obvious important survival value for increasingly complex types of life, affording them flexibility and resourcefulness in responding to the prospects and demands of their environments. This survival value has evident explanatory force when we reflect on the question of why organisms with increasingly complex and highly developed mental abilities have been naturally selected and evolved. Mental traits and capabilities are significant modes of adaptation to an organism’s environment. But I especially emphasize here the strong likelihood that some amount of consciousness and mind, as I have defined them, reaches across the range of diverse types of biological species on earth and extends in some manner and degree even to relatively simple types of organism. Mind or some sort of mental capacity and awareness is by

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no means confined to the human species. The susceptibility of most living beings to pain when injured, or even, in the cases of some of them, to behaviorally evident frustration, disaffection, lassitude, or grief as responses to gross interference with or interruption of their normal ways of life, should be a fundamental moral consideration in the treatment of these beings by humans. Their conspicuous satisfaction and contentment when things are going normally and well should also be given full recognition and respect. Animate beings of all sorts are entitled to their natural forms of life and being, and to the modes of positive feeling and awareness appropriate to those forms. I discussed and defended these profoundly important moral and—as I also insisted—religious considerations throughout an earlier work.25 In this chapter I offered a highly general and incomplete characterization of matter, stressing its dynamism, its systemic nature, the range of phenomena it encompasses, and its fundamental metaphysical status. I also called for continuing efforts to do justice to the nature of matter by exploring its multiple forms and manifestations, including those that lie beyond the competence of physics alone for their adequate explication. Since matter is all that matter does, we need to strive for conceptions of matter adequate to the many different things it has shown itself to do and to become. This task is far from being finished and requires the methods and resources of many different fields of thought. I then proceeded to discuss the emergence of life from matter, stressing the roles of autocatalytic molecules and sets of molecules, RNA and DNA molecules, far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures with their bifurcations and phase transitions, unicellular and multicellular forms of life, the mutations, genetic drifts, migratory changes, and the unique as well as convergent evolutionary outcomes of such processes. In all of these developments, I have noted, chance has played an important part, meaning that any attempted explanation of them can be only probabilistic at best and never reduced to the exactitude and certainty of linear cause-effect relations. Even in the latter, as I explained in the previous chapter, the element of chance or indeterminacy cannot be completely discounted. When we seek explanations for the emergence of living matter from nonliving matter, we must be careful not to assume that all explanation must be efficient causal explanation. Teleological explanation also comes to play a prominent role with the evolution of living beings, and the role of chance must always be given its due.

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Furthermore, the universe must be seen, not as a static, completely settled system, but as an intensely active one in which the highly charged, energetic character of matter and of the material universe as a whole cry out for recognition. Matter does not just sit placidly doing nothing new. It is forever active and innovative—restlessly productive of new avenues of becoming and resulting new types of being. In the process, matter is also destructive of aspects of the old in order to make room for the new. Rather than being viewed as a closed causal system, the universe needs to be recognized as at least a partially open system. In such an open system, the emergence of life is not an anomaly or extreme rarity but a distinct possibility if not routine probability. After analyzing the nature of life in terms of seven distinctive features and discussing some aspects of the rise of living matter from nonliving matter, I turned to a discussion of the emergence of mind as an accompaniment to the emergence of life. I stressed, with Thompson, the inwardness of life (one of the seven features) in its relation to the inwardness of mind. I emphasized the survival value of mental traits and capacities and the extent to which this fact helps to explain their emergence. I showed how sensation figures prominently in the description of mentality, and I stressed the place of semiotics in the development of mental capability. I took note of how minds can have significant effects on the nonmental world via the mediation of various other aspects of their bodily systems, just as the nonmental world can have effects, via those systems, on minds. We sometimes marvel at the ability of minds to influence bodies, but we should more properly think of some aspects of those bodies influencing other aspects of them. The mind is not something different from or separate from the body but a function of the body, and as such it is itself material or physical in its functionings. If this last statement sounds strange and unconvincing to our ears, it is because, I submit, we tend to assume a conception of matter that is markedly inadequate to encompass and to include all that matter is capable of doing and being. Have I sought to provide a definitive answer to the question of how matter gives rise to life, and of how life gives rise to mind? Have I explained how the brain and other parts of the body can enable or produce qualitative experiences of the five senses or experiences of pleasure and pain, hope and disappointment, joy and sorrow? Have I given a finally adequate explanation of how the brain working

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through other aspects of the physical body can initiate or affect in a teleological manner events in the extra-mental world? Have I shown how the brain and its bodily setting can inspire inquiries into metaphysical truths such as the inquiries of this book or respond to the world with fervent experiences of the sacred and sublime? I certainly have not tried to do so. I have only provided hints and suggestions in those directions. To my knowledge, no one has succeeded in giving definitive, finally satisfying answers to such questions. Those who may have claimed to do so have not won the consensus of others competent to deal with these problems, and they have tended to ignore crucial loose ends left dangling by their conjectures and theories. Daniel Dennett’s blithe allegation that all of us humans are robots is a case in point, one that I made mention of and argued against in chapter 4. The questions I have raised in this paragraph and numerous other related ones remain an open field for ongoing query, theorizing, and research. Part of what remains open and unsettled is the kinds of assumption we bring to the task of such inquiry. It is essential that we bring these assumptions to light and expose them to persistent critical examination. One such assumption relates to the concept and competencies of matter. Another relates to the nature of causality and the possibility of nonreducible chance and teleology. A similar type of assumption bears on whether the universe is or is not a closed causal system. Still another assumption relates to the reality of qualia or qualitative aspects of experience and to whether such experience can have consciously intended, goal-directed effects on the body and, through the body, on the world. Implicit in this kind of assumption is whether acts of genuine freedom are possible. Then there are assumptions about the nature and scope of scientific explanation. Finally, there are assumptions bearing on the issue of the competence of physics by itself to provide an adequate and comprehensive conception of the nature and capacities of matter and material phenomena. Metaphysics can help to call attention to various underlying assumptions in these and other domains and encourage us to subject them to critical comparison and analysis. In doing so, it refuses to allow them simply to be unrecognized or taken for granted. I have sought to undertake a small part of this large and important metaphysical task in this chapter.26

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Chapter 6 Good and Evil Non-philosophical people do not think that they invent good. They may invent their own activities, but good is somewhere else, as an independent judge of these. Good is also something clearly seen and indubitably discovered in our ordinary unmysterious experience of transcendence, the progressive illuminating and inspiring discovery of other, the positive experience of truth, which comes to us all the time in a weak form and comes to most of us in a strong form (in art or love or work or looking at nature) and which remains with us as a standard or vision, an orientation, a proof of what is possible and a vista of what might be. —Iris Murdoch1

T

he metaphysical status along with the existential importances and meanings of good and evil are the central concerns of this chapter. Any purported metaphysics that sought to investigate only the factual aspects of the world and ignored its valuative dimensions would be shockingly inadequate and incomplete. As novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch points out, we ordinarily experience good and evil, not as something made up or invented, but as part of the fabric of our lives and of the universe in which we live. These values are experienced as integral ingredients of the world, not as something arbitrarily imposed on it by human ingenuity and imagination. Experience of them awakens feelings and impulses of duty and responsibility, of the profound importance of fealty to the good and avoidance of the evil. These feelings serve or, so we instinctively intuit and believe, ought to serve as guideposts and standards for the whole of our lives. 109

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Continuing in the vein of Murdoch’s observations, we discover the bearing of transcendent standards of good and evil in every aspect of life—in such things as gripping manifestations of their opposing powers in works of art; demands, conflicts, fulfillments, and prospects of everyday work; grateful but also sobering awareness of the profound influences and binding claims on us of others; exaltations, challenges, and responsibilities of love; searches for the good of truth and attempted avoidances of the errors of misconception and falsehood; and encounters with the wonders of nature and musings on our proper place as humans in the presence of these wonders. The lure of moral goodness and the seductions, menaces, and misdirections of moral evil are like twin buoys in the midst of a storm, the one pointing the way to the safety of a sheltering port for ourselves and those dependent on us, the other warning of imminent danger and destruction. The buoys and the directions they indicate are incumbent on us whether we acknowledge them or not—or so, as Murdoch indicates, we are intensely inclined to believe. They are experienced as an intimate part of the reality of the human condition and its situation in the world. A metaphysics that downplays, dismisses, or makes arbitrary or purely subjective critical distinctions between good and evil ways of thinking, acting, and aspiring is by that fact alone shown to be deeply flawed. Metaphysics should make apparent the fact that the ideal of goodness is not only inescapably real but endlessly luring and never fully realized no matter how relentless the efforts of any individual or group to attain it may be. The good transcends all our past, present, or future accomplishments. And as Murdoch insightfully observes, “We must keep constantly in view the distance between good and evil, and the potential extremity of evil. We are ineluctably imperfect; goodness is not a continuously active organic part of our purposes and wishes. However good a life is, it includes moral failure.”2 It is also the case that every human life is in peril of disastrous moral failure, given the unpredictability of future situations, the stringent and perhaps seemingly impossible moral demands they might impose, and the extreme subtlety of some temptations to evil doing. Moreover, there is always much more of the quality of goodness that could be incorporated into one’s life, no matter how much goodness it may presently contain. Only approximations to the good are

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achievable by us finite beings. Goodness is something to be yearned for, striven for, and hoped for, but never to be completely attained. This ineluctable truth is not an excuse for complacency. It is a warning against too restricted a conception of goodness, failure to accord it the prominent, independent, inexhaustible status to which it is entitled as a metaphysical conception. The truth of the forever elusive and demanding character of goodness can also serve as a warning not to underestimate the seductions and traps of individual and collective evil, the ways in which what might at first be—or appear to be—only slight deviations from goodness or innocent but thoughtless actions can have the outcome, especially over extended time, of something radically different from the good. The menace of evil casts a dark shadow over the bright allure of goodness, and we must be forever wary of that shadow. It is not constructed or imagined. It is inescapably real, every bit as real as the goodness it opposes. And evil sometimes presents itself in the bright garb of seeming goodness, fooling those who lack the discernment to sense its presence. Goodness of all kinds, epistemological, moral, aesthetic, religious, and the like, is experienced as having a transcendent character in two senses. The first is that it is irresistibly felt and believed to be something that lies beyond our constructions, conventions, and inventions, constantly calling all of them to account. It is incumbent on us from without or at least deeply from within, imposing obligations and inspiring aspirations whose claims on us cannot be ignored or resisted or, as we tacitly acknowledge, can be ignored or resisted only to our detriment or peril. Goodness is transcendent in the second sense that its claims are inexhaustible and never-ending. The ideal of goodness in all its domains transcends and lies beyond whatever we may have presently achieved and whatever we finite beings could completely achieve. Our reach for it forever exceeds our grasp of it. The irrepressible ideal of goodness is a significant reminder of our finitude and safeguards against our tendencies to arrogance and complacency. The above are highly general claims, devoid so far of detailed explication and argumentative support. But they can serve as introductory to the topics of the natures and relations of good and evil and their status in reality: essential subjects for metaphysical analysis and development. A central part of my thesis here is that were there no objective, metaphysically grounded conflicts,

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options, and interrelations of good and evil, human existence would be bereft of genuine value and meaning, as would the universe in which humans live. What are the types and meanings of good and evil, then, and how can their objectivity be defended? What is the relation of facts and values? Is evil present in the nonhuman world? If so, how and why is it there? Is there such a thing as absolute goodness, with no admixture of elements of evil? Is the universe moving steadily toward maximum goodness? Why is it important to maintain the idea of the transcendent character of true goodness? These and other questions require our concerted attention in the rest of this chapter.

The Natures and Relations of Goods and Evils Goods are the appropriate excellences of different domains, and evils are radical diminutions, absences, dismissals, or rejections of these excellences. In this chapter, I dwell primarily on the kinds of good and evil distinctive of the moral domain, and in the next chapter I focus on those characterizing the religious domain. But I also attend briefly in this chapter to goods and evils of the epistemological and artistic domains. I begin with the last two. Then I discuss moral goods and evils, and their metaphysical status and significance. The excellence sought for in the epistemological domain is accuracy, perspicuity, and persuasiveness of knowledge, in whatever field of inquiry knowledge is sought. In fields such as logic and mathematics, the excellence pursued is that of deductively certain knowledge or a high level of statistical probability. Elegance of reasoning is also highly desired and admired in both fields. In other kinds of reasoning, such as that of the natural sciences, excellent hypotheses are formulated in a manner that permits as precise levels as possible of empirical confirmation or disconfirmation. Philosophical reasoning strives for clarity, precision, and comprehensiveness, as well as for lucid and convincing modes of argument. It also strives to take fully into account relevant objections to favored claims. And so on. These are some of the excellences of the mentioned fields of knowledge, and thus the sought for goods in those fields. Epistemological evils include being satisfied with shoddy thinking, using bogus or fudged data, resorting to rhetorical tricks rather than employing sound reasoning, making the false look like the true, seeking to score points rather than

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to persuade with sound arguments, using someone else’s work without attribution, being unwilling to enter into dialogue with those who hold different views from one’s own, and exhibiting carelessness, chicanery, or dishonesty in reasoning. The excellences and thus the kinds of goodness in works of art include evocation of depths of beauty and tragedy, striking originality, the awakening of deep aesthetic sensibilities and modes of awareness, the objectification and framing of these sensibilities and modes, and the arousal of authentic feelings of the sublime. Gross departures from these goods include such things as mere prettiness, cloying sentimentality and bathos, crass manipulation of lower emotions for ulterior ends rather than the heightening of authentic aesthetic emotions, tiresome repetition instead of creative innovation, and the like. Such departures are the evils of art. Their outcomes can include the trivializing and jading of aesthetic sensibility and the radical decline of cultural greatness and achievement. Epistemological and aesthetic evils are to be deplored, and their consequences, as these consequences ripple through persons and cultures, are extremely grave. Their respective goods are worthy of continuing aspiration, celebration, and support, contributing immeasurably as they do to the integrity, well-being, richness, and maximum positive growth of individuals, institutions, and societies. Wherever intense strivings and hard-won fruits of the intellect are neglected or scorned, and profoundly evocative and challenging artistic endeavors are given short shrift, there culture exhibits its shallowness and steady decline. What do these kinds of observation have to do with metaphysics? There would be no illuminating metaphysical systems in the absence of reliable knowledge. Epistemological and metaphysical issues are entwined with one another. Apart from the knowability of the world as a putative metaphysical fact, human claims to knowledge of the world would be futile. And if we could not assume a significant amount of capability to understand the world, meaningful and informative metaphysical as well as other kinds of searches for knowledge would be without point. There would be far less of the world for us to interact with if reliable knowledge of more subtle and elusive aspects of the world were not attainable. Moreover, as Aristotle observed long ago, it is in our nature as human beings to desire deeply to know, and to know as fully and completely as we can. His assertion that we are beings of this sort is a metaphysical one—a claim about human

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beings as part of reality—and the historical evidence for its truth is overwhelming. Art, for its part, taps into crucial areas of human sensibility and awareness that cannot be adequately known nor articulated in discursive forms of expression and reasoning. By revealing in their own distinctive manners the beauty, sublimity, wonder, and tragedy of life in the world and rendering these into productions to be felt and contemplated as humanly contrived but now objective parts of the world, works of art open up dimensions of emotion, experience, and reality that would otherwise be closed to us or, at best, only dimly expressed and perceived. Most of all, they help us in great measure to understand that the world is an arena of values and not just of facts, of richly qualitative modes of experience, insight, and awareness, not just of those things that can be scientifically measured and tested. Thus, the arts have an epistemological character and import of their own. With their focus on the valuative aspects of experience—in this case the area of aesthetic values—the arts also remind us that without the valuing of truth, there would be no incentive to search for it and thus no such thing as science. There is an exactness and precision of art as well as of fields of thought such as mathematics, science, history, or philosophy; and without the former our awareness of the world and of its secrets, treasures, perils, and values would be sadly inadequate and incomplete. Metaphysics requires the knowledge, insights, and revelations of the arts—and thus their disclosures of central features of reality—as much as it requires the disclosures of discursive argument and understanding. The goods of discursive knowledge and the goods of art are essential to human well-being. And the pernicious evils of these two domains need to be scrupulously unmasked, resisted, and avoided. I discuss in the remainder of this section the natures and relationships of moral goods and evils and provide some examples of each. The following section is devoted to exploration of the metaphysical status or basis in reality of moral good and evil. Moral goods and evils have to do descriptively with the existing habits, patterns, or customs (Latin: mores) of individuals or groups as these relate to attitudes toward and practices involving treatments of human beings (and, as I contend later, members of other species), and they have to do prescriptively with what these habits, patterns, or customs ought to be like. The attitudes and practices at issue here are those that either

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conduce or fail to conduce to the flourishing of individuals and to the orders of community and society, orders that permit and encourage creative innovation in the context of general communal and social stability. This last statement alludes to the fundamental moral good that encompasses and informs all of the other putative moral goods. This basic moral good is given lucid expression by philosopher Immanuel Kant in his treatise Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals.3 There is a tension between the well-being of individuals in a social group and that of the group as a whole that is captured by Kant’s three formulations in this treatise of what he calls the categorical imperative. The tension of which I speak is also a tension between individual freedom, autonomy, and inherent worth, on the one hand, and social order, on the other. I do not regard the three formulations as equivalent statements of the same idea but as calling attention to three different but interrelated aspects of that general idea. The first formulation enjoins us to act on principles that we can will to be universal and not just particular, that is, on principles that apply equally to everyone in society as a whole and in more specific social groups. The second formulation bids us to respect individual persons as ends, not merely as means, and to treat them accordingly. The third one impresses on us the importance of striving for a kind of society which can be characterized as a “Kingdom of Ends.” In such a human society all its citizens will work tirelessly for its betterment as a whole while continuing to emphasize and honor the incalculable value and importance of each of its members, carefully attending to how each of them can contribute to as well as benefit from its orderly processes and its safeguards and enhancements of individual and collective well-being. To treat persons as ends requires recognizing, among other things, that persons are not all alike. They differ in important respects from each other, not only in their interests and abilities, but also in their social and economic circumstances. The first formulation of the categorical imperative, with its stress on universality of treatment, fails to take sufficient account of these important differences among persons. The kingdom of ends is one in which as much balance as possible is achieved between the two goals of social stability and equitable, beneficial treatment of all the members of a society, on the one hand, and recognition of and respect for the appreciable differences of interests, abilities, and circumstances among those members, on the other.

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The latter goal allows for helping those most in need in ways that may not always be strictly equal to ways of treating those less in need, and it also allows to each person in society a maximum of freedom and dignity, a maximum that gives due regard to what each person is capable of giving in his or her particular ways to the ongoing vitality and growth of the society. A balance of stable, reliable order, on the one hand, and respect for individual integrity, worth, and freedom, on the other—and thus of the first and second formulations of the categorical imperative—is emphasized, and this balance is reflected in the third formulation, that of the moral goal of a Kingdom of Ends. I agree with philosopher George R. Lucas when he argues in an illuminating essay that Kant’s categorical imperative provides us with an abstract and very general depiction of what any reasonably ordered, richly innovative, and eminently humane society would look like.4 It thus describes, in broad outlines, what would be needed for such a society to be possible. Within this highly general, modal characterization, Lucas contends, many different kinds of more specific social organizations can exist, each of which subserves, in more particular ways the tensions and patterns of the three formulations of the categorical imperative. In this way, the formulations provide a moral norm incumbent on all particular forms of social organization while permitting an appreciable pluralistic variety among those forms. The extremes of moral absolutism and complete relativism are thus resolved into a mean of moral pluralism that is consistent with a substantive and universally binding moral standard or comprehensive moral good.5 In my judgment, the most important insights in Lucas’s fine essay are three: (1) the necessary interdependence of individual and social morality, or of individual freedom, capacity, and need, on the one hand, and stable social order, on the other hand, neither being intelligible or sustainable without consideration of its bearings and impacts on the other; (2) the basic modal condition or possibility of any viable society as being perspicuously defined by Kant’s categorical imperative in its three aspects; and (3) the consistency of this modal and normative depiction with a variety of more specific social forms and prescriptions. I do not intend to delve in detail into more specific kinds of moral standard or particular moral goods and evils here because my principal purpose is to examine the metaphysical character and

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requirement of moral good and moral evil in general, a task to which I turn in the next section. But I mention briefly some of the moral goods that would seem in my view to fall under the general moral good described in Kant’s three forms of the categorical imperative. These more specific goods would include such things as individual freedom and well-being, just laws, equality of all before the law, equal opportunity for all, maintenance of social order, care for those in need, protection of all against harm, and just punishment of those guilty of inflicting needless harm on others. Also included would be various descriptions of individual responsibility for upholding and working for the ideals of social harmony and social betterment. Each of these considerations can be regarded as an example of an important moral good. In whatever ways these putative goods are safeguarded and achieved and in whatever specific forms of social organization, each of them can be regarded as vitally important because of their contributions to the overarching conception of the moral good outlined by Kant. The related moral evils of a society would include absence of freedom of thought, expression, and assembly for all; unjust laws and unequal treatment before the law; absence of equal opportunity for all; unwarranted threats to and disruptions of appropriate and needful social order; lack of concern for and action toward those most in need of special concern and treatment; failure to protect all the members of society from arbitrary, willful, and needless inflictions of harm; and failure to inflict swift and just punishment on those guilty of imposing such harm on others. Included in a list of such evils would be failure on the part of individuals in a society to contribute in specific ways to their society’s stability, justice, and well-being, as well as actions of individuals that are deliberately inimical and destructive to society’s well-being.

The Metaphysical Basis of Moral Good and Moral Evil Kant calls his analysis of morality “metaphysics” (metaphysik) of morals, but his meaning of the term is different from mine. By metaphysics he means the transcendental condition for morality, as defined by synthetic a priori (informative and certain or undeniably true) principles, and he regards the three formulations of the categorical imperative as such principles. Moreover, he does not attempt to

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resolve the question of whether the kind of “reality” he relies on in his treatise on morality is that of how the world truly is, in and of itself, or only that of the way all we humans are bound to conceive it in order to act morally, given an assumed common human nature and common structure of human minds. He is led to his caution in this work partly by its seeming incompatibility with his earlier Critique of Pure Reason. In the earlier work he sought to demonstrate the possibility of a “pure” (synthetic a priori) analysis of the natures of natural science and mathematics and upheld there the thesis of causal determinism. But in his treatise on morality he felt that he had to assume the freedom of the will, and thus indeterminism, if he was to make sense of moral experience and the absolutely binding character of moral obligation. It would make no sense to talk of obligation if we are not free to choose between good and evil. I have no such incompatibility to cope with or negotiate here. I made a case in chapter 4 for the irreducible reality of both cosmic indeterminism and human freedom, meaning that there is no compelling reason to think that scientific and mathematical investigations and descriptions, on the one hand, and moral analyses and prescriptions, on the other, are necessarily at odds with each other. Also, in contrast to Kant, I feel no need to posit a supposed “in itself ” (an sich) world that is in principle inaccessible to human thought, investigation, or understanding. In my view, positing such a world is unnecessary precisely because if the real world is said to lie completely and unalterably beyond any possible human apprehension, its alleged inaccessibility could make no difference to us. And there could be no basis on which to posit its complete opaqueness to human thought, reason, and experience. It is one thing to insist that humans are incapable of gaining a total or all-comprehending understanding of the real world. This is a proposition with which I am in sympathy, given the vastness and diversity of our world in both space and time, the distinct possibility of worlds preceding our own, our undeniable finitude as human creatures of the world, and the ineliminable perspectivity of our vision of the world as compared with the multiple differing perspectives of other earthbound creatures. But to say that we can hope only to understand some part of reality is not the same thing as saying that we can in principle know nothing of it. I insist, as against Kant, that we can know, among other things, aspects of reality accessible to us that are indispensably relevant to making sense of moral obligation and

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moral experience. I state this point as a metaphysical hypothesis, but it is one of whose truth I am confident. What are some aspects of reality that lie behind and give support to the vision of the moral good contained in the three versions of Kant’s categorical imperative—a vision I take, along with Lucas, to express the most general character and possibility of the moral good? Elucidation of these aspects will enable me to set forth my thesis regarding the metaphysical status of the moral meaning of goodness. The aspects are four in number: cosmic indeterminacy, human freedom, human rationality, and human sociability. I spoke about the first three in chapter 4, but allow me briefly to rehearse that discussion and to highlight the relation of these three aspects of reality to the metaphysical status of moral good and evil. I then discuss the fourth aspect of human sociality, a sociality that extends beyond human social relations into relations with the whole natural environment. In insisting on the extension of human morality and sociality to the whole natural environment, I am going beyond Kant, who conceived of his theory of morality as applying only to “rational” beings, that is, exclusively to human beings.6 I contend that all forms of life and their interrelations and ecological settings should be objects of profound moral care and concern, and not just the human species. Appropriate objects of moral consideration and treatment need not themselves be capable of the type of rational reasoning or capacity for free deliberation and action associated with humans. Like human beings, they have intrinsic value and importance in their own right. Human morality is thus, in my view, a subset of far more wide-ranging ecological morality. Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, appropriate adjustments being made, should be expanded to include as far as possible the whole community of natural beings on earth. The first aspect of reality required as a basis for morality that I note earlier is cosmic indeterminacy. If the causal closedness of the universe is affirmed, then there can be no such thing as, or room for, human freedom, a freedom that requires genuinely available alternative possibilities for deliberation, choice, and action. Thus, cosmic indeterminacy is a necessary metaphysical condition for human freedom. If there is no such thing as human freedom, it would make no sense for humans to be held responsible as assumed ultimate sources of their choices and actions, meaning that moral obligation would lose its meaning. Thus, the reality of human freedom is a second

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necessary metaphysical condition for such a thing as the general moral good outlined in Kant’s statements of the categorical imperative (and for more specific versions of that good) for which human beings are held to be responsible and in strict accordance with which they are morally obligated to act. In sum, if there is no cosmic indeterminacy, there can be no genuine human freedom. And if there is no human freedom, then there can be no obligatory moral good or goods humans can be expected to take into account, scrupulously observe, and regularly act on. My earlier defenses of indeterminacy and freedom encompass the first two conditions. The third condition, the reality and competence of human rationality, is required as a metaphysical condition for humans to comprehend and articulate in systematic ways the nature of their moral obligations and their understandings of distinctions between moral good and moral evil. The first two conditions are implicit in this one because, as I argued in chapter 4, the ability to reason requires the capability to envision alternative possibilities for thought in the domain of morals and in other domains, and to choose, affirm, and defend those that seem to qualify as the most plausible ones before the judgment seat of reason. Were there no such thing as human freedom, the possibility of thoughtful, reliable moral reasoning, and thus action following on that reasoning, would no longer obtain. I am assuming in this chapter that my discussion of the natures and relations of moral goodness and evil can help to elucidate the metaphysical status and importance of this topic. And my discussion cannot avoid presupposing, for whatever validity or appeal it may have, the competence of human reason to address and make progress in resolving significant moral issues and the conditions underlying them. That leaves us with the fourth prominent condition for moral goodness and evil I focus on here in combination with the other three of cosmic indeterminacy, human freedom, and human rationality— namely, the condition of human sociality. I affirm human sociality as a basic metaphysical fact concerning the nature and capacities of human beings. We are beings with pronounced social instincts, and the whole of human history and of the diversity of human cultures shows this to be true. There have been hermits and other sorts of people who have chosen to live alone. But examples of such persons are extremely rare, and even when they do choose to live alone, they take such things as their socially induced languages and cultures with them as they begin and continue their lives of solitude. In view of the

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fact that the vast majority of human beings live in society with one another, and that we are warranted to consider them as by nature social beings, it is absolutely necessary that they continue to find and affirm ways of living together that can ensure the mutual responsibilities, benefits, opportunities, protections, and stabilities of their societies and ongoing social relations. Their natural state is not that of isolated individuals, contrary to the thinking of seventeenth-century social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes,7 but that of beings in community, beings in intimate relations with one another. Sustained reflections on the moral good, and on social systems that can give adequate expression to the moral good, are necessities of human life. If humans were in their metaphysical nature creatures that spent most of their lives in solitude like gopher tortoises, grizzly bears, and leopards, the need for understandings of and actions in accordance with the moral good would be much less necessary and important. A crucial metaphysical fact, and one that is indispensably relevant to the metaphysical status of moral goodness and evil, is the fact that humans are in their basic biological and metaphysical nature social beings. And the range of their sociability and moral concern should not be viewed as restricted to other humans and human communities, as I indicated earlier. It should be recognized as encompassing the entire community of creatures on earth. The ecological scope of morality was not discerned by Kant in the eighteenth century, but it should be readily acknowledged today. In making these observations, I do not for a moment lose sight of the utter seriousness of the topic of moral good and evil. My discussions of this topic are not meant merely as an abstract academic exercise. The depths of moral evils and of the radical departures from moral goodness are graphically disclosed in human history and include such things as systematic persecutions of minorities, ruthless aggressive wars, enslavements, tortures, slayings of the innocent, abuses of children, raping of women, cruel religious persecutions, exploitations of the poor by the rich, abusive treatments and endangerments of animals and their natural environments, and the like. The evils that humans have done and continue to do to one another and to other species of life are unfathomable and indescribable. A supposed metaphysical analysis that casts no light on the stark, obdurate realities of these violations of good, that relegates them to assumed incommensurabilities of a thoroughgoing cultural relativism or to irreducible vagaries of individual subjective moral outlook

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and opinion, is a metaphysics that fails dismally to recommend itself to perceptive human contemplation and acceptance. The same could be said of a metaphysics that makes impossible the kind of moral awareness, reasoning, choice, and action I am attempting to describe, and does so by rejecting the essential conditions for it I have outlined here.

Additional Questions about the Metaphysics of Moral Good and Evil There are other important issues regarding the metaphysical character of good and evil that I take up in this section. I do so by raising and responding to three questions that introduce and help to frame each of the issues in turn. 1. Is there such a thing anywhere in reality as absolute moral goodness, or is all goodness admixed with or implicated in some way with what can be interpreted as moral evil? 2. Is nature moving toward maximal moral goodness, that is, does it have some kind of moral telos? 3. Do the goods and evils of epistemology, aesthetics, and morality discussed in this chapter exhaust the fundamental types of metaphysical good? Let us take a look at each of these questions. Question 1: The metaphysics I explore and advocate in this book is a naturalistic metaphysics, meaning that there is no reality beyond or outside of nature, that is, no such thing as supernatural beings, powers, presences, or principles. Whatever exists, then, is something natural. To be is to be natural in some mode or form. The theistic idea of a radically transcendent God of absolute goodness is thus precluded, as is the Form of the Good cited as an absolute principle of goodness by Socrates in Plato’s Republic. The latter is precluded because it is thought to be static and eternal, and in no way affected by or located within the natural world of change. All such naturetranscending absolutes are rejected by the metaphysical naturalism I describe here. Is there anything that can be characterized as absolutely good in a moral sense within the natural world, then? Or does all natural

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goodness pose within itself the possibility of evil or even the necessity of some kind of evil? I argued in Living with Ambiguity8 that there are two kinds of evil in our world: moral evils and systemic natural evils. Moral evils result from misuses of human freedom. The good of freedom implies the possibility of using that freedom for evil purposes, and the good of freedom would not exist were this possibility not available for choice and action. So the possibility—and as human history testifies, the lamentable persistent actuality—of moral evil is contained within the good of human freedom. Kant views the moral will as absolutely good, but by “moral” he means a will that is completely aligned with the moral law. Because for him the human will is free, as I indicated earlier, it is capable of departing from and violating the moral law and, regrettably, often does so. The absolute good of the moral will is a metaphysical reality for Kant, but he postulates it to be present only in a radically transcendent God. The best that humans can hope for as finite beings is to make infinite progress starting here on earth and continuing in an afterlife toward this absolute good—toward God’s awesome moral perfection as exemplar of the moral life. But that progress will forever be asymptotic, never final or complete.9 Apart from God, then, there is no such thing for Kant as absolute moral goodness in reality. The actuality and not just the possibility of moral evil lurk always within the good of human freedom. But perhaps the whole of nonhuman nature can be regarded as absolutely good in a moral sense of good? This notion must be rejected on two counts. First, whatever good nonhuman nature, or nature unaffected by human beings, exhibits, that good does not result from the intentionality and choice of some imagined naturetranscending being or from intentionality and choice somehow immanent within nature as a whole. Hence, nonhuman nature is not a moral good, either in the sense of having been purposefully and freely conceived, designed, or selected, or in the sense of acting as a whole with conscious moral purpose. Nonhuman nature in all of its forms is an appropriate object of profound moral care and concern, but it is not morally good in and of itself. Some of the nonhuman creatures of nature may be capable of moral or proto-moral intentions and actions, but nature as a whole is not.10 Second, nature is shot through with systemic natural evils as well as goods, and the evils are corollary to and inseparable from the goods. Nature’s creations and its destructions go hand-in-hand, as I

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noted in chapter 5. The sun, the earth, and the inhabitants of earth would not be here did the solar system not result from massive, wildly destructive as well as constructive events. The entire present universe is the result of such ongoing combinations of destruction and construction. The history of biological evolution on earth exhibits the same pattern. Furthermore, nature is replete with predations of innumerable kinds. What is good for the predator is bought at the sad price of what is evil from the standpoint of the prey. And much of what is admirable in the prey has evolved as vitally needed means of protection against the predator. Storms, floods, earthquakes, fires, volcanic eruptions, droughts, starvations, and plagues are frequent facts of earthly life. They may be creative and good in some senses, but they are destructive and evil in others.11 Nonhuman nature is radically ambiguous with respect to good and evil, as is all of human history. Absolute, unqualified goodness is nowhere to be found on the face of the earth or in our universe as a whole. I even argued in Living with Ambiguity, for reasons I do not go into again in any depth here, that absolute goodness is questionable as a moral ideal for finite beings such as we humans are, because attainment of it would have to foreclose the possibility of conflicting goods, moral quandaries, moral mistakes, moral failures, learning lessons from those mistakes and failures, and even the possession of genuine, could-do-otherwise freedom. We are morally obligated to do the best we can in our moral strivings and actions, but we should not live with the illusion that we are capable of moral perfection, or even that moral perfection as often envisioned (in a supposed afterlife, for example, where we are supposed to be no longer capable of doing evil) is a desirable or realizable ideal for the likes of us. I quoted earlier in this chapter Iris Murdoch’s manifestly true statement, “However good a [human] life is, it includes moral failure.” Such failure is one of the marks of our finitude as human beings. To be no longer capable of moral failure would mean to cease to be human. Question 2: Some thinkers have envisioned the universe as moving steadily and inexorably toward some kind of ultimate or final moral goodness, and thus as containing within itself some kind of telos or impetus leading to that goal. And they have referred to biological evolution here on earth as evidence for such an ingrained tendency in nature. French paleoanthropologist and Roman Catholic priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, for example, saw nature as evolving through progressive stages toward a holistic integration of all

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individual consciousnesses into a cosmic consciousness he called the Omega Point or ultimate goal of the evolutionary process.12 This goal would constitute the achievement of what could be called absolute moral goodness. The kind of metaphysical naturalism I defend here, however, does not view nature as moving toward some kind of predetermined moral goal or as responding to some kind of immanent or transcendent telos luring it from the future. Purposes and goals are operative in many emergent creatures of nature, including us human creatures, but there is no purpose or goal of nature as such. And human moral progress is possible and to be hoped for and aspired toward, but it is neither guaranteed nor furthered by any inexorable force or impetus in nature as a whole. My version of metaphysical naturalism is not pantheistic or panentheistic, although it does allow for and strongly commend what William Wordsworth calls “natural piety”13 on the part of human beings. Question 3: This last point about natural piety segues into my answer to the third question about whether there is a species of good different from the epistemological, aesthetic, and moral goods I have discussed so far. The answer is that there definitely is. This other kind of good is that of nature regarded as an appropriate focus of ultimate religious commitment and concern. Nature is such, I argue, despite its pervasive ambiguity or admixtures of the aforementioned goods and evils, despite the absence in nature of some kind of overarching purpose or goal, and despite the fact that nature is not a personal being or animated or guided by any sort of personal being, beings, or comprehensive conscious intent. In order to distinguish nature’s religious goodness from moral and other types of goodness, I prefer to speak of nature’s unqualified religious rightness, meaning its eminent fitness for unstinting religious reverence and devotion. Nature is not unambiguously good in a moral sense of good, but it does deserve to be viewed as unqualifiedly good in a religious sense, that is, as the focus of wholehearted religious faith. Human religious goodness, then, is devotion to nature as sacred and good, and religious evil is the absence of such devotion and the exhibition instead of such things as crass, unthinking indifference to the well-being of natural environments and their natural species or deliberate, unrepentant, rampant violations of the integrity and value of those environments and species. Religious evil is failure to recognize and work to avoid long-range deleterious if not

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disastrous effects of these violations and attitudes of indifference. It is failure to love and honor all the aspects of nature in the ways they richly deserve to be loved and honored. Included in religious duties to the well-being of nature are moral duties to it and its creatures, including its human creatures. Human morality can thus be regarded as a subset of ecological morality, as I indicated earlier, and ecological morality is situated by religious naturalists in the overall context of their religious faith. The pervasive and astounding aesthetic features of nature can contribute greatly toward recognition of and response to its religious values. And increasingly detailed knowledge of nature’s character and ways can awaken religious wonder and direct attention to the sacredness of nature. Thus, moral, aesthetic, and epistemological goods have crucial roles to play in inspiring a sense of the intrinsic religious goodness of nature and motivating appropriate responses to that goodness. In this chapter I distinguished four basic types of goodness and value: epistemological, aesthetic, moral, and religious. I talked about the metaphysical status of these goods, commented on their related kinds of evils, and listed some specific kinds of goods and evils that illustrate their general character. I insisted that good and evil are not in their most basic natures mere subjective phenomena but have status as objective features of the experienced universe. The universe is thus to be regarded as an arena of values and not just of facts. I tried in the cases of all four types of value to point to some of their relations to one another and to their places within the whole of reality. I also emphasized the idea that we fallible humans fall forever short of the demands of these goods and must strive continuously to comprehend and measure up to them as fully as we can. The bulk of the chapter has been devoted to moral good and evil, with briefer discussions of epistemological, aesthetic, and religious goods and departures from those goods. The following chapter offers further analysis of religious good and evil. I address this issue by investigating the natures, relations, and metaphysical status of the sacred and the profaned.

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Chapter 7 The Sacred and the Profaned It was a strange half century, as one looks back upon it—that fifty years before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. It was dominated by a generation that saw the world as a complex symbolic system pointing in the direction of man, who was foreknown and prefigured from the beginning. Man, who comes last, is the end of this strange cycle. With him, in the eyes of many of these thinkers, the process ceases and no further changes in the world of life are to be expected. Since the transcendental “evolutionists” were man-centered, questions involving divergent evolution and adaptation did not come easily to their minds. . . . There was little comprehension of the fact that man had acquired his peculiar bodily structure and upright posture through a peculiar set of evolutionary circumstances, not easily to be duplicated. —Loren Eiseley1

F

or thousands of years of human history, it has been assumed by the great majority of people that the universe exists to serve the needs, desire, hopes, and yearnings of human beings. Everything else in nature was assumed to be instrumental to this overriding purpose. Even when humans of the Western world in the half century or so before Darwin began, on the basis of geological and paleontological evidence, to glimpse the possibility of the evolution of the human species from earlier forms of life, they did so with the unshakable conviction that it was all leading inexorably to the triumphant arrival of human beings. As anthropologist Loren Corey Eiseley writes in the epigraph to this chapter, it was taken for granted that humans were

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all along the foreordained apex and terminus of the evolutionary process, its entire reason for being. “It’s all about us!” This was the unconscious, unanalyzed, but stubbornly held assumption by most humans in the twilight of that pre-Darwinian dawn. Even with the idea of evolution coming increasingly to the fore in their minds, belief in the centrality of humans pervaded their attitude toward the natural world and informed all of their actions in relation to it. For these thinkers, nature is here to serve humans. It may have some intrinsic goods, but in the main its goods are instrumental means that serve the ends of human evolution, human flourishing, and human domination over the natural world as it exists here on earth. In another part of his statement that I have left out in the epigraph of this chapter, Eiseley even suggests that it was assumed then, and continues to be assumed today, that if we were to encounter intelligent beings from other parts of the universe, they would look and act basically like human beings, whatever the differences of their colors, shapes, or sizes. The fact that we humans tend strongly to view the universe sub species humanitatis can be seen in our tales of the exploits of gods and goddesses, in the idea that parts of nonhuman nature are animated by human-like spirits, and even in our notion of a high God with personality, consciousness, purposes, and actions akin to those of human beings. It is a small step from the soaring idea that humans are created in the image of God to the jarring realization that God is more often than not fashioned in the image of humans. All creatures are no doubt disposed and tempted to reduce the immense surrounding universe to their particular perspectives on it, and we humans are not exceptions to that rule. When reflecting on the fact that Ethiopians and Thracians see their gods as looking like themselves, with either snub noses and black skins, on the one hand, or with blue eyes and red hair, on the other, ancient philosopher Xenophanes remarked that if cattle, horses, or lions had hands like humans with which to draw, their drawings of gods would look like cattle, horses, or lions.2 The illusion that humans are the center of the universe dies hard, and it has persisted even after the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. It is still deeply entrenched today, despite all that we know about the biological sciences and the ecological interdependencies of all forms of life on earth. Richard Dawkins comments on how even some of his colleagues in the field of biology are sometimes

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unconsciously inclined to regard developments in evolutionary biology as somehow leading up to, approximating to, or culminating in human beings.3 But the sacredness of the universe does not center on human beings. The thesis to be developed and defended in this chapter is that the universe itself in all its forms, including the countless species of evolved life on earth, is sacred and therefore richly deserving of being the focus of naturalistic religious faith (and also of being a central concern of non-naturalistic types of religious faith). Humans are a part but only a small part of the glory, wonder, and majesty of an incredibly vast universe. In the metaphysical perspective of religious naturalism, the natural universe is intrinsically sacred, not just instrumentally so. It does not exist only to subserve human purposes and needs, although it does give remarkable support to these purposes and needs, along with the support it provides for its other living creatures. Why and in what ways the natural universe should be seen as sacred in all of its aspects and what profanation of the universe’s intrinsic sacredness can mean will be the concerns of this chapter. The chapter brings this book’s discussion of certain fundamental topics in metaphysics to a close by investigating the metaphysical status and importance of the sacred and the profaned, the fundamental good and evil of religion. I observed in the previous chapter that the universe is an arena of values and not just of facts, and I discussed there epistemological, aesthetic, and moral goods or values as objective features of the universe, as well as ways in which these basic goods or values can be violated. Among the crucial values in the universe is the religious value of the sacred, and in opposition to it is the stark disvalue of the profaned. In what follows, I first discuss the meaning of the term sacred and its closely related term holy. I then defend the claim that the natural universe is intrinsically sacred or holy in this sense. I also point out ways we humans should respond to this intrinsic sacredness. But nature can be and has been viewed and treated in profaning ways by human beings, some of them flagrant and deplorable, as I also show. Finally, I argue that there is nothing in nature considered in and of itself which is profane—it is sacred through and through—and that this statement is true despite the admitted natural ambiguities of creativeness and destructiveness, predator and prey, hazard and peril, life and death, and the like, spoken of in the previous chapter.

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I plead throughout this chapter for appropriate respect for and dedication to nature’s intrinsic sacredness. I do so in the name of religious naturalism, but it is quite appropriate for adherents of other religious traditions to acknowledge and respond to the sacredness of nature as well, even when nature is seen as subordinate to a more ultimate sacred principle, presence, or power. An example of the latter viewpoint is the fact that in the book of Genesis God not only created every aspect of the universe but also “saw that it was good.”4 This presumably means that God acknowledges the natural world’s intrinsic goodness, the outcome of his creative and loving power. This goodness has sacred significance in its own right. God loves the world because it is good; it is not just good because God happens to love it. The goodness of the created world testifies to its intrinsic sacredness as the endowment of God even as it points in theistic religions to the greater sacredness of God. I begin, then, with examination of the meaning of the term sacred.

What Sacredness Means To say that a place, time, object, person, book, or the like is sacred is to imply a number of closely related things about it. These are hinted at by the etymology of sacred and its correlate holy. Sacred derives from the Greek word so-s, meaning “safe” or “whole.” Holy has its root in the Old English term ha-lig, which also means “whole” and has connotations of being sound or complete. When we speak of a person as “hale and hearty,” the term hale has the significance of being healthy and of having a vigorously good outlook and disposition. Among the meanings of sacred and holy that are derivative from these etymological meanings and reflected in religious speech, writing, and practice are the following: • Spiritually perfect, exemplary, whole, and pure; • Religiously ultimate; the principal focus of religious concern, commanding the utmost in respect, reverence, awe, and commitment; • Combining assurance of ultimate safety and deliverance with the call to the utmost religious dedication and commitment; • Promising transformative power to meet the rigorous demands of this dedication and commitment;

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• Inviolable, not to be made common or profane; not to be approached or regarded carelessly or indifferently; to be approached with appropriate attitudes of wariness, deference, seriousness, and even dread; • But also eliciting incomparable responses of excitement, anticipation, fulfillment, wonder, and joy; • Contrasting radically with all that is religiously decadent, impure, and detrimental. I associate all of these meanings with my central claim that nature has the metaphysical character of being supremely sacred or holy. It is so for reasons I now indicate.

The Sacredness of Nature For Religion of Nature and for the naturalistic metaphysics that I explore and defend in this book, nature is sacred because it is majestic and sublime; the endlessly fecund and creative source of all things living and nonliving; the sustainer of all forms of life including our own; the origin of consciousness and mind; the basis of human history and culture; the natural home of human beings and all earthly creatures; and that which dwells in the depths of our being as well as in all that is outside and beyond us. There is nothing greater than nature and nothing beyond nature. It generates, encompasses, transforms, and sustains all that has been, is now, or ever shall be. We humans are absolutely dependent on the processes of nature. Without them, we would not exist from one moment to the next. We come from nature, we are nurtured and sustained by it, and we shall someday return to it. It is sacred womb, upholding arms, and last resting place. The cessations of our lives on earth are no less final than are those of the other living beings of earth. The fierce and sometimes sudden and unexpected forces of nature can strike dread into the human heart, but the heart can also be refreshed and rejuvenated by beauties and wonders of nature that lie on every hand. Love of nature is latent in human beings, and it can be awakened and brought to full consciousness as they learn to reverence, respect, and give fulsome thanks for their natural home. This love can have transforming and renewing power. It can provide assurance and rest in the midst of tumult, pain, and sorrow. It can expand

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horizons and increase the scope of attentiveness, recognition, care, and concern. And, properly approached and regarded, this love can bind humans to nature and to the other living creatures of nature in relations of mutual alliance and support. Nature is remarkably pliable to human use, need, and resourcefulness, but it also demands acknowledgment of its integrity and role as something that infinitely surpasses in importance and value all that is merely human. Human aspirations, purposes, and needs have their place within the economy of nature, but they are relatively insignificant when compared with the magnitude, mystery, and grandeur of nature as a whole. Humans can inflict grievous damage on nature here on earth in the short run, and evidences of that extensive damage are becoming increasingly apparent in our own time. But in doing so, they will damage themselves most of all. There is no escaping the fact that humans are creatures of nature who are crucially dependent on nature’s well-being. It would be the height of folly to ignore this brute fact. Humans ignore the complexity, criticality, and depth of their ecological dependency at their peril. This ecological dependency is itself a sign of the inviolable sacredness of nature. I am not suggesting that humans should love and be committed to the ultimacy of nature simply because it benefits them to do so. Nature should not be regarded as a mere instrument serving human endeavors and needs. It is sacred in its own right and has existed long before human beings came onto the scene. It will also exist long after the human species as it exists today is no more. One significant indication of the ultimacy of nature, and of its sacredness as indication of that ultimacy, is that nature in some mode, manner, or form always has existed and always will exist, as I pointed out in chapter 1. This fact alone puts all the accomplishments and aspirations of finite human beings in proper perspective. Our days, both as individuals and as a species, are but the flicker of a snake’s tongue or the flutter of a butterfly’s wing compared with the infinite temporal span of nature. The life of humans is a gift of nature, but what nature gives, it also takes away. It does so in the natural course of events, but it can also do so if humans fail to take their proper humble place in the whole scheme of nature on earth. I have explicated and celebrated the religious ultimacy and, thus, the sacredness of nature in all of its aspects in other writings.5 I do not delve much further beyond the above hints and suggestions in this regard here. Let it suffice to say that nature is holy ground, and

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nature’s being so is a profoundly important metaphysical fact. Properly understood, the facts of nature cannot be separated from the values in nature and, ultimately, from nature’s all-embracing religious value. We should tread on this holy ground with circumspection, dread, and care. We should give to it our utmost fealty of mind, heart, and strength. We should love and serve it with all our being. In so doing, we can find the ultimate meaning and value of our lives as creatures of nature. Nature supports and sustains us. It infuses in us the powers of life and love. And it deserves and demands to be loved and served in return. But does not nature threaten and harm us as well? Is it not a source of loss, suffering, and grief? Does it not inflict on us storms, droughts, pestilences, diseases, deaths before the fullness of time, and the like? And is nature not riddled with predations and extinctions? How, then, can we be expected to affirm it as religiously ultimate or to seek in it our salvation and the meaning of our lives? These are extremely large and important questions, and I cannot hope to do justice to them here. My book Living with Ambiguity is an attempt to deal with them at greater length.6 What I can basically say in response to them is that the economy of life on earth is a finite economy and one that is marked by the obduracy of natural laws. As finite, the maintenance of some forms of life requires the sacrifice of others. This is a necessary admixture of goods and evils. If lives on earth were unending, the carrying capacity of the earth would long ago have been exceeded. If there were no relations of predator and prey, a large number of species of life on earth would not exist. And extinctions are the necessary prices paid by the ongoingness of biological evolution. Storms, droughts, pestilences, diseases, and the like are harsh reminders that nature does not focus on us. It goes about its turbulent, destructive, and often unpredictable but also restlessly creative ways in independence of our personal wishes and desires. Such things are not always individually good or desirable, but the whole system of them is. I do not claim that the tragedies and evils of nature are made moot or ignorable by being swallowed up into its goods. They remain tragic and evil and cannot so easily be eclipsed or ignored. But the whole of nature, with its admixtures of goods and evils, of intimately related creations and destructions, can be acknowledged as religiously right partly because no imaginable or even desirable alternative to it can be conceived. It is as wondrously good, despite

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its admixtures with sometimes terrifying and horrible evils—both natural systemic and humanly caused evils—as an evolving, marvelously inclusive system can be. It is critically important to keep the goods and evils of nature and of human beings as awesomely responsible and free creatures of nature in proper balance and perspective. Neither blithe, insensitive optimism nor sour, unrelieved pessimism is warranted. Reverence for the sacredness of nature is reverence for all of nature, not just a part of it. For elaboration of these points, here all too briefly stated, see especially chapter 6 of Living with Ambiguity. Nature is not a personal being, although it gives aid and support to our human lives in innumerable ways. Finally, as I have argued elsewhere, there is no plausible religious ultimate in any of the religions of the world that is not implicated in and marked by the ambiguities of the world. The book of Job in the Hebrew Bible is a telling case in point, insofar as God or the religious ultimate of that book and tradition is concerned. Shiva the god of creation and destruction in Hindu religion is another case in point. Plausible religious ultimates do not fit easily within the confines of our relatively narrow human needs and concerns, any more than they do within those of nonhuman animals of the natural world here on earth. As philosopher and theologian Bernard Loomer has convincingly argued, any putative religious ultimate claimed to do so would be perspicuously lacking in believable and adequate “size.”7 In this connection, I make mention of and respond to an argument of philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger at the end of a book jointly co-authored with physicist Lee Smolin. Unger muses on the question of whether nature is deserving of reverence in this passage: We know for a certainty that nature is on our side in one respect: it gave us life. We also know for sure that nature is against us in another regard: it will soon crush each of us. It may later annihilate humankind. For the most part, nature is neither for us nor against us. It is simply indifferent, and organized on a scale unfathomably disproportionate to our concerns. He concludes from these reflections that “[i]t should form no part of the program of natural philosophy to inspire or justify reverence for the cosmos” and that such so-called reverence is nothing more than

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naked “power worship.” As such, he alleges, it is dangerous and unworthy of human beings.8 Three debatable assumptions seem to me to underlie Unger’s argument. The first one is that nature is deserving of reverence only if it allows us humans as individuals or as a species to live forever. The second assumption is that nature can properly awaken and command reverence only if its principal focus is on us humans and our wellbeing. The third one is that reverence is an appropriate response only to some kind of personal presence or being, a presence or being with conscious intention and purpose. The first assumption seems wrongly to reason that a life can have no value if it is brought to an end by death, in other words, that only if we humans live forever can our lives be truly worthwhile. The logic of this assumption escapes me. Temporary things, events, and experiences can have great value even as they come into being and pass away over time. And the same is true of human lives. My parents are now dead, for example, but while they lived they brought great value into the world, a value that lives on in my own life and in the lives of many others now living. Similarly, the human species will have brought indescribable value and possibilities of value into the world even if it someday becomes extinct. The passage of time with its comings into being and its necessary goings out of being is not an inexorable enemy of value. The second assumption fails to see that a large part of what suits nature for unqualified reverence is that it is stupendously greater than us and our human concerns, that it has far-reaching cosmic rather than merely human proportion, value, and importance. We are richly entitled to reverence nature precisely because it does not center exclusively or even primarily on us humans, and we can be grateful for the fact that it nevertheless gives us over finite spans of time sustenance, significance, and general well-being—both as individuals and as a species. The third assumption betrays what I can term a theistic bias that something can be worthy of reverence only if it is personal and intentional, only if it is capable of conscious concern for our lives as human beings. This bias is also anthropocentric because it thinks that only something like us or at least closely akin to us in character is worthy of reverence. I think that there is also a confusion or unwarranted identification here between reverence and worship. Nature is a fit object of reverence, but it is not a fit object of worship. Worship is

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appropriate only for a personal being, a being who can respond in conscious ways to our expressed and unexpressed needs and concerns. Reverence has a scope beyond worship, although worship can be one of its forms. And the sacredness of nature does not require that it be conscious or the creation of a conscious being. Let me turn now to discussion of another issue. In chapter 4 I took issue with the contention by Thomas Nagel and Alfred North Whitehead that teleology or the capacity for goal-directed behavior must be present in nature in all the phases of its development. Otherwise, they argue, its presence at later stages cannot be accounted for. I argued instead in that chapter that teleology in our universe or face of nature is an emergent phenomenon, not a primordial one. It arises only with complex levels of material organization. Does this mean that the sacredness of our universe is also emergent rather than primordial? In other words, has our universe always been sacred or does it only become sacred with the emergence of beings capable of recognizing it as such? This question was raised by one of the anonymous readers of an earlier draft of this book. My position is that nature’s sacredness is primordial and thus intrinsic to its character in all of its phases and in all of its manifestations. Its sacredness does not depend on the presence of beings capable of recognizing its sacredness. Just as something can rightly be said to be knowable in principle even if not currently known (for example, the element oxygen prior to its discovery by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestly, and Antoine Lavoisier in the eighteenth century), so nature was sacred even when its sacredness was not or could not be consciously recognized as such. The sacredness of our universe resides not only in its later inclusion of teleological beings capable of acknowledging its sacredness, undeniably contributory to its recognizable sacred character as that inclusion is, but also in the creative powers (natura naturans) that have given rise to those beings over billions of years. We can look back on those anciently active powers and rightly deem them to be essential aspects of the sacredness of nature, but we do not in that way make them sacred. This is part of what I mean in speaking of the sacredness of nature as intrinsic to it, that is, as not dependent on anything beyond or in addition to itself— in this case, on emergence of beings capable of having awareness of its sacredness. With these indications of the sacredness of nature in mind, let us now move to consider what it would mean for that sacredness to be

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profaned. How does the profaned differ from and contrast with the sacred? Profane outlook on and use of the sacred, that is, profanation as an attitude and treatment is what I bring under discussion here. Profanation includes both dismissal of the inviolable significance of the sacred and actively doing violence to the sacred. To the extent that humans abuse nature, their profanations become sad and regrettable facts, human blots on the face of nature. Another word for the human profanation of nature is desecration, with its etymological suggestion of treating the sacred with wanton carelessness, uncaring indifference, or reckless scorn. Still another quite apt word is sin.

Human Profanations of Nature Human profanations of nature can take at least three basic forms: centering unduly or exclusively on human beings (anthropocentrism); bemoaning human finitude and the fragility and limitation of humankind’s physical character; and allowing the undeniable evils of an ambiguous nature completely to overshadow its evident and abundant goods, thus succumbing to the dark outlook and mood of rank pessimism or nihilism.9 I begin with the first form: profanation of nature’s sacredness by the outlook and accompanying actions or inactions of anthropocentrism. Centering on human beings. The grass in my lawn needs cutting after several days of rain. The broad-leafed St. Augustine grass blades are getting high. I try to imagine what this would be like for a beetle in their midst. The blades must look like a forest to it. Then I think of myself and of how the tall trees and tangled underbrush and vines of a dense rain forest would look to me if I were trying to make my way through it. In proportion to those trees and that vegetation, I would be like the beetle. Next I think of how the rain forest looks like from the summit of a mountain far above the tree line. I go on to imagine the appearance of the mountain range from the space shuttle. Finally, I try to picture the earth as it would appear from the planet Saturn. From there, it would look like a tiny dot of light, just as Saturn looks to the unaided eye from the vantage point of the earth. The entire solar system, in its turn, occupies a minute corner of the massive Milky Way galaxy, and that galaxy is only one of a hundred billion or so galaxies in the universe, each with its own complement of billions of stars and their accompanying planets. Moreover, the

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immense times and distances astronomers and cosmologists routinely rattle off when speaking of the origin and size of the universe are astounding and incomprehensible to the mind. In similar fashion, the human species is a tiny part of the ecosphere of this earth, teeming as it is with millions of interdependent species of life, and it is beyond belief to think that everything in the vast universe beyond the earth centers in on humans and their problems, prospects, and concerns. To think in that way and to act in accordance with that way of thinking is not only conceptually indefensible, it is a profanation of the intrinsic sacredness of the universe and of the earth as our home in the universe. The awe-inspiring immensity of the universe as a whole, and the range and intricacy of its aspects, creatures, and systematic relationships here on earth, are reminders of the sacred mystery and wonder that surrounds us humans on every hand. As I argued in chapter 2, nature is not just one but also many, not just an “it” but also a “they,” a dizzying congeries of different and often conflicting orders, features, and creatures. It is in some sense a whole or one but in another sense a volatile multifariousness, an incredible mixture of comings and goings, of emergences and extinctions, of reliable order and rumbling disorder. We humans are only a tiny part of this manysplendored, awesomely diverse character of the universe. The sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne calls vivid attention to this fact in his essay “Of the Education of Boys,” where he writes, whoever shall conjure up in his fancy, as in a picture, that great form of our mother Nature, in her full majesty; whoever reads in her face so universal and so constant variety; whoever observes himself therein, and not only himself, but a whole kingdom, to be no bigger than a point made with a very delicate brush, he alone estimates things according to their true proportion.10 The disorienting amazement, stupor, terror, and fascination—with its accompanying sense of minuteness—that can creep over us humans when we contemplate our humble place in the perspective of the massive, ever-changing universe is augmented beyond all bounds when we reflect on the distinct possibility that this present universe is only one of many universes coming into being and passing out of

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being over unending time. Nature natured (natura naturata) is both created and surpassed by nature naturing (natura naturans). It is not just the surpassing, all-encompassing immensity of nature that overwhelms us in our relative littleness, but its awesome, unrelenting profuseness of creation and destruction, and the marvel that we ourselves are privileged to be among the creatures of that fierce and irrepressible power. To reflect deeply on such matters is to be transported to a sense of the sublime, and through the gateway of the sublime to an overpowering sense of the inviolable sacredness of nature.11 To profane the sacred is to put ourselves who are but one species among innumerable others in a position where all of nature belongs. It is to usurp the proper religious significance and value of nature as a whole and foolishly to claim that significance and value for ourselves. Nature does not exist just to serve us, despite what we may long have believed. In the standpoint of Religion of Nature, we are obligated religiously as well as morally to recognize and work for the good of nature in all its aspects, in whatever we think or do. This acute feeling of responsibility and demand is awareness of the sacredness of nature as a metaphysical fact. To be oblivious to it, to violate it in forthright ways, or to focus exclusively on imagined human wellbeing at the expense of the well-being of nature, is to yield to idolatrous seductions and misconceptions of the sacred. Anthropocentrism and profanation go together, just as do nature-centeredness and appropriate acknowledgment of the sacred. Bemoaning human finitude and the fragility and limitation of humanity’s physical nature. Symptoms of this second kind of profanation of nature and our place as human beings in nature are yearning for an unnatural state of imagined perfection; dreaming of some kind of transcendence of our finitude as natural creatures; and pining for a home beyond our natural home. These attitudes, outlooks, and feelings are profanations of nature to the extent that they express radical ingratitude for all of nature’s gifts, accord to us humans an importance surpassing that of the whole of nature and all of its other creatures, and deny the responsibilities belonging to us as members of the community of creatures on earth, dependent with them on the integrity and soundness of the earthly environment. The dream of floating free of earth and its limitations is also a dream of being exempt from the obligations an earth-bound existence imposes on us. It is to regard our time on earth as a mere

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sojourn and passing phase of a journey that we are hastening to get behind us in the hope that it will lead to some kind of unearthly, unblemished paradise. It is to deny, or ardently to wish to find some way of being able to deny, our nature as creatures of the earth. The dream of transcending our finitude and physicality profanes nature and our own nature. Such a dream is not only based in an illusion. It is also a willful rejection of the distinctive gifts that nature has bestowed on us as one of its myriad forms of life and of the responsibilities that flow from those bestowals. An analogy that comes to mind is that of a person who deplores and seeks in every way to avoid paying taxes to support a city’s infrastructure, assisting those in need who live within the city’s boundaries, voting in the city’s elections, or taking responsibility for any aspect of the city’s needs because the person plans soon to move away from the city and assumes that he or she will have no need of its infrastructure or of continuing relations with its citizens. “Just passing through!” is the motto the person proclaims as an intended justification for lack of commitment to the city and concern for its citizens. But what if there is no other place to live and make our home? What if our status as creatures of nature here on earth and as members of its community of creatures, including but not confined to its human creatures, is the whole story of our nature and destiny? And what if it is both futile and arrogant to deny our finite, physical nature and to ignore nature’s gifts as well as to wish somehow to transcend its limitations? Such futility and arrogance, such colossal ingratitude and insensitivity, would amount to a willful profanation of nature, a flying in the face of its sacredness. Such is the viewpoint of Religion of Nature, and condemnations of such sinful ingratitude, arrogance, and denial can figure in the outlook of other religious perspectives as well. If the Psalmist is correct in proclaiming, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; /The world and they that dwell therein,”12 then the goodness of earthly life should not be scorned, resisted, or denied but welcomed with gratitude and enthusiasm. And the responsibilities for helping to maintain the goodness of the earth and the health of its creatures should not be lightly regarded or dismissed, whether by adherents of Religion of Nature or by devout theists. To think or act in such ways is to profane the sacredness of earthly life and its inestimable gifts. In contrast, to reverence the sacred goodness of the earth, along with its

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built-in ambiguities and limitations, is gladly to accept and affirm our place and responsibilities as an integral part of the interlinked systems and relations of all living and nonliving beings in nature. To do so is to exhibit natural piety: due recognition of the intrinsic sacredness of nature. Allowing the evident evils of an ambiguous nature to overshadow completely its evident and abundant goods. The final evidence of impiety toward nature, and thus of willful profanation of its sacredness that I make mention of here is focusing exclusively on its constraints, hazards, and evils, refusing to acknowledge them as necessary concomitants of its provisions, protections, and goods, and in that way giving in to a starkly one-sided mood of pessimism and nihilism. The sorrows and pains of earthly life are undeniable, and some humans have much more reason to complain of them than do others. There is undeniable truth in the observation that life is often unfair to humans, conferring benefits such as the following on some while denying them to others: freedom from disfigurement, disease, or chronic suffering and pain; adequate food and shelter; generous amounts of physical and/or mental ability; supportive parents; loving relationships with spouse, children, and extended family; enjoyment of good friendships; stimulating challenges and satisfying accomplishments over the span of a long lifetime; and being born in a peaceful, well-ordered nation and society. One person may be maimed or killed in a horrible natural disaster, while another person emerges from it unscathed. Whole cities may be wiped out by natural disasters, as in the sudden destruction of the ancient city of Pompeii by the volcanic eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius. Nature’s laws are inflexible, and its processes are sometimes mercilessly destructive for those who get in their way. These processes often lie outside the range of human prediction, prevention, or control. Moreover, natural prey and their progeny are routinely killed and eaten by predators in order that the predators and their progeny can live and flourish. Misuses of the good of human freedom can have disastrous consequences for humans and nonhumans alike. Human institutions can become pervasively corrupt and in some cases unbelievably cruel and destructive. The nefarious effects of the institution of slavery in the United States, for example, cannot be adequately described in words of mere prosaic description. It requires all the resources of artistic expression and evocation to help us witness and experience those

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effects, even if only at secondhand. The motion picture Twelve Years a Slave, to cite one instance, does so with revealing and horrifying power. Based on the true story of how Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, was abducted and sold into slavery in Louisiana before the Civil War, the movie shows how deep-rooted the institution of slavery and the ideology of racism were in the hearts of white slaveholders, their overseers, and their culture and society at that time, and how disastrous its consequences were for the human beings condemned to oppressive, humiliating, and hopeless bondage.13 Another telling example both of individual and institutional human evil is the ecological destructiveness of human beings and their institutions, of their rampant technologies and exponentially expanding population—a destructiveness besmirching the face of the earth today that requires prompt and thoroughgoing attention. It is especially important to note that pessimistic or nihilistic attitudes toward nature can have the profane outcome of apathy and indifference toward the blatantly evil effects of human encroachments and attacks on the integrity of the earth’s creatures and ecological systems. Humans have the responsibility and freedom to do something about their individual, social, and environmental evils, but the difficulty of doing so becomes increasingly greater the longer these evils are tolerated and allowed. We should by no means minimize the amount of evils of various kinds that characterize nature in its past or present, or in its human as well as nonhuman aspects, and that will continue to characterize it in the future. But we also need to balance these evils and put them in proper perspective with acknowledgment of nature’s numerous goods. A realistic attitude is amply warranted. A thoroughly pessimistic one is not. The metaphysical truth about nature and its human species with the two-sided sword of freedom is that both are actually and possibly intricate mixtures of goods and evils. This truth becomes distorted when we allow one side of that mixture to minimize or discount the reality of the other. Distortion in either direction is profanation of the sacred, because it denies the full reality of the sacred as it presents itself to the unjaundiced, unprejudiced eye. To insist that nature in its every detail is morally good, constructive, or helpful is as false a picture as to insist that everything in it is evil. Nature in all of its necessary ambiguity is affirmed as sacred and religiously right in Religion of Nature and in the metaphysical

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outlook I outline and defend in this book. That sacredness and rightness do not endorse complacency or sentimentality, but they give support to a kind of engaged, effortful gratitude, with a deeplying sense of obligation to our natural world and to the fellow creatures of our world, human and nonhuman alike. The evils of the world, both those of a systemic natural kind and those of a human, moral kind, are starkly and sadly real and cannot be brushed over or ignored. We humans are creatures of nature—nothing more and nothing less. And we can be grateful for the privilege of being such creatures, and ones possessed with both consciousness and freedom. Expressions of this gratitude can include compassionate help and support by more fortunate humans on behalf of those of their own species who are less so. It can include the righting of human wrongs, working for social justice, and striving for the elimination of destructive, harmful human practices and conditions. Also included in the gratitude that gives fitting acknowledgment to the earth in all its aspects as sacred ground is loving attention to and concern for the welfare of the innumerable nonhuman living creatures of earth and for the integrity and stability of the natural environments on which they, as well as we, crucially depend. Profound ecological sensitivity and action, on the one hand, and grateful, wholehearted recognition of the sacredness of nature, on the other, are inseparably conjoined.14 There is a passage in Alfred North Whitehead’s little book called Modes of Thought of which I am especially fond. I quote it here, and then I comment briefly on the significance I think it has for this chapter. When we survey nature and think however flitting and superficial has been the animal enjoyment of its wonders, and when we realize how incapable the separate cells and pulsations of each flower are of enjoying the total effect— then our sense of the value of the details for the totality dawns upon our consciousness. This is the intuition of holiness, the intuition of the sacred, which is at the foundation of all religion.15 Each of us humans, and each of all the other incalculably diverse particular details of the universe as well, acquires its final claim to value

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and importance by its engagement with and contribution to what can be justifiably regarded as having utmost, overarching, or as Whitehead terms it, total or all-inclusive value and importance. Whatever fits this latter description is, as he suggests, the holy or sacred. For Religion of Nature and at least some other forms of religious naturalism, the never-beginning, never-ending, ever-emerging, ever-changing, relentlessly creating and destroying, systemic but loose-limbed concatenation of complexes, traits, beings, and becomings that is nature qualifies for this role of religious ultimacy.16 Sacred nature is the appropriate object of ardent faith and commitment. It always has been and always will be. The ephemeral flower in the glade brings this fact into distinct focus even when no conscious being is there to acknowledge the flower’s fragrant loveliness or its far-reaching reverberations of religious meaning. In this chapter, I briefly explicated some meanings of the term sacred and of its closely related term holy. I explained and defended the idea that nature is intrinsically sacred and argued that this sacredness should be recognized as a prominent and essential part of nature’s metaphysical character. I also indicated some of the attitudes and actions by which that sacredness can be and has been routinely profaned by human beings. And I pointed to some of the dire consequences of such profaning, unholy, desecrating attitudes and actions. In particular, I cited centering unduly on human beings, bemoaning human finitude and physicality, and responding pessimistically and nihilistically to the ambiguities of nature as prime examples of the profanation of nature’s sacredness. I also noted that due recognition of the sacredness of nature, and of attitudes and actions that should follow from and accord with it, is not restricted to the outlook of Religion of Nature or characteristic only of other forms of religious naturalism. Recognition of the intrinsic sacredness of nature is also an important part of the outlooks, teachings, and practices of many other religious perspectives, even if it is subordinated to something claimed to be even more sacred or holy than nature, such as God. The ecological crisis of our present age makes serious reflections on and responses to the intrinsic sacredness of nature especially urgent and important. For numerous living creatures of the

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earth—and perhaps eventually for the human species itself—these reflections and responses address issues of life and death. The sacredness of nature, when this sacredness is recognized as a fundamental metaphysical reality rather than as a mere subjective projection, preference, or opinion, not only has profound theoretical significance for philosophy, but has immediate and unavoidable practical implications as well. These practical implications call for hard thought and decisive individual and social action.

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Chapter 8 Summing Up [W]hat distinguishes the primary interest of the metaphysician is the advocacy of a certain way of looking at the world. His concern is to offer us a vision of the world; and when he points to the relative inadequacies of older, inherited visions, he proposes a revision of the world in new and, he believes, more fruitful terms. —Milton K. Munitz1

I

n this final chapter, I offer a brief summary of the book as a whole—a synoptic view of its parts and their relations to one another. The chapters of the book are intended to give insight into my suggested vision (and revision) of prominent aspects of the experienced world, and into the relations of this vision to a naturalistic type of religious faith. In keeping with Milton K. Munitz’s description of the task of the metaphysician as set forth in the epigraph to this concluding chapter,2 I hope that my articulation of this particular vision will be “fruitful” at least to the extent of encouraging further thought about and dialogue relating to the critical issues brought under discussion here. In the first chapter of this book, I argue that there never has been and never will be such a thing as sheer nothingness. In fact, the notion that nothing once “existed” or “was the case,” or could now exist or be the case in the future, makes no linguistic or conceptual sense. Nothing is a term that contrasts in particular cases with something existing or thought to exist. It is the absence of something or other. It has no meaning apart from the assumed priority of, or

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contrast with, something existing. Its meaning is privative, not substantive. It makes no sense to think of the universe popping into existence from nowhere, and even the Big Bang theorists concede that this statement holds true, positing the instabilities of a so-called quantum vacuum or an extremely dense nugget of potential energy as the origin of the present universe. But can we not conceive of the whole universe just vanishing and nothing being left in its place? No, because even if the present universe were to reach a state of near thermodynamic equilibrium and most of its familiar operations were to shut down, its remnants would still be active in some measure and remain. And their perturbations would be likely to have new creative power. Sheer nothingness is inconceivable, and even if it could somehow be shown to be conceivable, it is unlikely in the extreme. If this analysis holds, and I invite the reader to look again at the arguments in the opening chapter presented in support of it, there is no deep mystery about the existence of the universe. It is wonderful that it exists—an extremely important metaphysical statement about the sacred value of the universe explicated in chapter 7—but no perplexing wonder that it should do so—a different kind of metaphysical statement. And because, in order to exist, it would have to do so in some manner, there is no great mystery about it having some particular manner in which it exists. And there is no ground for believing that it was or is necessary that it exist in its present form, contrary to a supposed principle of sufficient reason. Contingency or chance cannot so easily be dismissed, as I argue in chapter 4. There is convincing ground for believing that a universe of some kind must always have existed and will always continue to do so. An upshot of these considerations is that all change is transformation of something already existing. There is no such thing, as I point out in this first chapter and reiterate in chapter 4, as de novo, spontaneous, baseless change. Another way of putting this point is to note that all possibilities for change in the future are resident in the past proximal to that future. There are no detached, free-floating possibilities, entirely independent of what has already occurred. We can seek for explanations within the scope of nature, but there is no point in trying to account for nature as such or nature as a whole. In all its forms and manifestations, it is the given, the ultimate something in terms of which all explanations must take

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place. As the context for all explanation, nature does not itself require explanation. If this naturalistic claim is rejected, then the given will be something else that exists, such as God, from whom the existence of the universe is said to be derived. In no case is sheer nothingness plausible as a posited “situation” prior to the existence of the world. This chapter also includes a brief excursus into the nature and role of time, and especially into the question of whether time itself has had a beginning. I conclude that time as the property, function, or outcome of ongoing process or change always has been and always will exist as a fundamental metaphysical fact. The universe always has been and always will be a changing universe, a universe that exhibits on every level ongoing processes of gain and loss, creation and destruction, continuity and novelty. It will never stand still or reach a state of static timelessness. The discussion of time in this chapter points the way to its further discussion and analysis in chapter 3, which deals with permanence and change. I argue in chapter 2 that the universe is one in some aspects but many in others. It is neither to the exclusion of the other. It is one in the sense of being this particular universe (or sequence of subuniverses unfolding in endless time) and not some other one. It is also one in the sense of being the sum total of all the systems that comprise it. It is not something over and above those systems, however. It is not an order of all orders. We can speak of the universe as the totality of orders, of whatever grand, intermediate, or minimal sort. We can conceive of it as a whole without reducing its parts to that whole. And we can speak of the multiple modes of interrelation of those parts without having to assume that everything is or must be directly related to everything else. There are real connections and real disconnections in nature, and this point is a clue to the third chapter, with its discussions of permanence and change. I also propose in this chapter the need for a kind of materialism or physicalism that would attempt to do justice to all that matter does and has shown itself capable of doing over the course of the universe’s changes and developments. Such a materialistic metaphysics would require radical revisions in current conceptions of matter in physics and other fields of thought. It would combine a portrayal of the unity or persistent underlying character and trajectory of matter with the dazzling plurality of its manifestations as these have evolved and emerged over time.

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In chapter 3 I contend again that there is no such thing as absolute permanence or an absolutely permanent or timeless universe. In an alleged wholly permanent universe there would be no disconnections, only connections. Such a universe would be a deterministic block universe. It would be like a formal system in mathematics or logic, in which all relations are deductive or necessary and in which there is no place for contingency or looseness. There would also be no place for changes of any kind in such a universe. But our universe is not like this, despite the dream of Platonistic mathematicians that it ultimately is so. Ours is a universe of restless and unceasing change, as is shown by the evolutionary changes that have marked its past and continue to do at present and on into the future. Change is also a prominent feature of the universe moment by moment and day by day, as is shown by the experienced facts of dynamism, movement, alteration, loss, and gain that lie on every hand. Stability at any level is relative rather than absolute. This means that time is ultimately real, that change is inevitable and unceasing, and that absolute permanence exists only in imaginary constructions of the mind. I present four arguments in the chapter defending this thesis. I also take issue with the idea that possibilities belong to some kind of permanent, unchanging metaphysical realm, supporting instead the claim that possibilities come into being and pass out of being, just as actualities do. All possibilities are therefore relevant or real ones posed by the past. There are no pure possibilities existing independently of the passage of time. But is not God permanent or timeless? If God were so, God could not be relevant to or responsive to a changing world. And there would be nothing going on in the mind of God, no challenge, newness, or adventure. God’s mode of being would be an unenviable static state. There would be no such thing as divine experience, because experience involves change. To be God would be to exist in something like an unrelieved and unreliveable coma or catatonic state. No religiously interesting or religiously available conception of God, then, can be conceived that requires that God be absolutely permanent and immutable. And it would not even be interesting to be such a God. Lowly rocks of the roadside or in the creek bed, by contrast, have changing states or forms of being. They, like everything else, are only relatively fixed and stable, not absolutely so. They may once have been parts of large boulders or subterranean magma, and they may eventually

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become grains of sand. Vibrant atoms and their subsystems of dynamic energy underlie the rocks. To exist is to be in process. There is no other kind of existence. And any credible metaphysics must be metaphysics of process, not one that celebrates, elevates, or prioritizes supposed static being. In chapter 4, I present three necessary conditions for understanding cause-effect relations: a relatively stable background of repetition that persists through other kinds of change, provision of real possibilities for change in the causal past, and efficacy in the causes that enables them to produce their effects. I also argue that causality is unintelligible without novelty. If the effect did not differ in some way from the cause, even if only being a new instance of repetition, there could be no way to differentiate it from its cause. There could also be no such thing as the pervasive change argued for in chapter 3, because change requires that a present moment be different in some way from the preceding and following moments. Time, too, then, requires some amount of novelty in the present moment that distinguishes it from the past moment, and time should be recognized as a combination of continuity and novelty—of leaving something of the past behind in order to move with freshness and distinctness into the present and future. Freedom, in its turn, depends on there being such a thing as novelty, that is, the presence of alternative possible outcomes available to the chooser in times of choice and the ability of the chooser to select one of those possible outcomes. If there are no such things as indeterminism in the universe and no ultimate power of selection among real alternatives residing in humans and other creatures, there can be no such thing as genuine freedom of choice. But it is also true that there can be no such thing as time or change if the thesis of causal determinism holds true, in which case the universe reverts in its ultimate character to being a static block universe entirely devoid of change or temporal alterations. The universe does not accord with this description, at least not if we are willing to subject tests of its character to the court of experience and to refrain from restricting analysis of it to mere abstract ways of thinking. I explain in this chapter why genuine freedom is the precondition for meaningful thought and inquiry, and thus for the pursuit of reliable knowledge. And I note why real freedom is also necessary for moral responsibility and moral action, a point taken up again in chapter 6. I expose—as against the view of Daniel Dennett and

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others—the extreme implausibility of the notion that human beings are, at bottom, nothing more than predetermined causal machines or robots and show that, without genuine freedom and a fundamental role for the inner, firsthand experiences of humans, their lives are stripped of existential meaning and value. Finally, I focus on some of the insurmountable incoherencies that bedevil the contemporary natural sciences when causal determinism is insisted on and a significant role for metaphysical novelty or chance is flatly denied. In chapter 5 I continue to argue, as I did in chapter 2, for a radically new and revised conception of matter that can take into account all that matter has shown itself over vast stretches of time to be capable of becoming and doing. I contend that such a conception would reject the notion that the concept of matter must be restricted to how matter is portrayed in physics, although it would take that portrayal thoroughly into account. It would also take note of the many contested issues and unresolved problems in current physics and would seek for resolutions of these issues and problems in the interest of contributing to the search for a coherent and adequate conception of matter. In keeping with the materialistic metaphysics of this book, I indicate that space, time, and relations should be viewed as functions or aspects of matter rather than as existing independently or in their own right, and that they should be seen as local and variable rather than global and fixed. The revised conception of matter for which I plead would need to give careful attention to developments and ways of thinking in chemistry, biology, and psychology, to speak of three other scientific disciplines, and it would draw on fields of thought such as philosophy, the arts, and religion as well. In this metaphysical outlook, where matter is seen as the seedbed of life and mind, its capacity to be such would need to be thoroughly explicated. The role of far-from-equilibrium dynamic systems discussed in chapter 4 would need to be brought squarely into view. Novel evolutionary emergences would be given their due and, with them, the continuing upsurges of new possibilities as well as of new actualities. Novelty in its role of metaphysical chance would thus have to be given full credit. And in the case of the emergence of sentience and mind, the roles of purposive goal-seeking and freedom of choice would need to be accorded their proper and irreducible places. The arrow of time would be seen as irreversible and as setting aside some of the old in order that aspects of the new might come into being.

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Chapter 6 addresses the metaphysical status and meanings of good and evil. Epistemological and aesthetic goods and evils are briefly described and discussed, and their metaphysical status is emphasized. The main focus of the chapter is on moral goods and evils. In it I discuss the general obligatory character and possibility of moral goodness, using the insights of Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative and drawing on George Lucas’s illuminating interpretation of these insights. This general character and possibility, I argue along with Lucas, admit of variations in particular, more specific moral standards and codes, thus allowing for a kind of pluralism that does not degenerate into moral relativism. I seek to bring into focus the nature of moral evil, and I provide examples of particular kinds of moral evil. I indicate that the universe is an arena of value and not just of facts, and show why this view of it must figure prominently in any viable metaphysical analysis and description. Implicit in my discussions is the critical point that in order for these epistemological, aesthetic, and moral values to have the significance they deserve, humans must be free to argue for and be critical of claims to knowledge; investigate and experience aesthetic meaning and create significant works of art; and deliberate on and choose correct moral courses of action. I make reference in this way to the metaphysical status and requirement for freedom, a central topic of chapter 4. Along with human freedom and the cosmic indeterminacy it requires—themes reemphasized and discussed anew in this chapter—I also highlight in the chapter human rationality and human sociability as comprising together four metaphysical conditions that underlie and give support to moral values. Chapter 7 is devoted to the topic of the sacred and the profaned. I show that they too constitute a fundamental type of value (and disvalue) to be carefully considered along with epistemological, aesthetic, and moral values. I assign to this type of value, along with the other three, a crucial metaphysical status. I present meanings of the sacred (or holy) and point out contrasting meanings of the profaned. I claim that the universe itself is inviolably sacred in all of its aspects. I list and discuss three basic types of profanation of the sacredness of the universe and trace out some of their consequences. I defend the religious rightness (or sacredness) of the universe in the face of its undeniable and inescapable ambiguities. And I insist that recognition, respect, responsibility, and reverence in thought and action are proper responses to this sacredness and

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that they are incumbent on people of all religious outlooks, not just those of Religion of Nature or other versions of religious naturalism. In this chapter, religious sensibility, inquiry, and practice are claimed to be crucial and ineliminable sources of metaphysical understanding, that is, of a comprehensive philosophical vision of reality and of our place as human beings within reality. Metaphysics involves more than religion, but religious awareness and untiring searches for and responses to religious truth and value are essential elements in its proper articulation and conception. Metaphysical assumptions and beliefs are thus necessary parts of religious as well as philosophical outlooks and commitments. They also play crucial if not always explicitly acknowledged roles in various aspects of scientific thinking. The quest for recognition, modification, enlargement, and improvement of metaphysical assumptions and beliefs in all the dimensions of thought and life is a formidable but essential task. As the persistent search for increasing understanding of what is genuinely real in comparison with what is unreal but may initially have been presumed to be real, the task has far-reaching importance and value. This book has provided only a brief outline and discussion of seven central metaphysical topics. They could obviously have been explored in much more depth and detail. Each of the topics by itself has ample scope and significance for a separate book or multiple volumes of books. But I hope that my highlighting of the seven topics and their interrelations, and my arguments relating to them, can help to emphasize the fundamental place of metaphysics as a particular type of philosophical investigation and contribute to continuing metaphysical exploration, argument, and awareness. But more than metaphysical clarity and understanding is involved. A proper understanding of nature in its intrinsic sacredness and of the integral, radically interdependent place of humans in nature is an essential part of awakening us in our day to our critical obligations to nature and to the community of all of our fellow nonhuman creatures. We are in desperate need of this awakening in a time of widespread, largely anthropogenic species endangerments and severe ecological crisis. It is good to think deeply about concepts of reality, but we also need to think tirelessly about how to act in light of concepts that prove to be most cogent, useful, and applicable. Above all, we should do so with full awareness of the awesome sacredness of nature. This book has accentuated the thinking aspect, but I hope

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that it can make some contribution to our devising and following through on appropriate courses of action as well. We are beings with the inestimable gift of freedom in an open-ended world that allows for responsible and effective freedom. We should put our freedom to the best possible use in doing all that we can to make evident the critical importance of fitting reverence for the sacredness of nature and active engagement in the sacred calling that is ours as residents of an endlessly enthralling—but also imminently endangered—natural home.

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NOTES

Preface 1. 2. 3. 4.

Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle; Metaphysics Z (VII), 1–15, p. 783. Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, B xx, p. 24. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, 3–22, 31–34. This familiar statement is contained in Meditation 17 of the English poet John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624).

Chapter 1 Being and Nothingness 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, The Principles of Nature and of Grace, Based on Reason. In Leibniz Selections, 522–533:527. See for example Genesis1:2 in the Hebrew Bible and Plato’s dialogue the Timaeus, 50b–52c, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 1177–1179. Aristotle, Physics, VIII, 1, 2. See Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, 354–360. See the second of the five ways in which Thomas Aquinas argues for God’s existence in his Summa Theologica, I, Question 2, Article 3. See Thomas Aquinas, Introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas, 25–26. See the third of the five ways in which Aquinas argues for God’s existence in Summa Theologica, I, Question 2, Article 3. See Aquinas, Introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas, 26. Loyal Rue, Nature is Enough: Religious Naturalism and the Meaning of Life; John F. Haught, Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science. Rue wrote his book in part as a direct response to Haught.

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7.

8.

9.

10.

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Haught, Is Nature Enough? 80. Immanent novelty is not factored in by Haught, and therefore emergence of genuinely new things such as mind is not allowed. It is always the “same old, same old” in this kind of thinking. Haught’s reasoning is reminiscent of Descartes’ assumption that the cause must be at least as great as the effect, or that more cannot result from less. Like Haught, Descartes argues for God’s existence on this basis. See René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation III, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 162. I return to the critical metaphysical character and role of immanent novelty in chapter 4. When I speak of the universe or nature, I mean these terms to encompass the possibility of universes other than this one, either as preceding it or concurrent with it, issues I take up in the next section. The universe may thus include or contain multiverses and relate to them as a metaverse. See Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing. Krauss readily acknowledges that “empty space is not quite so empty” (62). On the term quantum vacuum, see xxiv, 159. Vacuum in ordinary English connotes total absence or emptiness, but this is not the scientific sense of the term in current physics, as Krauss’s book makes clear. Krauss describes his sense of nothing as involving quantum perturbations or instabilities when he quotes with approval the claim of physicist Frank Wilczek that “[t]he answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing’ would be that ‘nothing’ is unstable” (159). Even the properties of so-called empty space, Krauss claims, could be explained by a quantum theory of gravity, which merges quantum mechanics with general relativity (161). But in all these cases, there remains an original something, however minimal or radically attenuated that something is thought to be. A list of nine parallel universe scenarios is provided in physicist and science writer Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, 355. Each scenario is discussed in other parts of his book. Supposed parallel universes that are in principle inaccessible to any kind of empirical verification or falsification are of dubious status as scientific hypotheses, and the same point would apply to them, in my view, as viable philosophical hypotheses. Roberto Mangabeira Unger makes this point when he states: “If the postulated entities [parallel universes] cannot ever be observed, and no trace of them even indirectly found, the application of the idea of prediction has lost touch with what prediction has meant in science.” I have to agree with Unger on this issue. See Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy, 120.

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11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

159

Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Book X. Grünbaum makes this statement while being interviewed by Jim Holt. See Holt, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, 71. See Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, especially 127–142, where Greene argues that there is no such thing as a river or flow of time. “In this way of thinking,” he explains, “events, regardless of when they happen from any particular perspective, just are. They all exist. They eternally occupy their particular point in spacetime. There is no flow” (139). See also Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics. Barbour contends that, according to the theories and findings of contemporary physics, “time truly does not exist. This also applies to motion: the suggestion is that it too is an illusion. If we could see the universe as it is, we should see that it is static. Nothing moves, nothing changes” (39). “For we convinced physicists,” Einstein alleged in one of his letters to Michele Besso, “the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.” The quote is from Albert Einstein Michele Besso: Correspondence 1903–1955. It is cited in Greene, The Fabric of the Universe, 139. Lee Smolin, “The Unique Universe.” http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/2009/jun/02/the-unique-universe. For a discussion of the idea that mathematics is reality or that mathematical existence and physical existence are one and the same, see Greene, The Hidden Reality, 343–345. After considering this idea, Greene rejects it, as well he should. The mathematician Hermann Minkowski’s conflation of space and time into spacetime was taken up as a basic feature of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It can suggest the metaphor of a kind of elastic “fabric” subject to stretching, compressing, or bending. This conflation, useful as it is in physics, can have the effect of dulling or even extinguishing the distinctive, nonreducible, nonreversible character of time as a real trait of the universe. The relativity of time in Einstein’s thought is relativity with respect to measurements of a rate of change. A change of velocity affects the amount of mass in a changing system, which, in turn, affects its rate of change. Greene’s discussion of a supposed “block” or “loaf ” of spacetime that can be “cut” at different angles by relativistic time is helpful for understanding the idea of spacetime, but it can also reinforce, if we are not careful to think of it metaphorically, a tendency to think of the universe as some kind of block devoid of real change or temporal process, or of spacetime as some kind of uniform substance. See Greene, The Fabric of the Universe, 51–61.

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Chapter 2 One and Many 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

William James, Pragmatism, in James, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, 64. See chapter VIII, “Parmenides of Elea” in G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, eds., The Presocratic Philosophers. Plotinus, The Philosophy of Plotinus: Selected Texts, 55–56 and passim. See the section on Shankara (there rendered as Shamkara) in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore, eds. A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, 506–543 Benedict Spinoza, Ethics in the Geometrical Order, in The Chief Works of Spinoza, 46–50. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, 84–87, 224. These passages are from Schopenhauer’s book The World as Will and Idea, published in 1844. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay. See chapter VI “Heraclitus of Ephesus” in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, eds., The Presocratic Philosophers. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature. See, for example, 18, 24, 36, 233. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 85. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 52; A Pluralistic Universe, 146–147. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology: Corrected Edition. Justus Buchler, Metaphysics of Natural Complexes. Ibid., 265, 275. Ibid., 265, 273, 275–76. Ibid., 1, 2. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 269. Ibid., 276. Ibid., 269. John Dewey, A Common Faith, 19. The emphasis is mine. James, Essays on Faith and Morals, 331; James, A Pluralistic Universe, 19. George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge/Three Dialogues. See Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 61–69. Nagel can be called a panpsychist in the sense that he wants to posit teleological laws as basic to and somehow guiding the universe from the very outset. I regard teleology as an emergent phenomenon, and the possibility of its emergence as itself emergent. That is, teleology is dependent on emergent orders of

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26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

161

great complexity that make it possible at one time when it was not at an earlier time. In my view, neither the possibility of the emergence of teleological phenomena nor the actuality of such phenomena is primordial. Both are derivative and arrive at later stages in the development of the present universe. See, for example, Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness and A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo, 243–244. Ibid., 241–242. Donald A. Crosby, The Philosophy of William James: Radical Empiricism and Radical Materialism. Chapter 9 of this book calls attention to the radically unfinished, anomalous, puzzling, and unsatisfying descriptions of the nature of matter in current physics. Philosopherphysicist Meinard Kuhlmann discusses the lack of consensus among scientists about the metaphysical character of the basic constituents of quantum physics. Are these supposed constituents particles, fields, relations, or properties? Kuhlmann contends that they might best be considered as either relations or properties because there are seemingly intractable problems with regarding them as either particles or fields. Yet physicists continue to speak of particle physics and quantum field theory. Regarding the fundamental constituents of quantum physics as either relations or properties also poses its own kinds of conceptual problem, as Kuhlmann observes. For example, it may be difficult to explain how there could be relations without relata, or to imagine properties that are not properties of something. Kuhlmann comments that today’s quantum field theory is quite successful from an empirical standpoint, telling us what we can measure. But “it speaks in riddles when it comes to the nature of whatever entities give rise to our observations.” He pleads for a “union of the two disciplines” of physics and philosophy “at a time when physicists find themselves revisiting the very foundations of their subject.” He is right in contending that the histories, approaches, methods, and competencies of the two disciplines are complementary and that the two need to be kept in close dialogue with each other. See Meinard Kuhlmann, “What Is Real?” in Scientific American, August 2013:40–47, p. 47. For other discussions of the unsettled state of the concept of matter or material phenomena in contemporary physics, see Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science, and What Comes Next and Alexander Unzicker and Sheilla Jones, Bankrupting Physics: How Today’s Top Scientists are Gambling Away Their Credibility. Philip Clayton, “On the Plurality of Complexity Producing Mechanisms,” in Complexity and the Arrow of Time, 332–350:339. See also

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31. 32.

33.

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Clayton’s third point on page 342, which contains these statements: “The laws of physics are necessary but not sufficient for explaining the nature and interactions of biological agents. There is an asymmetry here: Darwinian explanations must be consistent with the laws of physics, but the general laws of biology (if such exist) do not similarly constrain the motions of all physical particles.” James Blachowicz, Essential Difference: Toward a Metaphysics of Emergence, 258. Primack’s statement is in Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack, The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World, 195. Richard Ward communicated this notion to me in personal correspondence and enclosed an unpublished paper in support of it. The paper is in the form of a report to the Office of Chief Naturalist, Rocky Mountain National Park (in Colorado) and is entitled “Alpine Tundra on Fall Mountain, RMNP.” See especially page 7 of the report.

Chapter 3 Permanence and Change 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Aristotle, Physics, I.7, 191a, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, 233. Deuteronomy 33:27 Psalm 90:2 Psalm 102:13, James 1:17, Hebrews 13:8. All quotations from the Hebrew Bible are contained in The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text: A New Translation. Those from the Christian New Testament are contained in The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Oxford Annotated Edition, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII.6, 1071b, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, 878. Ibid., XII.10, 1029a, 886. Ibid., XII.10, 1076a, 888. See Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, VI, 510b–511e, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 745–747. Aurelius Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Book Eleven, ed. Edward B. Pusey, 194. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 5, Prose 6, trans. Richard Green, 115–119. Benedict Spinoza, Ethics in the Geometrical Order. Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe, 50–53. Philip K. Dick, Counter-Clock World. Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics, 44. Ibid., 45.

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17.

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Ibid., 246–247. Tim Folger, “Newsflash: Time May Not Exist,” Discover, June 12, 2007. See endnote 13 in chapter 1, where I make reference to Barbour’s view of time and also to that of physicist Brian Greene. As I indicate there, Greene concurs with Barbour’s view that time is ultimately unreal. A view similar to theirs is taken and defended by physicist Max Tegmark in chapter 11 of his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. The chapter’s title question “Is Time an Illusion?” is answered unequivocally in the affirmative, and Tegmark endorses a view like Barbour’s, that is, that time consists in disconnected and nonflowing “nows” in a wholly static spacetime. See, for example, Barbour’s enthusiastic celebration of the existential implications of his vision of reality as a collection of disconnected Nows in the Epilogue to his book The End of Time. Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, 3, 26, 56. Physicist Lee Smolin ably defends the idea that there must be a deep, fundamentally temporal and asymmetrical law or initial condition of the universe that lies behind the symmetrical or reversible ones such as those of general relativity. See Smolin, Time Reborn, 207–209, and passim. Lincoln was quoting a statement of Jesus in the Christian New Testament that would have been well-known to members of his audience. See Mark 3:25 and Matthew 12:25. See Aristotle, Physics, IV, 11, 219b, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, 292. In the scholium to Definition VIII of his Principia Newton defines “absolute, true, and mathematical time” as flowing “equably without relation to anything external,” that is, as independently of motion or change. See Isaac Newton, Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections from his Writings, 17. For an informative discussion of this notion, and of Newton’s relating it to God, see E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, 244–265. Prigogine, The End of Certainty, 170. The term “history” is critical here, for it implies nonreversibility or the uni-directionality of time. Thus we should amend Aristotle’s conception of time as the indication of change to say that it is the indication of irreversible change. Prigogine makes this point in The End of Certainty, 167, 171. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology: Corrected Edition, 22–23; 31–32. Smolin, Time Reborn, xvi. Holmes Rolston III, Three Big Bangs: Matter-Energy, Life, Mind, 37. Justus Buchler, Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, 166–167. Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” The Monist 1:2 (1891): 161–176; quoted in Smolin, Time Reborn, xxv.

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Smolin, Time Reborn, xxv. For further development and defense of the idea of successive universes, see Smolin’s book written with philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy, part I, chapter 3, part II, chapter 4, and passim. Nobel Laureate in Physics Paul Dirac also had the view that the laws of nature can undergo change over vast periods of time. He said in a lecture at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Trieste, Italy) in 1968: “It is usually assumed that the laws of nature have always been the same as they are now. There is no justification for this. The laws may be changing, and in particular, quantities which are considered to be constants of nature may be varying with cosmological time” (Marco Mamone Capria, ed., Physics Before and After Einstein [Amsterdam, Netherlands: IOS Press, 2005, 156]; quoted in Alexander Unzicker and Sheilla Jones, Bankrupting Physics: How Today’s Top Scientists are Gambling Away their Credibility, 66). Another example of a physicist who takes regards natural law as mutable and evolving is David Ritz Finkelstein. See his chapter “Physical Process and Physical Law,” in Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process, and Experience, 180–186:182–184. James Russell Lowell, from his poem “The Present Crisis” (1844), in The Poems of James Russell Lowell Complete and Unabridged. Smolin, Time Reborn, 120. I do not personally find reason or need to believe in a God of any sort. For me, nature is both metaphysically and religiously ultimate. But some of my arguments in this book have bearing on the plausibility of particular types of belief in God.

Chapter 4 Causality, Novelty, and Freedom 1. 2. 3. 4.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, 330. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 382–83, 361; the emphasis in the second quotation is Bergson’s. Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, 182. In his book Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett declares that determinism, which he endorses throughout his book, means that there is one and only one physically possible future at any instant. Thus, if we were able to look at the universe from a “God’s-eye” perspective, we would find that “nothing ever changes—the whole history of the universe is laid out ‘at once’. . . .” But this (alleged) fact of a fixed future for all that occurs, including the whole course of one’s life does not, according to Dennett, mean that one’s nature is unchanging or unchangeable.

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There can be plenty of changes in the course of one’s life because we have been evolutionary evolved to be entities that are caused to “change their natures, in response to interactions with the rest of the world.” The thesis of determinism is not, therefore, in Dennett’s view, at odds with self-directed changes in one’s life and character over time when viewed, not from a God’s-eye perspective, but from one’s own internal or subjective perspective. Subjectively, we humans are agents in control of many of our actions and can be said to be “free” so long as our acting is not impeded from outside ourselves or in conflict with our intentions. See Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 25, 93. Dennett is therefore unperturbed by the absence of either chance or freedom in my sense of those terms. His analysis of causality is also different, because for him causes are entirely sufficient to account for their effects. No element of chance or novelty, in my sense of these terms, is involved. And my differences from him turn to a significant extent on the different meanings he and I assign to these three terms. We have fundamentally different views, that is to say, on what a God’seye view of the universe would amount to or on what is objectively the case. Dennett also seems to want to deny the ultimate reality of time from a God’s-eye perspective. Time is a persistent and pervasive subjective phenomenon for finite beings such as we are, but because, as he insists, nothing ever could be different or is ever really alterable in his deterministic outlook, time must be seen ultimately or objectively as an illusion (93). In sharp contrast with Bergson’s outlook, noted earlier, time neither makes a difference nor reflects a difference. What occurs must have occurred. It could not have been different, and that is the end of the matter. Still, Dennett talks repeatedly—inconsistently it seems to me— about changes of all sorts, including changes in the natures or characters of human beings over the course of time. And he places a lot of emphasis in his book on evolutionary processes that have led, seemingly also over the course of time, to changes in the natures of biological organisms that allow for their successful adaptations to their natural environments. There is no genuine evolution or change of any kind, in my view, without objective time, and no objective time without objective novelty. Determinism is opposed to freedom in my sense of the latter term because freedom is impossible if time is unreal, the future is fixed, and there is no possibility of choices being different when the causal conditions underlying them remain the same. Michael Epperson, Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 95–96.

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Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 48–49. Philosopher of science John Dupré notes three disanalogies between machines and living systems. The first is that organisms, unlike machines, “constantly rebuild and replace their worn parts.” The second is that although “it is the specification of parts and their behaviours (activities) that provides the mechanistic explanation,” it is the case, by contrast, that “in biological systems parts often have multiple roles and multiple causal interactions.” The third disanalogy is that while mechanistic accounts involve inventories of stable things and their interactions, “the entities that form the hierarchy of biological ontology are not stable.” They “are not things, but processes.” Biological organisms, Dupré claims, differ from machines in that they are “fundamentally processual.” I believe that everything is processual, but in different degrees. Dupré’s “stable things” are therefore for me relatively so, but not absolutely so. This qualification having been noted, his third disanalogy between machines and organisms still makes an important point. See Dupré, “Living Causes,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 19–37:29–30. Dupré’s paper is part of a larger work entitled Mechanism and Causation in Biology, authored by him and James Woodward. Alicia Juarrero notes still another disanalogy between living beings and machines when she writes, “Because their organization is given ‘from the outside,’ machines are allopoietic. Living organisms, on the other hand, self-assemble, and as such are examples of autopoietic (self-organizing) systems.” See Juarrero, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System, 112. I make further mention of this essential trait of living beings in the next chapter. See Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, 168–169, 174–181. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 98–100. In these pages Kant draws a distinction between heteronomous understandings of the actions of the human will and autonomous ones. Heteronomous acts, as he defines them, are controlled by subjective interests, preferences, and desires regarded as causes that necessarily determine the agent’s decisions, while the autonomous ones are selfdetermining. Kant argues that only self-determining choices and actions can be regarded as truly moral ones, for they express the ultimate responsibility of the agent for his or her actions and for positing or acquiescing in the specific moral laws guiding those actions. Only if human beings are genuinely free, then, can their actions be regarded as having moral import. Moral praise or blame can then be focused ultimately and directly on the agent and not on supposedly more basic causes inclining and finally compelling the agent to act as he or she does in moral situations.

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The Daniel Dennett interview was conducted by Jennifer Schuessler and published in the New York Times with the title of “Philosophy that Stirs the Waters” on April 29, 2013. The occasion for the interview was the publication of Dennett’s book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (New York: Norton, 2013). www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/ books/daniel-dennett-author-of-intuition-pumps-and-other-toolsfor-thinking.html?_r=0 Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained. See pages 441–448 for Dennett’s discussion of Nagel’s article. The latter’s article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” was published in Philosophical Review, 435–450. Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will. Nicholas Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe: Consciousness, Free Will, and Evolution, 116. We should include in Maxwell’s representative list of important inner phenomena experiences of active and efficacious self-agency, that is, subjective, firsthanded experiences of ourselves as consciously and actually deliberating on, choosing, and executing personal choices from a range of genuine alternatives. Maxwell does take into account such experiential phenomena, but he interprets them in a compatibilist fashion and thus in a manner that is fundamentally different from my own noncompatibilist position. Compatibilists contend that freedom of the will is entirely consistent with a deterministic metaphysics, while noncompatibilists argue that genuine human freedom is impossible if determinism is true. For Maxwell’s defense of compatibilism, see his The Human World in the Physical Universe, chapter 6. See ibid., 125–126, 131, 155–156. Prigogine, The End of Certainty, 68. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 69. Prigogine operates in his book with what is called “deterministic chaos,” meaning that the future behavior of dynamical systems exhibiting such chaos is not precisely predictable in practice, even though the behavior is held to be law-like and causally conditioned. The relevant laws are probabilistic rather than certain, and they apply to ensembles rather than to particulars (87–88). Prigogine thus asserts that scientists “are now able to include probabilities in the formulation of the laws of physics. Once this is done, Newtonian determinism fails; the future is no longer determined by the present, and the symmetry between past and present is broken” (5–6). I argue in this chapter for some degree of metaphysical indeterminism, however slight or large, operating at every moment of change or time. Laws depicting such changes or transitions to new moments of time are in all cases probabilistic in principle, therefore, and not just such from the standpoint of our limited human knowledge. If a metaphysical stochastic element

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is allowed for so-called deterministic chaos at every stage, then it becomes consistent with metaphysical indeterminism and the critical role for chance I have argued for in this chapter. Alicia Juarrero states this point well when she notes that “the landscape of a dynamical system, by definition, is never static. Although it remains qualitatively the same between phase changes, it continually shifts in response to the system’s interactions with its environment.” In another place she notes: “Because complex systems are sensitive to initial conditions, irregularities and fluctuations in behavior will be so significant that any prediction of the next move will be practically useless. And the more complex the system, the less the prediction will tell you, even between phase changes.” Juarrero, Dynamics in Action, 160, 222. Juarrero, Dynamics in Action, 120, 126. Prigogine, The End of Certainty, 179, 184. Ibid., 5, 29. The Carnap quote about Einstein is contained in James Gleick, “Time Regained!” a review of Lee Smolin’s Time Reborn. The review is in New York Review of Books, June 6, 2013, 46–49. The quote is on page 48.

Chapter 5 Matter, Life, and Mind 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion, 43. John A. Jungerman, “Evidence for Process in the Physical World,” in Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process, and Experience, 47–55:52–53. Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage, 65. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 48–49. Whitehead associates the concept of matter here with that of “stuff . . . which has the property of simple location in space and time,” but I do not use the term matter in this way, as I have indicated. Whitehead has in mind the notion of Newtonian atoms that undergo no internal changes and any one of which would continue to exist unchanged even if the rest of the universe were to cease to exist. Such atoms require nothing but themselves in order to exist, and once created, they are eternal and unchanging in their essential natures. My conception of subatomic, atomic, and other forms of matter—and the conception of them in current science—is entirely different from this idea. “I will mean by the physical order,” Cahoone writes, “the objects of high-energy physics, the domain of reality for quantum, relativistic, cosmological theories, and the laws of thermodynamics, or what is called ‘fundamental’ physics.” He goes on to allege that “the order

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which directly emerges from the physical” is “the material.” This order “refers to non-living matter with identifiable parts, in the form of atoms (or ions), and the material entities—individuals and ensembles of individuals—which result from their combination. These emerge from the fields and particles of high energy physics.” He then further distinguishes the biological, the mental, and the cultural from the material. See Lawrence Cahoone, The Orders of Nature, 90–92. (I note in passing that a number of physicists restrict the term matter to things possessing mass and volume. Massless particles like photons would not, by this rendering, be material.) My metaphysical outlook differs from Cahoone’s in at least two other respects as well. The first one is that he distinguishes metaphysical materialism from metaphysical pluralism, arguing for the latter as over against the former. I contend that my version of materialism is radically pluralistic because it associates matter with all the diverse things that matter has shown itself capable of doing and becoming. I disagree with Cahoone’s assumption that the physical and material must be associated exclusively or even primarily with one scientific discipline, namely, physics. Where Cahoone sees materialism as reductionistic, I view it in an expansionistic way. That is to say, matter acquires new characteristics via evolutionary emergences while continuing to be matter. The second additional respect in which I differ from Cahoone is his contention that nature requires a “Ground” to account for its present character. For me, nature in its two fundamental aspects of natura naturata and natura naturans is its own ground. See Cahoone, The Orders of Nature, 27–28, 75 on the first point of additional disagreement and 292–293 on the second. Isaac Newton distinguished between relative and absolute time. See footnote 20 of chapter 3 on Newton’s view of absolute time, which he associated with the eternality of God. In similar fashion, he associated absolute space with God’s omnipresence. Finally, God is the locus of absolute force or motion in his omnipotence. Newton states these ideas in this way: “He [God] is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient, that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things and knows all things that can be done. He is not eternity and infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space; but he endures and is present. He endures forever and is everywhere present; and, by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space.” Isaac Newton, Selections From His Writings, 43. On the difference between substantive and relational views of spacetime in physics, and on the uni-directionality of time and cause-effect relations, see Peter Kosso, Appearance and Reality: An Introduction to

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the Philosophy of Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 34–38, 88–91, 66. On space and time as local and relational rather than universal and substantive, see Niels Viggo Hansen, “Spacetime and Becoming: Overcoming the Contradiction Between Special Relativity and the Passage of Time,” in Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process and Experience, ed. Timothy E. Eastman and Hank Keeton, 136–163:154–156. For a somewhat different view, urging “a theory with a dynamically determined preferred global time” [my italics] see Lee Smolin’s argument in Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy, 418–421. Such a theory, Smolin contends, would be applicable to successive universes (or, more properly, to modes of the one, singular universe prior to and subsequent to the present mode) and would allow for the evolution or temporal unfolding of all natural laws, including those of modes of the universe prior to and subsequent to the present one. Smolin’s view can be at least partly reconciled with the one I am defending if we restrict the local view of time to the present universe and allow for a “global” view such as Smolin’s in the interest of making room for time as the measure of changes over the whole span of successive modes of the universe, including changes in natural laws over this whole span. In this case, time would still be a function of change—and entirely relative to change—not something distinct from change. But the ongoing changes in question would extend over past, present, and future modes of the universe. And time would not be thought of as something substantive or absolute in the sense of somehow lying behind, being prior to, or being independent of change. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 157. A Bénard cell is a convection cell resulting from the heating of a liquid in a specially designed apparatus. It results from a phase transition and is based in perturbations at the microscopic level that are initial conditions for the formation of the cell. It is unpredictable from these conditions whether the resulting cell will be clockwise or counterclockwise in its formation. The order of the cell is spontaneous and thus self-ordering, and it is far from equilibrium. The B–Z reaction is also an example of nonlinear dynamics and exhibits a continual oscillation of colors. As Richard Dawkins states, “Catalysts, by definition, are not consumed in the chemical reaction they boost, but they may be produced. An autocatalytic reaction is a reaction that manufactures its own catalyst.” Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, 563. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 56.

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Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 122–127, 159, 178. See also my discussion of inwardness in The Thou of Nature: Religious Naturalism and Reverence for Sentient Life, 22–25. Undue emphasis on the Second Law of Thermodynamics might blind us to the fact that, as Smolin reminds us, “Much of the universe . . . is far from equilibrium. The most common objects in our universe are stars, and these are not in equilibrium with their surroundings.” He notes that “[a] star can be characterized as a system driven far from equilibrium by a steady flow of energy through it.” This energy comes from gravity and nuclear fusion. Converted into starlight, it bathes planets like ours with energy, and it is this energy that drives such far-from-equilibrium, highly ordered systems as those of living beings on earth. See Smolin, Time Reborn, 217. Astrophysicist Eric J. Chaisson observes, “At least as regards energy flow, material resources, and structured integrity while experiencing change, adaptation, and selection, stars have much in common with life.” He hastens to add that stars are not literally alive. See Chaisson, “Using Complexity Science to Search for Unity,” in Complexity and the Arrow of Time, ed. Charles H. Lineweaver, Paul C. W. Davies, and Michael Ruse, 68–79:75. Application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the universe as a whole assumes that the universe is a closed system. But is it? Can we with complete confidence and overwhelming justification claim that it is? Perhaps both entropy and negentropy are local phenomena rather than the first universally and in all cases taking final precedence over the second. Perhaps there is a dynamic openness to the universe (or nature) rather than our being required to regard it as a closed system. Neither devolution (entropy) nor evolution (negentropy) needs to be viewed as the final story. We know that the two work in concert and perhaps both are local rather than universal. Put differently, the everlasting tension between the two may well be what is universal or applicable everywhere and everywhen. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 78. When I say “purely mechanical” I do not mean to exclude the element of novelty I have argued to be present in all temporal phenomena. The term “mechanical” connotes for me something that is notably regular and predictable in its character, lacks inwardness, and does not organize or direct itself from within. The stream flows around the rock because of the hardness and shape of the rock and the force of gravity—external rather than internal factors. Kauffmann insists on this important point throughout his book Reinventing the Sacred. See especially chapter 4, “The Nonreducibility of Biology to Physics.”

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Genetic drift occurs when chance or some kind of abnormal event changes the frequency of alleles (alternate forms of genes) contained in the population of a type of organisms. Random sampling within the genetic components of the population might bring about such a change, or changes in the environment could do so. Examples of the latter would be earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, severe storms, or diseases that bring about changes in the frequency of alleles. Here it is not mutations favored by natural selection that are operative, as would normally be the case, but accidental events in the environments of organisms that affect the components of their gene pools. An intriguing discussion of the close connection of levels of complexity of organization with emerging stages of biological evolution is contained in Philip Ball, “The Strange Inevitability of Evolution: Good Solutions to Biology’s Problems are Astonishingly Plentiful,” in Nautilus. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 132–133. Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale, 588; see 587–596. Ibid., 592–593. Isaiah 40: 6–9. See also I Peter 1:24 in the Christian New Testament, where this passage from Isaiah is quoted. The word translated into English as cause is in the Greek of Aristotle’s writings aitia. This term has the legal connotation “factor responsible for which,” as when a defendant is said to be responsible for a criminal action. Aristotle’s famous four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final) are thus four factors involved in adequately describing and fully accounting for a change. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, 43–45, 87. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 21. For Whitehead, continuity and novelty go necessarily together. Donald A. Crosby, The Thou of Nature. I reflect on the natures and relations of matter, life, and mind in chapters four through six of Novelty.

Chapter 6 Good and Evil 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 508. Ibid., 509. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. George Lucas, “Moral Order and the Constraints of Agency: Toward a New Metaphysics of Morals,” 117–139. Ibid., 132–134.

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A significant defect of Kant’s analysis of morality is that he restricts the scope of moral obligation to human beings. He does so on the ground—commonplace in his time—that only humans are capable of rationality and thus of moral considerability and regard. Lacking rationality, he contends, nonhuman forms of life, even those we recognize today to have significant degrees of sentience and feeling, are not proper objects of such considerability and regard. The sharp line Kant draws between humans and other life forms is inconsistent with the continuities and interdependencies among human and nonhuman capabilities and needs brought to light in Darwinian evolution and with our present ecological understanding of biological organisms and their relationships— relationships that include ourselves as one among numerous interdependent species of organic life. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, 129–234. Donald A. Crosby, Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 60–62. See in this connection the researches and findings of zoologist and ethologist Frans de Waal, as recounted in his book Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. De Waal argues that human morality is rooted in biological evolution and anticipated in the behaviors of animals such as members of the primate species that live socially and communally. I discuss some of the distinctive goods (and evils) of nature in chapters 4 and 7 of A Religion of Nature. See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man. This term is contained in Wordsworth’s poem “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold” (1802).

Chapter 7 The Sacred and the Profaned 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey, 110–111. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, eds., The Presocratic Philosophers, 169. Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, 4–6. Genesis 1; see the summary statement in 1:31. See especially Donald A. Crosby, A Religion of Nature, chapter 6. In this chapter I discuss and defend at some length the religious ultimacy of nature. The ideas of its religious ultimacy and of its sacredness are

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15. 16.

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interchangeable. Nature is sacred because of its religious ultimacy, and it is religiously ultimate because of its intrinsic, all-encompassing sacredness. Donald A. Crosby, Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil. Bernard Loomer, “The Size of God,” in The Size of God: The Theology of Bernard Loomer in Context. Roberto Mangabeira and Lee Smolin, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy, 531–532. I term this outlook cosmic nihilism in my book The Specter of the Absurd: Sources and Criticisms of Modern Nihilism, 26–30. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montaigne, 135. Here I assign the sublime to a subordinate status in relation to the sacred. In so doing, I reverse the priority assigned to these two sensibilities or modes of awareness by philosopher Robert S. Corrington. Corrington wants to place the sublime as an aesthetic category over the sacred as a religious category. I am keenly aware that the sublime and the religious are closely related to one another, and I appreciate Corrington’s explication of this close connection. But I am convinced that experience of the sacred is awareness of what is (and should at all times be) the most important, most encompassing concern of human life, consciousness, and commitment. I am also convinced that the metaphysical sacredness of nature takes precedence over its sublimity. For Corrington’s contrasting view, see his book Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism, 174–175 and passim. Psalm 24:1. The movie was directed by Steve McQueen from a script he wrote with John Ridley, and brought to the screen in 2013 by Fox Searchlight Pictures. The script is based on Solomon Northup’s memoir as told to David Wilson, published in 1853. I discuss at length the ecological duties and responsibilities of humans, as well as indicate ways in which neglects or violations of them have contributed—wittingly or unwittingly—to such things as endangerments of species, mistreatments of living beings, and despoliations of natural environments, in my book The Thou of Nature: Religious Naturalism and Reverence for Sentient Life. Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 164. I say “at least some” because not all religious naturalists view nature in the way I describe it here and elsewhere in this book. Religious naturalists such as Benedict Spinoza and Albert Einstein who are causal determinists do not, for example.

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Chapter 8 Summing Up 1. 2.

Milton K. Munitz, 247. Munitz’s description needs to be altered to include female as well as male metaphysicians. Being a metaphysician is not an exclusively male prerogative or undertaking, contrary to the impression created by the commonly accepted male-oriented language of the mid-1960s he uses in his description of it.

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INDEX

Absolute, the, 20 Anaximander, 4, 30 Anthropocentrism, 127–129; 135, 137–139 Aquinas, Thomas, 6 Aristotle, x, 4, 13, 37–40, 60 Augustine, Aurelius, of Hippo, 15, 40–41 Avicenna, 30 Ball, Philip, 172n17 Barbour, Julian, 15, 44–46, 48, 49, 159n13, 163n17 Being, as becoming, 15, 17; cannot originate from nothing, 39; privileged place of, 41 Bénard cell, 170n9 Bergson, Henri, 57–59, 62 Bifurcations (or phase transitions), 81–83; and chance, 81–82; source of diversification and innovation in the universe, 82; unpredictability of, 96, 167–168n16 Blachowicz, James, 32–33 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 41, 42 Bradley, F. H., 20 Brahman, 20 Buchler, Justus, 25–29, 32, 34, 53, 64, 92 Buddhism, 21 Burtt, E. A., 163n20 B-Z reaction, 170n9

Cahoone, Lawrence, 92; on Ground of nature, 168–169n5; on the physical and the material, 168–169n5 Causality, 59–61; cause must be as great as effect, 158n7; relation to novelty, 61–63; role of repetition in, 59; not same as premiseconclusion relation, 17, 43; three senses in which necessary (but not sufficient) for effects, 60–61 Chaisson, Eric J., 171n13 Chance, and bifurcations, 81–82; objective, 8, 81–82; present in everything that happens, 81; and science, 80–83; shifting scales of in relations to causal continuity, 66 Change (see time), absence of an illusion, 17; role of chance in, 66, 80; an illusion, 42; as manifestation of time, 16; not possible without lapse of time, 15; and possibility, 51–55; primordial, 56; not separable from time, 49–50; something must persist through, 38, 59–61; as transformation, 12, 14, 16, 27, 38–39, 53, 60 Chardin, de, Pierre Teilhard, 124–125 Churchland, Paul, 29 Clayton, Philip, 32, 161–162n30 Corrington, Robert, 174n11 Crosby, Pamela, xiv

183

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INDEX

Damasio, Antonio, 68–69; continuing use of metaphor of the machine, 69; on disanalogy of machines and living organisms, 69; seeming persistence of older conception of matter in thought of, 69 Darwin, Charles, 99, 173n6 Dawkins, Richard, 99–100, 170n10 Deacon, Terence W., 70 Dennett, Daniel, 74–76, 78, 79, 164–165n4 Descartes, René, cause must be as great as effect, 158n7; conception of matter, 67–68 Determinism, causal, allows for no alternative future possibilities, 42; belied by bifurcations or phase transitions, 167–168n16; rejection of chance, 71; 164–165n4; not compatible with freedom, 64, 67, 164–165n4; not essential to science, 76; an extreme position, 76; failure of, 167n16; false because efficient causes only necessary not sufficient to explain change, 59–60; incoherence of, 79– 80, 85; contrary to evolution of life forms, 98–99; implies the absence of novelty or real change, 42; makes everything look opaque and incoherent, 79–80; denies time, 164–165n4; if true, no way to show its truth, 74 Dewey, John, 28 Dick, Philip K., 44 Dirac, Paul, 164n28 Dissipative structures, 82 Dupré, John, 166n6 Ecological crisis, 142, 144–145 Eisley, Loren Corey, 127–128 Ellegate, Nancy, xiv Einstein, Albert, 16, 23, 85, 159n14, 174n16 Entropy and negentropy, 171n13 Epperson, Michael, 66

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Evolution, biological, 47, 98–101; centrality of for science, 81; of consciousness and freedom, 83; convergent, 99–100 Far-from-equilibrium dynamic systems, 81–83; 100; bifurcations in, 81–82; pervasive in nature, 82; sensitive to initial conditions, 167–168n16; stars as, 171n13; never static, 167–168n16 Finitude, human, not to be bemoaned, 139–141 Finkelstein, David Ritz, 164n28 Folger, Tim, 45 Freedom, 63–71, requires alternative possibilities for choice, 64, 65; not same thing as chance, 65; not compatible with causal determinism, 64, 67, 68, 167n12; inestimable gift of, 155; inseparable from consciousness, 67–68; definition of, 63, 64; degrees of vary with levels of organization, 70, 96; and dissipative structures, 82; epistemological significance of, 73–74; and everyday human experience, 74–80; moral significance of, 71–73, 120; requires orderly world, 63–64 Gleick, James, 168n20 God, xi, xii, 91, 164n31; creator of time, 15; creator of universe, 3, 11; exists necessarily, 6; as form without matter, 39; humans in image of, 128; ground of universe, 4, 5, 7; limited perspective of, 27; same as nature, 20; no need for, 91; Newton on, 169n6; outside of time, immutable 7, 40; primordial nature of, 25, 51; must be temporal to be relevant, 7, 56; as unmoved mover, 39 Goods and evils (see morality, human), natures and relations of, 112–117; aesthetic, 113–114;

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INDEX

epistemological, 112–114; metaphysical status of aesthetic values, 114; metaphysical status of epistemological values, 113–114; moral, 114–117; metaphysical status of moral values, 117–126; metaphysical status of religious values, 125–126 Greene, Brian, 15, 46, 48, 49, 158n10, 159n13, 159n15 Grünbaum, Adolf, 15 Hansen, Niels Viggo, 169–170n7 Haught, John F., 11 Heraclitus, 20, 56, 62 Hobbes, Thomas, 121 Hume, David, 21 Immutable, the lure of, 40–45 Indeterminacy, cosmic, a necessary condition for moral freedom, 119 James, William, 19, 22, 25, 28, 64 Job, Book of, 134 Juarrero, Alicia, 82, 166n6 Jungerman, John A., 90 Kant, Immanuel, xi; 115, 117–119; defect in his moral theory, 173n6; heteronomy and autonomy, 166n8; three formulations of his “categorical imperative,” 115; the three provide an outline of a just and morally good society, 116 Kauffman, Stuart A., 87–88, 95, 97–98, 171n16 Kosso, Peter, 169–170n7 Krauss, Lawrence M., 12, 158n9 Kuhlmann, Meinard, 161n29 Laws of nature (see Nature) Leibniz, Gottfried, 1–2, 5, 6, 8, 9 Life, arose from matter, 98; autopoietic, 166n; and genetic drift, 172n17; and levels of complexity, 172n17; wholly materialistic, 100; not mechanistic, 69, 166n6; origin of

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on earth, 98; and random sampling, 172n17; relations to matter and mind, 172n26; seven traits of, 95–98 Lincoln, Abraham, 48 Lowell, James Russell, 54 Lucas, George R., 116 Materialism, eliminative, 29, 68; emergentist, 29–30, 33–34; expansionist, 168–169n5; a significant metaphysical option, 2–3; mechanistic, 23, 68–70, 75; not necessarily opposed to morality or religion, 3, 91; radical, 29–32, 34, 88–89, 149, 152, 161n29; reductive, 30; non-reductive, 89 Mathematics, seductive influence of, 16–17; (see possibility, mathematical possibilities as formal; see universe, as mathematical through and through) Matter, is all that it does, 31, 89; forever active and innovative, 106; Cartesian, Newtonian conception of, 68–69; definition of, 89–90; everything made up of, 100; what it includes, 91–93; and life, 95–101; and mind, 101–105; nature of, 89–95; same as the physical, 92; more than what is described in physics, 87–88; plastic, protean character of, 30, 88; as processive systems, 90; seedbed of life and mind, 152; not simply located, 92; relations as, 94–95; space and time as, 93 Maxwell, Nicholas, 78 McQueen, Steve, 174n13 Mechanical, meaning of, 171n15 Metaphysics, as analysis of basic assumptions, 107; criteria for, xi; definitions of, x–xi; 2–3, 147; fundamental place of in philosophy, 154; interdisciplinary approaches needed for,

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49,161n29 ; materialistic, 91; naturalistic, xiv, 4, 91; practical value of, xiii–xiv,144–145, 154–155; of pure being, 43; questions raised by, xi–xii; informed by religion, 154; necessary aspect of religious outlooks, 154; and values (see goods and evils); varieties of metaphysical views and systems, xii Mind, epiphenomenal view of, 29, 75, 77; evolutionary development of, 104; need for external and internal approaches to, 78–79, 167n12; not confined to humans, 104–105; inseparable from freedom, 67–68; function of the body, 67, 91; subjectivity or inwardness essential to, 78–79 Minkowski, Hermann, 159n15 Monism, idealistic, 29; materialistic, 32; panpsychistic, 29, 31; radical, 21 Montaigne, de, Michel, 138 Morality, human (see goods and evils); and biological evolution, 173n10; ecological, 174n14; four aspects of reality required for, 119–121; seriousness of, 121–122; a subset of ecological morality, 119; three questions about metaphysical status of, 122–126 Munitz, Milton, 147, 175n2 Murdoch, Iris, 109–110, 124 Nagel, Thomas, 23–24, 29, 31, 75,101– 102, 136, as panpsychist or panteleologist,160–161n25 Natura naturata and natura naturans, 26–27, 35, 101, 136, 139 Natural complexes, 26 Nature (see time; see universe), moral ambiguity of, 124, 129, 133–135, 141–143; no absolute beginning or ending of, 13; ecological sensitivity to needed, 143; not instrumental to humans,

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127–128, 132; laws of probabilistic, 83, 167n16; laws of inflexible, 141; laws of physics not adequate to explain biological phenomena, 161–162n30; laws of not timeless, 54–55, 164n28; metaphysical ultimacy of, ix, xiv, 10–13, 148; not pantheistic or panentheistic, 125; pervades all orders, 26; the primordial given, 13, 148–149; profanations of, 137–144; religious ultimacy of, ix, xiv, 132, 144, 173–174n5; a fit object of reverence, 135–136, 140; sacredness of, xi; 125, 129–130, 173–174n5, 174n11; its sacredness as primordial,136; reasons for its sacredness, 131–137; relations of knowledge, art, and morality to its sacredness, 125; never stands still, 62; as sublime, 174n11; not a superorder, 25–26, 32; to be reverenced but not a fit object of worship, 135–136; its relation to world (Buchler), 26 Negentropy, 47 Newton, Isaac, 42, 50; conception of God, 169n6; conception of matter, 68– 69, 163n20, 168n4; conception of space and time, 169n6 Nihilism, cosmic, 174n9 Northup, Solomon, 142 Nothing, absence of something, 9; denial of absolute nothing, 9, 12, 13; as privational, 38; simpler than something, 3, 5, 8; not source of anything, 17, 37, 39, 158n9. Novelty, 61–63; as chance, 65; correlative with causal past, 62, 63, 101; goes necessarily together with continuity, 63, 172n24; essential to freedom, 63; as ever-intruding manyness, 28; immanent, 158n7; just as primordial as causal continuity, 63, 88, 101; not same as teleology, 101

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INDEX

Organisms, not machines, 97 Pantheism, 8 Parmenides, 11–12, 19–20, 37, 40 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 54 Physics, Newtonian, 41; tells only a partial story, 46–47, 49 Piety, natural, 125 Plato, 16, 40, 51 Platonic forms, 40–41, 44, 51 Platonism, 44–45 Plotinus, 3, 20 Possibility, actuality the basis of, 53; and change, 51–55; emerges, 51; exists in mind of God, 51; mathematical possibilities as formal, 53–54; meaning of “always possible,” 54; pure, 51, 52; real, 52, 53; time as actualization of, 65 Pratityasamutpada, 21 Prigogine, Ilya, 47, 63, 81–83, 167–168n16 Primack, Joel R., 33 Pythagoras, 16 Qualia, 75 Quantum theory, metaphysical character of uncertain, 161n29; as model for understanding the passage of time, 66–67 Quantum vacuum, 158n9. Rationality, human, necessary for morality, 120 Raymo, Chet, 90–91 Relations, as concrete, 94; as material, 94–95 Religion of Nature, ix, 144 Repetition, and bifurcations, 82; a kind of change, 7, 60; a kind of stability, 59–61, 63 Ridley, John, 174n13 Robots, humans as, 74–77 Rolston, Holmes III, 52 Rue, Loyal, 10–11 Sacredness (or holiness), meanings of, 120–121 Santayana, George, 30

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Schopenhauer, Arthur, 20 Semiotic ability, of biological species, 103–104; of humans, 104 Separatism, radical, 22 Shankara, 20 Shiva, 134 Slavery, institution of, 141–142 Sociality, human, essential for morality, 121 Smolin, Lee, 16, 43, 52, 54, 83, 134, 161n29,163n18, 169–170n7, 171n13 Space, not absolute but relational, 94; local in the present universe, 93–94; as material, 93; Isaac Newton on, 169n6 Spacetime, not literally a block, loaf, fabric, or substance, 159n15 Spinoza, Benedict, 20, 41, 42, 174n16 Sufficient reason, principle of, 1, 5, 8 Tegmark, Max, 163 Teleology, 23–24, 97; not primordial, 101–103, 136, 160–161n25 Thales, 30 Theory of everything, 22–23 Thermodynamics, Second Law of, 47; 171n13 Thompson, Evan, 96 Time (see change; see universe), abstract, 59; absolute, 50; not absolute but relational, 94; arrow of, 47, 65; Big Bang origin of, 15, 47; chance an essential aspect of, 66, 80; concrete, 59; divine origin of, 15; not an enemy of value, 135; flow of does not exist, 15, 45, 80, 159n13, 163n16; global, 169–170n7; as illusory, 15, 16–17, 42; rejection of its being illusory, 45–51; infinite, 7; as invention, 62; local in the present universe, 93–94, 169–170n 7; metaphysical role of, 15–17; as material, 93; measured by rates of change, 159n15; Isaac Newton on, 169n6; primordial, not derivative, 50, 56;

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INDEX

quantum theory as model for, 66; not reducible to space, 50; relative, 50; not reversible, 43, 50, 65; not separable from change, 49–50; not made up of separate instants, 58; a source of order,47; substantive or relational views of, 169–170n7 Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, 134, 158n10 Unity and diversity, both-and approach to, 22–34; either-or approach to, 19–22 Universe (see nature; see time), absolute beginning of, 3, 12–13; no all-inclusive, God’s-eye vision of possible, 27; arose spontaneously, 4; awe-inspiring and wonderful, 11; best of all possible ones, 3; Big Bang origin(s) of, 14, 27, 47, 54–55, 83; does not center on humans, 129; compared to an ecosystem, 33–34; as concatenated unity, 25; contingent, 5; and Cosmic Crunch, 14, 27; as open, 171n13; created out of nothing, 3, 8, 9; created out of preexisting chaos, 3; emanationist view of its origin, 3, 8; endless existence of, 51; eternal, 4, 12, 13, 39, 41; existence of not problematic, 11, 17; no ultimate frame of reference

for, 94; no need for God to explain, 91; immanental view of, 10–13; intelligible, 24; as mathematical through and through, 16, 41, 159n15; multiple current universes, 14, 158n8, 158n10; and multiverse, 13–15; 158n8; phase transition or bifurcation origin of, 83; as pluriverse, 25, 34; 138; sacred in all its aspects, 129–130; sacredness of as primordial, 136; practical implications of sacredness of, 144–145; not a seamless whole, 24–25, 27, 32; static and unchanging, 159n13; succession of universes, 4, 14, 16; 138–139, 164n28; sufficient in itself, 11; transcendent ground view of its continuing existence, 5–10; values in (see goods and evils) Waal de, Frans, 173n10 Ward, Richard, 32 Wegner, Daniel M., 77 Wheeler-Dewitt equation, 45 Whitehead, Alfred North, xi, 25, 29, 51, 92, 94, 102, 136, 143–144, 172n24 Wilson, David, 174n13 Wordsworth, William, 125 World, relation to nature (Buchler), 26 Xenophanes, 128

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