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This leads to consideration of yet another theodicy, Manicheanism, in which the universe is the site of the titanic struggle of roughly equal forces of good and evil. For Manicheans there is no necessary reason why the transhumanist development of human capacities could not contribute to the struggle for good. As with arms races in temporal reality, if the forces of good refuse to avail themselves of all the means at their disposal the forces of evil will be guaranteed to use those powers to gain advantage. A Manichean bioconservative may believe that all enhancement technologies are poisoned pills which will doom the user, and that the only armaments necessary in the battle are spiritual. But many contemporary Manichean evangelical Christians – those who inveigh against the wiles of Satan as if he was God’s co-equal – have no problem using television, medicine, computers and so on in their battle for the Lord. So presumably some will also soon see the spiritual necessity for Christians to be as smart, wired and long-lived as the agents of Beelzebub.

The transhumanist philosopher Mark Walker is probably the leading writer on reconciling transhumanism with Christian theology. In his essay “Becoming Gods: A neo-Irenaean Theodicy” (Walker, 2002c) he argued that the theodical position of a Polkinghorne (2000) or Hick (1977, 1981) – that God gave us free will in order to give us the opportunity to struggle for self-improvement – can be applied to a transhumanist theodicy:

it is not the mere possession of free will that guarantees the production of evil, rather it is free will in conjunction with our finite nature that leads to the production of moral evil. Thus, it is our duty to attempt to move beyond our merely finite selves, to become gods. When, and only when, we have discharged this duty will evil be expunged, only then will the problem of evil be fully answered. (Walker, 2002c)

Walker notes that since we are considered God’s children rather than God’s pets that the expectation should be that we are being nurtured and encouraged to become adults and not to remain in perpetual pet-itude.

If God is an ideal parent His mission must be to allow us to develop to become type identical with Him. (Walker, 2002c)

Walker goes on to argue that the transhumanist project, applied to the moral improvement of humanity as well as to the usual goals of longevity, super-intelligence, post-biology and emotional regulation, would be the fulfillment of such a Christian theodicy.  Peters makes a similar point about humanity being in Imago Dei, the image of God; doesn’t this imply that we are enjoined to also be god-like in all our attributes, instead of only our spiritual virtues? Philippians 3:21 says He “will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory.” Couldn’t transhumanist technologies be part of the working out of the divine plan that we become godlike as well?

While some Christians insist that humanity was created as we are today, and that no evolution has taken place or should take place so that we remain in Imago Dei as intended, many other Christians have no problem imagining that Creation was simply a prima causa of the Big Bang, or a sparking of life on Earth. Christians who accept that humanity has evolved since Creation should also have no problem believing that we can remain in Imago Dei as posthumans. For instance Robert Schneider notes in “Evolution and the Image of God”:

If this is the biblical understanding of what it means to be created in “the image of God,” then does it require a separate creation for human beings, that is, for H. sapiens, to be made in this image? …”That God created human beings (Gen. 1:27; Ps. 100:3) does not imply instantaneous action.  God’s creation of humanity encompasses past primate history, the present, and whatever is to come.  The sweep of human evolution illustrates how God’s work of creation is a continuing relationship of dependence between the world and God, a continuing act of God’s will, an eternal covenant relationship”…Genesis itself implies that humanity and all the other living beings are made of the same stuff and given the same breath of life (Gen. 2:7, 9, 19, cf. Eccl. 3:19-21; Miller 1993), and modern science has shown that we share the same DNA and other molecules with virtually all living things…It does not denigrate either God or humanity to hold that God’s creative evolutionary processes brought humanity to a point where it would be capable of expressing those qualities that both Scripture and theology have associated with the “image of God.” (Schneider, 2007).

In summary, in theodicies as in metaphysics, there is no inconsistency between most religious views and transhumanist aspirations. In the next section I will consider some of the soteriological positions on virtue and transcendence that are similarly consistent with a transhumanist project of radical human enhancement.

Virtue, Happiness and Soteriology

Patrick Hopkins (2005) argues that both religion and transhumanism are soteriological efforts to transcend animality. Most transhumanists are libertarian in respect to life goals. While they may personally aspire to enlightenment, salvation, moksha or a life of virtue, they have little evangelical or authoritarian impulse to guide others away from vice or self-indulgence. But there is an implicit conception of the good personality in transhumanist thought, from the evolving Extropian Principles, which urged transhumanists to be more rational and dynamically optimistic, to the writings of Bostrom, Walker and myself which have dealt with issues of eudemonia and the benevolent obligation to restrict others from self-harm. A positive moral and political agenda for transhumanism is riskier than strict liberal neutrality about life ends, since bioconservatives already suspect transhumanists of totalitarian ambitions. But given the types of moral and psychological harms people could cause themselves and society with future neurotechnologies a pro-active theory of the good posthuman personality is inescapable.

The idea of linking transhumanism with moral improvement and soteriology has developed rapidly in the last couple of years in reaction to the growing body of evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetic explanations for religion (Boyer, 2001, 2003, 2004), and the emerging fields of positive psychology, neurophilosophy and neurotheology (Seligman, 2004; Alper, 2006; Hamer, 2004; Newberg, 2002). If our impulses for virtue, vice and religiosity are in some part determined by genetic, hormonal or neurological predispositions why then shouldn’t we redesign ourselves to have better impulses, superior moral reasoning and more frequent experiences of meditative or prayerful transcendence.

In Walker’s essay “Genetic Virtue” (2003d) he argues that there is a growing body of evidence to support genetic predispositions for friendliness, which has been generally considered a virtue. The literature he cites is based on the “five factor” personality model, which shows that everyone’s personality can be described as a mix of five basic characteristics, all of which are substantially set at birth and stable across one’s life: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Kerry Jang at the University of British Columbia has found that the agreeableness or sociability trait is especially strongly influenced by genes (Jang, 1998). People who score high on sociability are more compassionate, trusting and helpful while people low in sociability are uncooperative, unsympathetic and easily irritated. Genetic enhancement to make people more compassionate, trusting and helpful, Walker argues, will therefore be both ethical and commendable.

One drug that has been shown to increase our capacity for trust and cooperation is the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin is released during breast feeding, orgasm and the infatuation period of romance, contributing to bonding. In experiments in Switzerland Ernst Fehr and colleagues have found that subjects covertly dosed with oxytocin were more cooperative and trusting in laboratory experiments (Kosfeld, 2005). 

Similarly applying psychopharmaceutical, genetic or cybernetic control to our vices would also be commendable. Substantial research suggests that our predispositions for addictions, anger, self-absorption, gluttony and sexual promiscuity have a neurochemical basis which can be treated with drugs and potentially gene therapies (Medina, 2000).

Most religious critics of transhumanism assume however that no such biomedical enhancement of human virtue is possible. For instance Christopher Hook wrote in Christianity Today that:

Transhumanist philosophy claims that technology can correct the fundamental problems of humankind. As Christians, we know that our elemental problems arise from the corruption of the human heart (Mark 7:21-23). Sin is real, observable, and unexplained by empirical tools. All technological innovations will not only fail to produce true happiness but also will be corrupted intrinsically by sin.  (Hook, 2004)

Nonetheless, the recent controversy over the proposal by Baptist theologian Albert Mohler that Christian parents would be obliged to fix their gay embryos’ sexual orientation in utero shows that the idea of genetic or cybernetic moral enhancement will be compelling for even those religious who are otherwise bioconservative:

Research into the sexual orientation of sheep and other animals, as well as human studies, points to some level of biological causation for sexual orientation in at least some individuals.  Given the consequences of the Fall and the effects of human sin, we should not be surprised that such a causation or link is found. After all, the human genetic structure, along with every other aspect of creation, shows the pernicious effects of the Fall and of God’s judgment….If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.  (Mohler, 2007)

If sinful genetic predispositions are the mark of the Fall of Man in the genome, why stop with the correction of just the impulse to same sex relationships and not include predispositions to greed, anger, lust, gluttony, sloth and pride? Since Adam’s loss of longevity was his gravest punishment in the Fall, wouldn’t correcting genes for aging be a means to redress genetic sin?

General cognitive enhancement of intelligence will lead to improvement in some virtues, such as more sophisticated moral reasoning (Colby, 1983) and our ability to predict the consequences of our behavior for others. But enhancing our capacities for empathy, compassion and cooperation will require different interventions. “Emotional intelligence,” our understanding of our own and other’s feelings, is not correlated with IQ tests (Gardner, 1993). Autistics can display high levels of intellectual ability, while being completely incapable of understanding or empathizing with the emotions of others, and we are coming to understand that damage to specific “mirror neurons” are the cause of autists’ disabled empathy (Oberman, 2005). Similarly our ability to perform moral decision-making, our capacity to experience outrage at lying and injustice, and our feelings of love and shame, appear to depend on specific brain structures (Allman et al., 2001).   Developing drugs, gene therapies or devices which enhance the functions of these structures would have profound effects on our moral sense, potentially making us more ethical and compassionate people.

The growing field of positive psychology has developed a meta-cultural model of the six basic, pancultural virtues, and is working on the balance of congenital and environmental factors that determine your virtue orientation on each one. In turn one’s level of each virtue, like several of the congenitally set personality traits and one’s basic happiness set point, all influence one’s level of happiness. People who are congenitally set to be friendly, trusting, energetic and not neurotic are happier than they would otherwise be given their happiness set point. Happily, virtue – energy, diligence, friendliness and so on – leads to happiness (Seligman, 2004).  As yet, the positive psychologists have focused on behavioral and cognitive interventions to modify individual virtues, but their work also provides a model for a complementary neurotechnological approach.

If enhancement technologies could suppress our vices and enhance our virtues, is there any reason to believe they would interfere with salvation, grace or enlightenment, the other component in most soteriology? In his 2005 essay “Trans-Spirit: Religion, Spirituality and Transhumanism” Zen priest Mike LaTorra argues that the emerging investigations of neurotheology  (Alper, 2006; Newberg, 2002) – the genetic and neuron-physiological bases of meditation, rapture, awe, sudden insight and contentment – should be the basis for new neurotechnologies to enhance these capacities. David Pearce and the “abolitionist” school of transhumanism are researching neurotechnologies that provide a consistently high level of contentment, and other desirable altered states of consciousness.  The Council on Spiritual Experiences (Forte, 1997), and a growing network of “entheological” researchers (Hoffman, 2000; Smith, 2000; McGraw, 2004; Economist, 2004), are documenting the effects of “entheogens,” traditional psychedelics and novel psychopharmaceuticals that appear to induce spiritual experiences. In Michael Persinger’s (2001) research on transcranial magnetic stimulation to temporarily suppress activity in specific parts of the brain he has been able to generate the feeling that a spiritual being was in the room with the subject, and brain lesions have been linked to out of body experiences and “religious reverie.”

There is a frequent religious objection to the notion of “push-button Zen” that I think is cogent, and it goes to the transhumanist rejection of the myth of authenticity. Kass et al.’s Beyond Therapy, Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future and Sandel’s The Case Against Perfection all argue that enhancement technologies will rob us of a sense of accomplishment, an argument that often bleeds over into the idea of learning through suffering.  While I do not think this complaint is an argument for sickness, aging and death, or poverty and injustice for that matter, I do think some people will feel differently about their spiritual health if they overcome their licentiousness or drug addiction with a pill rather than through arduous self-examination. The person who has spent twenty years meditating to achieve a satori experience of oneness with the universe will feel differently, and get different benefits, than the person who is able to induce such an experience with a brainjack. Spending years in community with fellow seekers, talking about your life, your struggles, and sitting on a cushion to master the drunken monkey of mind is not reducible to transient, inducible experience.

Perhaps some of us will still choose to forego engineered virtue and push-button enlightenment, and persist with the spiritual slog, just as people still like to ride horses even though they have cars, or climb mountains when they could take a helicopter. Nonetheless many mountain climbers appreciate having the latest camping gear, GPS locators, climbing boots and a cell phone to call in a helicopter just in case they need one. Similarly, when we have neurotechnologically enabled virtue, grace and transcendence I believe it will be up to each seeker to decide their own combination of technological and pre-technological methods.

Perhaps the ability to use neurotech to occasionally taste contentment and transcendence will provide a little motivation for those who prefer mostly non-technological methods. Those who don’t feel the need to slog slowly up the mountain, generosity, patience, self-control, energy and even enligthenment will be easily available.

Eschatology

Reflecting on the likely capacities of emergent superintelligence in this century and in the far future has led a number of secular transhumanist thinkers to develop eschatologies. These eschatologies are structurally and psycho-culturally isomorphic with religious eschatologies, reflecting the recurrent logic of questions of origins, interruptions and endings. As the religious come to see these similarities they will understand them as a scientific secular validation of their prophesies and visions, with superintelligent humans and machines, and the rest of the transhumanist project, cast as prophecied parts of the eschatological narrative.

The Singularity as Techno-Millennialism

Joel Garreau’s (2005) psycho-history of accelerating change, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies-and What It Means to Be Human, is structured in three parts: Heaven, Hell and Prevail. In the Heaven scenario he focuses on the predictions of a coming Singularity of transhumanist inventor Ray Kurzweil, summarized in Kurzweil’s 2005 book, The Singularity is Near. The idea of a techno-millennial “Singularity” is usually associated with a 1993 paper by mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge. Vinge projected the millennial/apocalyptic consequences of the emergence of self-willed artificial intelligence, which he projected would emerge within the next couple of decades. In physics “singularities” are black holes, within which we can’t predict how physical laws will work. In the same way, Vinge said, greater-than-human machine intelligence, multiplying exponentially, would make everything about our world unpredictable.

Since 1993 a “Singularitarian” subculture has emerged within the transhumanist movement predicated on anticipation of the dramatic abruption of history by technological acceleration.   Most Singularitarians, like Vinge and Kurzweil, have focused on the emergence of super-human machine intelligence. But the even more fundamental concept is of exponential technological progress, with the multiplier quickly leading to point of either catastrophe or a transition to a new phase of history.

The most famous accelerating trend is “Moore’s Law,” articulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, which is the observation that the number of transistors that can be fit on a computer chip has doubled about every eighteen months since their invention. Kurzweil goes to great lengths in The Singularity is Near to document that these trends of accelerating change also occur in genetics, mechanical miniaturization, and telecommunications, not just transistors. Kurzweil projects that the “law of accelerating returns” from technological change is “so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.” For instance Kurzweil predicts that we will soon be able to distribute trillions of nanorobots in our brains, and thereby extend our minds, and eventually upload our minds into machines. Since lucky humans will at that point merge with or become superintelligence, some refer to the Singularity as the “Techno-Rapture” or “the Rapture of the Nerds” pointing out the similarity of narrative to the Christian Rapture; those foresighted enough to be early adopters of life extension and cybernetics will live long enough to be uploaded and “vastened” after the Singularity. The rest of humanity may however be “left behind.”

This secular “left behind” narrative is very explicit in the Singularitarian writings of computer scientist Hans Moravec (1988, 1998).  For Moravec the human race will be superceded by our robot children, among whom some of us may be ale to expand to the stars. In Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, Moravec says “Our artificial progeny will grow away from and beyond us, both in physical distance and structure, and similarity of thought and motive. In time their activities may become incompatible with the old Earth’s continued existence…An entity that fails to keep up with its neighbors is likely to be eaten, its space, materials, energy, and useful thoughts reorganized to serve another’s goals. Such a fate may be routine for humans who dally too long on slow Earth before going Ex.” (Moravec, 1988)  Here we have the Tribulations and damnation, in addition to the millennial utopian outcome. Rather than consigning the late adopters to eternal damnation, however, as in the Christian Rapture narrative, Moravec argues for the far gentler institution of a universal welfare state to provide comfortably, even splendidly, for the ur-humans, revealing less a vengeful damnation of the unbelievers and more of a Universalist embrace of salvation, heaven on earth for the stubborn humans while the posthumans become gods.

While Kurzweil acknowledges hypothetical apocalyptic potentials inherent in these technologies, such as the “Terminator” scenario of malevolent AI and robots intent on wiping out humanity, he is nonetheless recognizably millennialist about the utopian promise of the Singularity. Hence Garreau’s label that Kurzweil’s is a  “Heaven” scenario of the human future. Kurzweil acknowledges his continuity with millennialists by, for instance, specifying the date 2029 as the specific year in which he expects the Singularity, and including a picture in The Singularity is Near of himself holding a sign with that slogan, referencing the classic cartoon image of the EndTimes street prophet.

For most Singularitarians, as with most millennialists before them, the processes that lead to the millennium are seen as autonomous of human agency (Baumgartner, 1999), and little attention is given to ways that war, regulation, energy crises or human incompetence might slow or stop the trajectory. Kurzweil is quite explicit on this point, referencing the continuous curves of technological acceleration that appear to have been unperturbed by wars and recessions in the 20th century. In this sense Singularitarians are more similar to the most familiar Christian millennialism, the “pre-millenialists” who also see the EndTimes coming on God’s pre-ordained timing, not hastened or slowed by human agency. Singularitarians share the premillennialist fatalist optimism that the deus ex machina does not depend on human collective action. Many Singularitarians are apolitical or libertarian; believing that public policy can contribute little to hastening or improving the Millennium, although Luddite regulations may slow it down.

On the other hand, Singularitarianism is also similar to Christian “post-millenialism,” which believes that human agency is required to establish the Kingdom on Earth, to “immanetize the Eschaton” and bring about the EndTimes.  For Singularitarians the millennial event comes at the apogee of accelerating progress, rather than after intense Tribulations, similar to the “post-millennialist” eschatologies.  Some Singularitarians are focused on the fact that continued human economic and social progress is required to create artificial intelligence, and are dismayed at the slow progress of cybernetic science and the prospects for setbacks to technological civilization. Others are more focused on the possibility of a Manichean conflict between good AI and bad AI, and the importance of human agents in ensuring the success of the former.

An example of such concerns is found in the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). SIAI is perhaps the leading exponent of Singularitarianism, centered on the writings and ideas of the autodidact cyber-philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky and the SIAI hold that the first machine mind to emerge will likely take over the entire world, and therefore it is extremely important that it be “friendly” to humanity. If it emerges spontaneously, without pro-human friendliness having been woven into it’s fabric from the beginning, it will probably either ignore humanity or see us as a competitor for resources, and we could be wiped out. Drawing on films about a future dominated by hostile AIs, some call this the “Terminator scenario.” Therefore for the SIAI it is extremely important that the very few programmers who take seriously the need for friendliness, principally Mr. Yudkowsky and his followers, be the first to produce a machine mind. The SIAI has attracted some support from Silicon Valley philanthropists who share their desire to promote friendliness engineering among AI designers. Like an order of secret warrior-monks performing vital rituals necessary to ensure the incarnation of a divine avatar in order to defend humanity from the forces of evil, the SIAI sees itself as all that stands between humanity and destruction. If the first emergent AI is friendly it will be transcendently benevolent, and only it will have the capacity to solve human problems, from war and hunger to eternal life.  The SIAI worldview is a form of messianism, albeit a more loosely organized, nerdily diffident and nonviolent messianism than its religious cousins.

The SIAI researchers have nothing but contempt for any suggestion of a parallel between their own eschatological beliefs and those of religious believers, and they make a cogent point in response; for medieval apocalyptics there was no danger of fire actually falling from the sky, while today we have nuclear weapons. Fear of an noon-negligible empirical threat, and expectation of a scientifically plausible utopia, is empirically entirely different from fear of fictional supernatural threats and expectations of supernatural salvation. The point is important, but it does not change the psycho-cultural similarities between scientistic seculars and religious with similar millennialist expectations; neither see any reason to plow their fields much less stop climate change. If only the deus ex machina can solve human problems, then all energies must be turned to ensuring its appearance on the stage. Any expectation that we might control or regulate the deus ex machina are absurd.

Other Singularitarians are more explicitly millennial in their thinking. John Smart, founder and director of the California-based Acceleration Studies Foundation, often notes the similarity between his own “Global Brain” scenario and the eschatological writings of the Jesuit mystic Teilhard de Chardin (1959).  In the Global Brain scenario propounded by Smart (2005), Stock (1993) and Bloom (2000), collective intelligence will emerge as all human beings are be linked to one another and to machine intelligence in the emerging global telecommunications web. Again, this scenario is more similar to the “post-millenialist” form of Christianity since the Global Brain will include all or most of humanity, and come as a culmination of social progress. Smart and a growing group of more mystically inclined Singularitarians believe this scenario is similar to Chardin’s idea that humanity would evolve into the global “noosphere,” or info-sphere, leading to a postmillennial “Omega Point” of union with God.

Possible Posthuman Telos in a Natural Universe

The most common transhumanist cosmology is that the universe is impersonal and purposeless. The emergence of intelligence is a chance occurrence, with no inevitability or pre-ordained end. Given our existence and the immensity of time and the universe, however, intelligence must have emerged in many places and is presumably out there now. All intelligence presumably has the capacity to evolve into superintelligence, go star-faring and engage in galactic engineering of some kind. We should be able to perceive the ubiquity of superintelligence in galactic anomalies.

Thus the Fermi Paradox – the puzzling lack of visible evidence of superintelligence in the universe – provides transhumanists with both a mystery and a moral warning.  The mystery is that the telos of evolved extraterrestrial superintelligence may be so ineffable that our expectation that they would be building giant neon signs out of stars, or blasting out radio messages of mathematical formulae in order announce themselves to us may be akin to our intestinal bacteria despairing that we advanced multicellular organisms have not sent an intracellular chemical semaphore to announce our presence to our intestines. We might be swimming in evidence of superintelligent beings who have no interest in communicating with us and not even know it.

The moral warning of the Fermi Paradox is that there are many pitfalls on the path from the chance emergence of life to superintelligence, many “filters” (Hanson, 1998) the passage through which most species never survive. Some astro-biologists suggest that the universe is full of bacteria, but that complex creatures and intelligent species rarely evolve (Ward and Brownlee, 2000). Intelligence may be a rare and not terribly successful evolutionary path. Intelligence may lead inevitably to the creation and use of self-negating technologies and weapons. Superintelligence may tend toward static self-absorption and decline, transforming themselves into inert ecosystems calmly contemplating eternity on their home planets.

We are thus enjoined to take seriously that our posthuman future faces such enormous odds (Rees, 2004) and thoroughly consider all the “existential risks” (Bostrom, 2002) that intelligent species have had to face, and that we ourselves face. Those risks include natural phenomena such as asteroid impacts, supervolcanoes, plagues, and gamma ray bursts (Æirkoviæ, 2003), as well the capricious randomness of evolution, which could run even an intelligent species back into cul-de-sacs and devolution.

In Bostrom’s canonical existential risks paper (2002) he outlines four types of risks:

Bangs – Earth-originating intelligent life goes extinct in relatively sudden disaster resulting from either an accident or a deliberate act of destruction.

Crunches – The potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity is permanently thwarted although human life continues in some form.

Shrieks – Some form of posthumanity is attained but it is an extremely narrow band of what is possible and desirable.

Whimpers – A posthuman civilization arises but evolves in a direction that leads gradually but irrevocably to either the complete disappearance of the things we value or to a state where those things are realized to only a minuscule degree of what could have been achieved.

A “crunch,” the permanent unattainability of posthumanity, is posed by various natural or man-made catastrophes that could permanently end human technological progress, sending us back into a pre-technological state. Bostrom describes several “shriek” risk scenarios involving totalitarian superintelligences, with some narrow, unattractive flaw that eliminates all other evolutionary possibilities. The Terminator scenario is one such “shriek” assuming that the Terminator civilization becomes static and does not go on to develop the dynamic capacities of human intelligence. Another possibility is that a hegemonic superintelligence has a very narrow goal set – to make all living things as efficient as possible for instance – leading it to engineer all the diversity and autonomy out of all inferior beings in order to serve its ends. In the novel Accelerando by Charles Stross (2005), for instance, post-Singularity superintelligences tend to evolve out of computerized trading systems, and devolve into static communicators of buy and sell orders.

The risk that intelligence might willy-nilly end in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, without the imposition of totalitarianism but simply through the results of aggregate free choices, is the final “whimper” risk. This is the island of the lotus eaters, or the Eloi and Morlocks of Wells’ The Time Machine, or any number of other static u/dystopian far futures.

In order to avoid these risks we need not only foresight and posthuman technological mastery over nature, argues Bostrom (2002, 2005b), but also the capacity for collective action through posthuman, hegemonic global governance (a “singleton”). Given the risks of too tight or too loose governance, the global governance system must permit individual and subcultural diversity for the continual evolution of the creative, diverse and dynamic intelligence. 

If we can anticipate and navigate these risks we – we as in all intelligences in the universe, and we human beings, and perhaps we personally –  may be able to evolve to superintelligence and to spread out to manipulate and become one with everything within this universe or even multiverse. No matter how powerful and sublime it becomes, however, intelligence will still be constrained by the impersonal laws of the multiverse. Superintelligence – singular or plural, sublime or autistic –  will either face its end with the heat death of this universe, or achieve some kind of immortality by writing itself into the structure of the universe before the heat death (Kurzweil, 2007) or by building a new and more congenial universe to migrate to as proposed by physicist Michio Kaku (Kaku, 2005; Holt, 2004).

Transhumanist Affinities in Buddhist Eschatology

Buddhist cosmology and eschatology is similar in some respects to Singularitarianism and the standard transhumanist cosmology described above. Buddhism rejects the idea of a created or designed universe, and all beings are subject to the natural laws of cause and effect, impermanence and insubstantiality. After the emergence of this universe, and the first emergence of intelligent beings in the heavens, earth realms and hells, all sentient beings develop dukkha or suffering. In the effort to escape from the cycle of sickness, aging and death, and transcend dukkha, a few rare people begin to discover the path of enlightenment that leads to freedom from causality, Buddhahood. Rebirth into the human realm is especially propitious for working on the path to enlightenment, since the suffering of the hells and hungry ghost realms, and the pleasures of the heavens, are so distracting.  Even the way to enlightenment has many pitfalls however, including millennia-long absorption into meditative dead-ends and spiritual cul-de-sacs. Having navigated all these challenges the Buddha is in a unique position to point them out.

Each Buddha then establishes a lineage of instruction which gradually loses its soteriological potency until no one can achieve enlightenment through it. Then another Buddha appears and the cycle starts again. We are currently thought to be in the period between the last Buddha, Gautama Shakyamuni, and the coming Buddha, Maitreya.

The Buddhist text The Lion Roar of the Wheel-Turning Monarch describes the events that lead to the coming of Maitreya, the next Buddha, a mythos that has been an inspiration for Buddhist millenarian rebellion from Burma to China (Hughes, 1993). First humanity is nearly destroyed by a seven-day war, engulfing the whole world and destroying civilization. The war is followed by a seven-month plague, spread by non-human beings, and an eight-year drought and famine, all resonant with other apocalyptic narratives and projections of the potential consequences of the use of nuclear and biological weapons. The survivors unite and establish a peaceful, united world.

Humans will evolve into a new species. After many generations these new humans will live 80,000 years.  Age of first marriage will be 500 years. The climate will always be good and mild. The earth will be thickly populated, and the scripture comments that we might think such a world to be like the hell of the “Waveless Deep”, crushed by these billions of humans like being at the bottom of the ocean. But rather than an overpopulated, urban sprawl of polluted mega-cities, in this future humanity will pervade the world “as a jungle is by reeds and rushes,” and the countryside will be like “an adorned garden.”  

The people will be tranquil, safe, and free from danger. They will be happy and joyful, enjoying festivals. They will have plenty to eat and drink… In squares at the gates of the city, there will be shining wishing trees: one blue, one yellow, one red, and one white. Divine adornments and ornaments as well as all sorts of wealth and possessions will be hanging on the trees.

The world is ruled by a righteous, nonviolent king, Sankha. The next Buddha, Maitreya, is born into this utopia. Like previous Buddhas he will have 32 distinctive physical characteristics, such as a long tongue, webbed fingers and toes, spoked wheels on his hands and feet,  a spiral lump on his head, his penis hidden in a sheath, arms longer than his knees, unblinking eyes, and 40 even, white teeth. He will be considered beautiful by all.

When Maitreya reaches the age of 8,000 he leaves the householder life to become a monk, but this time accompanied by hundreds of thousands of male and female followers in his flying palace. After a short, intense period of meditation he achieves full enlightenment and becomes the next Buddha. He then travels the world spreading enlightenment. “Seeing people who are ready to be Awakened, he will go 100,000 leagues in a moment to cause them to be Awakened.” On his return to the capital his ministry brings about the final, peaceful “withering of the state.”

The Maitreyan millennial period will also then come to an end, leading to many more historical cycles before the destruction of the universe, which is not described in the official canon. The fifth century Sri Lankan monk Buddhaghosa systematized Theravadan Buddhist apocrypha and monastic commentaries on the canon in his work Visuddhimaggha (The Path of Purity), including a story of the end of the universe. In Buddhaghosa’s account as this universe comes to an end humanity is warned by heavenly beings “who have seen the end of the universe and the new one being born.” We are told to prepare for the end by meditating ourselves into immaterial states that can survive the destruction of all matter.  After the emergence of the new universe, all the immaterial spirits that have survived may re-enter the cycle of samsara as gods, humans, animals and ghosts, continuing their cycles of rebirth until they achieve enlightenment.

A universal human desire to transcend the limitations of human life. The risk of absorption into psychic dead-ends on the road to superintelligence. Radical longevity. A utopian world with eco-friendly wish-fulfilling technology. Flying palaces and teleportation. A superintelligent posthuman avatar of salvation spreading mind vastening. Uploading into hyperspace to escape the death of the universe aided by benevolent aliens. While secular transhumanists are uninterested in prophecy, those who believe in or are inspired by these ancient myths and stories may find their parallels and correspondences to the transhumanist worldview exciting, validating a creative trans-spiritual eschatology.

Posthuman Teleology in a Created Universe

Another, more theistic, correspondence between Buddhism and transhumanism can be found in the mythos of the supernatural bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism. Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who decide to remain in samsara after their enlightenment in order to save all beings from suffering. Their salvific mission is focused on human beings since the gods are too besotted with pleasure and power to engage with spiritual growth, and the animals, ghosts and hell-dwellers are too stupid, hungry and miserable. A human rebirth is therefore a rare precious opportunity between much longer periods of spiritual stasis in the other realms.

The supernatural bodhisattva has the power however to make “Buddha lands” which provide a utopian existence with peace, plenty and long lives, but in which these are provided to support and encourage spiritual growth instead of frivolous entertainment and indulgence. The Buddha land is not a terminal paradise, but a kind of Extropian utopia providing the material preconditions for maximum spiritual dynamism until you transcend it and move to the next level of reality. The Pure Land sects of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism are based on worship of Amitabha, the bodhisattva who presides over the Western Paradise.  Amitabha ensures that those who call his name are reborn in his realm in which they are assured to achieve enlightenment.

As discussed in relation to theories of theodicy, the idea of superpowerful superintelligences opens the possibility that this universe could be created, perhaps even with benevolent teleological goals for humanity. One very influential transhumanist text that argued for a version of a created universe teleology was the physicist Frank Tipler in his 1995 book The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. Tipler attempted to reconcile the then dominant scientific cosmological theory of an eventual Big Crunch, with transhumanism and the Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead. He argued that when the universe began to crush back down in on itself, that it would form an enormous black hole, the “Omega Point.” On the edge of a black hole the laws of time and space twist so that we would theoretically experience an eternity in our fall further down into final annihilation, with a theoretically infinite amount of matter and energy with which work. Tipler further argued that by the time the universe reached this end they would have gathered and recorded information about all the creatures that had ever existed in this universe. With infinite computing resources they would then be able to create infinitely detailed recreations of all the beings to populate the endless stretches of the End Time black hole. Thus, there could be bodily resurrection for all dead at the End of Time.

The subsequent discovery that the universe is accelerating in its expansion without sufficient arresting gravitational mass, leading eventually to a heat death and not a crunch, has not changed Tipler’s convictions; by his current calculations we can still arrest the expansion to heat death, and bring on the Big Crunch, if we can migrate our consciousness into dark matter/energy and destroy all baryonic matter in the universe (Tipler, 2005).

Somewhat more proximate, plausible, and far more disturbing, is Nick Bostrom’s (2003) “simulation hypothesis.” Bostrom calculates that if superintelligences emerge and spread with any frequency in the universe, with 50 billion years before the heat death of the universe, during which time the intelligences will be able to convert all matter and energy into information processing capacity, one of the things that will likely occur to them to do to do will be to play a god-like version of SimCity. Except that these future virtual worlds could be simulated down to the behavior of subatomic particles, back to the beginning of time, and out to reaches of visible light. Or at least the virtual creatures within them would never be quick enough to catch the gaps in the simulation, which could produce a star up for every astronomer and a quark for every atom smasher consistent with the illusion of a material universe.

Not only would such detailed simulations be possible, but uncounted numbers of such simulations could be run in parallel, testing every possible evolutionary trajectory for intelligence, exploring every possible war, art form, philosophy and scientific paradigm. Perhaps the superintelligences will compete in an inter-galactic tournament, with the winners being the simulations whose species succeed in destroying all their virtual baryonic matter and creating their own simulated eternal paradises. Perhaps it is pointless to speculate on the mind and aims of God, and simply to posit that a large number of such simulations are likely before the end of the universe. If so, it is not very likely that we are in an original, authentically material universe, and much more likely that we are in a simulation, merely dreams in the minds of gods.

Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis was then further complicated by Stephen Wolfram’s hypothesis that the material universe itself is a computation, whether simulated or not (Wolfram, 2002). In his book A New Kind of Science, Wolfram proposes that from the quantum level on up the universe builds itself through algorithmic computation. Although he does not propose that the universe was designed, or is intended to compute anything in particular, he does discuss the “scientific pantheistic” implications of his theory in the book, and his ideas have been seized upon by intelligent design theorists and other religionists to argue that the universe is intelligent in its very substance.

In his latest book Ray Kurzweil also finds himself entertaining the possibility of a created universe which may also be intelligent, partly from the observation that the cosmological constants for our universe are set in the very unlikely narrow range which permit intelligent life, and partly as a consequence of his musings on the possibility that superintelligence may upload itself into the quantum flux of all things (Kurzweil, 2007).

So materialist transhumanism can, through certain logical steps, come full circle to the idea that we live in a created universe, perhaps a natural universe infused with the quantum mind of God, perhaps because we are a simulation being run in the mind of gods, or a resurrection of ourselves at the End of Time. None of these materialist ideas of a created or intelligent universe necessarily argue that God is unitary, benevolent or even aware of our existence. As discussed above in theodicy, we may be intended to evolve towards a posthuman apotheosis, or we may choose to become gods ourselves in order to challenge the Creator(s) for dominion. But for those inclined toward a theistic trans-spirituality these cosmologies provide yet another bridge to trans-spirituality.

One such extant manifestation of the religious seeing transhumanist ideas about the Singularity and a posthuman apothesosis as a fulfillment of their religious prophecies is the Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA). They note in a 2007 document:

Mormon teachings of the Millennium and immortality parallel Transhumanist ideas regarding the Singularity and transhumans in at least the following ways:

First, a period of dramatic and unexpected change is imminent. Although some ridicule and few have recognized its signs, the Millennium approaches, and we should prepare ourselves for the Day of Transfiguration and its attending changes. Likewise, although critics scoff and despite the intuitive linear view of change, the Singularity is nearer than we anticipate, and we should review and mitigate associated risks.

Second, minds and bodies may be changed diversely. In the twinkling of an eye, we and other animals may be transfigured or resurrected to bodies of varying types and degrees of glory. Similarly, information technology may enable genetics, nanotech and robotics to enhance the minds and bodies of humans and other animals.

Third, anatomical changes may extend lives indefinitely. From one transfiguration to another, exchanging blood for spirit, we may attain immortality. Analogously, as transhumans, we may extend or exchange our biological substrate with another to ensure persistence of our identity.

Fourth, our work may contribute to these changes. Transfiguration and resurrection may be ordinances for us to perform for each other. Comparatively, our science may provide technology that enables us to enhance ourselves and attain indefinite longevity.

Others see transhumanism as a fulfillment of the prophecy of a rise of demonic powers, apocalyptic trials and false prophets in the End Times:

A terrifying future thunders toward mankind, an impending fate embodied by monstrous, blasphemous combinations of human and animal genetic materials, of man/machine cyborgs, and of beings not only with increased capacities and extended life-spans, but also with re-engineered morality void of compassion. This future is so abhorrent as to almost defy the imagination. These new beings, and the transhumanists looking forward to their arrival, will not be benevolent. (Quayle, 2003)

In summary, posthumans and other aspects of the transhumanist project are likely to be woven into the eschatological beliefs of the world’s faiths, sometimes as a fulfillment of the promise of a millennial future and sometimes as agents of evil.

Conclusions

Improving the human condition is not a criticism of a Creator’s work left undone; it is rather using His free will, and His gifts of the intellect, in fulfillment of our destiny. (Rich, 2003)

While many religious today are skeptical of materialist, atheist transhumanists, and see transhumanism as contrary to the teachings of their faiths, there are already many transhumanists with religious faith who attest to the compatibility of religion and transhumanism. As transhuman possibilities increasingly develop, the compatibilities of metaphysics, theodicy, soteriology and eschatology between the transhumanist and religious worldviews will be built upon to create new “trans-spiritualities.” In this future religious landscape there will be bioconservative and transhumanist wings within all the world’s faiths, and probably new religious traditions inspired by the transhumanist project. We will create new religious rituals and meanings around biotechnological and cybernetic capabilities, just as we did around fire, the wheel, healing plants, and the book. Human creativity will manifest itself not only in technological mastery, but in the ongoing quest to imbue life and the universe with mytho-poetic meaning. I look forward to seeing the results.

References

“’I’m not afraid to die, I’ll go to heaven’: 

5/7/2007 05/07/2007 9952 Test title 4 Test Abstract Test Quote 5 5/7/2007 05/07/2007 9953 3 6 4 5

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5/7/2007 05/07/2007 9954 3 6 4 5 7 5/7/2007 05/07/2007 9955 3 67 4 5 7 5/7/2007 05/07/2007 9958 test test 5/7/2007 05/07/2007 9963 Lecture Series:  Shanghai Normal University, “Dialogues among Science, Philosophy and Religion,” April – June 2007, Shanghai, China The LSI Shanghai Workshop of Science and Religious Dialogue at Shanghai Normal University is hosting a lecture series, titled:

“Dialogues among Sciences, Philosophy and Religion”

The series will run from April to June 2007.

All events will be held at:
1002 Lecture Hall
Building Wen Yuan
Xuhui Campus
Shanghai Normal University
Shanghai, China

All events are free and open to the public. 

For more detailed information, please kindly contact the coordinators of Shanghai Workshop for Dialogue between Science and Religion in the Urban Society:

Prof. Gao Huizhu at 
huizhu@shnu.edu.cn

or

Prof. Wang Jianping at
wangjp27@shnu.edu.cn
 

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The following are details about the different lectures in the series:

Title: Sciences and Greek Philosophy in Islam
Speaker: Wang Jianping, Professor of Religious studies, Dept. of Philosophy, Faculty of Law and Politics, Shanghai Normal University.
Date: 6:30 pm. May 9, Wednesday, 2007

Title: World Civilizations and World Religions
Speaker: Zhuo Xinping, Professor of Religious studies, Institute of World Religions, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China.
Date: 6:30 pm. May 10, Thursday, 2007

Title: Taoism and Lifestyle
Speaker: Xu Xiaoyue, Professor of Religious studies, Dept. of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanity Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China.
Date: 6:30 pm. May 14, Monday, 2007

Title: Confucianism in China
Speaker: Li Shen, Professor of Religious studies, Dept. of Philosophy, Faculty of Law and Politics, Shanghai Normal University.
Date: 6:30 pm. May 16, Wednesday, 2007

Title: Dialogue between Man and God in the Renaissance
Speaker: Zhou Chunsheng, Professor of History, Dept. of History, Faculty of Humanity Sciences, Shanghai Normal University.
Date: 6:30 pm. May 17, Thursday, 2007

Title: The Common Source and Diversity between Tao and Sophia
Speaker: Zhao Dunhua, Professor of Religious studies, Dept. of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanity Sciences, Beijing University, Beijing.
Date: 6:30 pm. May 22, Tuesday, 2007

Title: Sages and Mystical Monks in Buddhist History of China and Japan
Speaker: Ma Delin, Professor of Philosophy, Dept. of Philosophy, Faculty of Law and Politics, Shanghai Normal University.
Date: 6:30 pm. May 24, Thursday, 2007

Title: The Correlation and Interaction between Religions and Contemporary Metropolitan Cultures in the Context of Chinese Culture.
Speaker: Gao Huizhu, Professor of Marxism Philosophy, Dept. of Philosophy, Faculty of Law and Politics, Shanghai Normal University.
Date: 6:30 pm. May 28, Monday, 2007

Title: The New Religions in Contemporary World
Speaker: Ye Luhua, Research Fellow of Religious studies, Institute of Religious Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Shanghai.
Date: 6:30 pm. May 30, Wednesday, 2007

Title: Religion and Sino-American Relation Today
Speaker: Xu Yihua, Professor of Politic Science, Center of American Studies, Faculty of International Relational Studies, Fudan University, Shanghai.
Date: 6:30 pm. May 31, Thursday, 2007

Title: Buddhism and Sciences
Speaker: Master Juexing, Monk of Jude Buddha Temple, Chairman of Shanghai Buddhism Association, Shanghai
Date: 2:00 pm. June 5, Tuesday, 2007

Title: Faith and Religious Behaviors: on Religious Phenomenology of Max Scheler
Speaker: Zhang Zhiping, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dept. of Philosophy, Faculty of Law and Politics, Shanghai Normal University.
Date: 6:30 pm. June 5, Tuesday, 2007

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The Series Lectures of Dialogue among Science, Philosophy and Religion are partly supported by the Local Society Initiative program of the Metanexus Institute, Philadelphia, U.S.A.

5/7/2007 05/07/2007 9964 Conference:  University of Copenhagen, “Religion in the 21st Century:  Transformations, Significance, Challenges,” 19-23 September 2007, Copenhagen, Denmark The University of Copenhagen is hosting a conference, titled:

“Religion in the 21st Century:  Transformations, Significance, Challenges”

19-23 September 2007

Ceremonial Hall, Frue Plads,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

For more information, contact the conference secretary, Niels Valdemar Vinding, at:
nvv@teol.ku.dk

or visit:
http://www.ku.dk/satsning/religion/copenhagenconference/

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Over the past quarter of a century it has become increasingly clear that religion is and will continue to be a decisive factor in many areas of life in the modern society. Therefore, there is a need for an overall look at the transformations, significance and challenges of religion in the 21st century. The Copenhagen Conference provides an interdisciplinary effort to come to terms with the primary question of the conference: How does religion matter?

Conference Planning Committee:

Ass. Prof. Hans Raun Iversen, Chairperson
Ass. Prof., Dr. Lisbet Christoffersen, Research Coordinator
Dr. Jonas Adelin Jørgensen, Papers Secretary
Niels Valdemar Vinding, Conference Secretary

5/7/2007 05/07/2007 9965 Lecture Series:  LSI group at Innsbruck, “Human Soul,” 10 May – 14 June 2007, Innsbruck, Austria The LSI Group at Innsbruck, “Research group on the Soul and the Naturalistic Challenge” is happy to announce the next talks of the
colloquia series on the Human Soul:

Thursday, 10 May 2007

Prof. Dr. Brigitte Falkenburg of the Institut für Philosophie, Universität Dortmund

“Was heißt es determiniert zu sein? Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen
Erklärung.” (What does it mean to be determined? Limits of scientific explanations)

Madonnensaal
Karl Rahner Platz 3, 1
Stock, um 18.00 s.t.

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Thursday, 31 May 2007

Prof. Dr. Uwe Meixner – Philosophisches Institut, Universität des Saarlandes

“Was ist Dualismus? Das Verhältnis von Dualismus zu Wissenschaft und christlicher Religion.” (What is dualism? The relationship of Dualism to science and Christian Religion)

Hörsaal 1
Karl Rahner Platz 3
Parterre, um 18.00 s.t.

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Thursday, 14 June 2007

Univ. Prof. Dr. Brüntrup Godehard – Hochschule für Philosophie, München

“Brauchen wir die Seele? Die Kohärenz des christlichen Materialismus.” (Do we need the Soul? The coherence of Christian Materialism)
Hörsaal 1
Karl Rahner Platz 3
Parterre, um 18.00 s.t.

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For further information about the LSI group Innsbruck, past and present activities and abstracts of the talks please visit the homepage of the LSI group Innsbruck:
http://www.uibk.ac.at/philtheol/lsi-innsbruck/events.html.en

5/7/2007 05/07/2007 9966 Conference:  Lancaster University, “Science & Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” 23-26 July 2007, Lancaster, UK

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This international and interdisciplinary conference is being held to mark the retirement of Professor John Hedley Brooke, Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. It will bring together historians, philosophers, scientists, and theologians from around the world to debate the latest research into science-religion relationships. The topics to be discussed range from “Intelligent Design” to scientific naturalism, and from new understandings of the “Scientific Revolution” to the role of teleology in contemporary evolutionary biology. Speakers will include Simon Conway Morris, Frank Turner, Peter Lipton, Nancey Murphy, Wentzel van Huyssteen, and John Hedley Brooke.

The cost of registration for this major international conference will increase after 1 May.
5/7/2007 05/07/2007 9967 Book Announcement:  Bill Kramer, “Unexpected Grace:  Stories of Faith, Science and Altruism,” Templeton Foundation Press, June 2007 The Templeton Foundation Press is releasing a new publication in June 2007, titled:

“Unexpected Grace:  Stories of Faith, Science, and Altruism”

By:  Bill Kramer

Templeton Foundation Press
ISBN:  978-1-59947-112-9
Price: $22.95, paperback
Publication:  June 2007

For more information, contact Diane Glynn Publicity at: 

Tel.: 203.259.4586
or
E-mail: dglynnpublicity@aol.com

About the author:

Bill Kramer is a freelance writer who has written for magazines, nonprofits, corporations, theater, and film.  Several of his plays have been produced, and two of his screenplays have won independent film festival awards. He has traveled extensively in America and throughout the world, including multiple trips to India. For nearly thirty years, he has practiced meditation, and, as a result, is deeply interested in the way individuals attempt to integrate spiritual beliefs with the challenging circumstances of real world social agendas.  Unexpected Grace, his first book, reflects this interest.  Kramer lives with his wife and son in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

“Bill Kramer has given us all a wonderful gift, a visionary, moving, and transfixing guide to the human heart. Unexpected Grace is itself unexpected grace: a surprisingly gripping exploration of the keystones of social harmony, empathy, and compassionate actions.”
Daniel Goleman, author Social Intelligence

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What makes scientists undertake a study?  What are the personal histories they bring to their research?  Who are the participants who volunteer to become statistics in the studies?  And how do the studies impact the lives of those involved with it?

In Unexpected Grace: Stories of Faith, Science, and Altruism (Templeton Foundation Press, $22.95), Bill Kramer explores the human side of scientific research.  He goes behind the scenes of four scientific investigations on diverse aspects of the study of unlimited love and eloquently shares the personal stories behind the research. 

First is the heartrending and inspiring story of Courtney Cowart, who was a part of a group of theologians who met at Trinity Place in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, not knowing her experience would become the subject of a study.  The group’s struggle to survive led to the formation of a practical, effective altruistic community. 

Students from a University of California Santa Cruz psychology department study embarked on a study of the formation of friendship.  Focusing on the dynamics of prejudice and stereotypes, with the goal of learning how intergroup friendship might reduce prejudice, they found their own perceptions changed radically in the course of their research.

The third study, from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, focused on the benefits of religion on mental and physical health, which led its researcher to a fuller understanding of forgiveness, humility, and grace. 

The final powerful story is about a physiology of love study conducted in Iowa City.  Here, a functional MRI is the vehicle for measuring empathy and brings the researcher to wonder, “Is there a point at which empathy shuts down and we turn away?” Ultimately she comes to recognize that past experiences influence our ability to respond empathetically.

Each story candidly unveils the transformations the researchers and their subjects experienced in the course of their work.  This unique behind-the-scenes view of the research process is a powerful testament both to those who do the research and those who participate in the studies.

5/7/2007 05/07/2007 9978 Symposium & Workshop:  University of California-Davis, “Music and the Brain:  From Real World Experience through Laboratory Experiment,” 11 May 2007, Davis, CA, USA
The Center for the Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis is hosting a symposium and workshop, titled:

“Music and the Brain:  From Real World Experience through Laboratory Experiment”

Friday, 11 May 2007
8:30AM – 8:00PM

UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain
267 Cousteau Place
Davis, CA 95618

Registration is free but required.

Information regarding the program and registration is available online at http://tarp.ucdavis.edu/symposium.

or

Contact Dr. Petr Janata at pjanata@ucdavis.edu.

The event is sponsored in part by the Metanexus Institute as part of a Templeton Advanced Research Program project titled, “Music, Spirituality, Religion, and the Human Brain.”

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The program is highly interdisciplinary and targeted toward an educated lay-audience.  It features talks by prominent scholars from the fields of religious studies, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience as well as workshops and discussions delving into research linking music, emotion and spiritual experience.

Program
           
8:30–9:00 –  Registration & Coffee

9:00 – 9:10 –  Welcome and Introduction

9:10–10:00 –  “Music and Spiritual/Religious Experience” – Robin Sylvan, The Sacred Center

10:00–10:30 –  Coffee

10:30–11:15 –  “Synchronization in piano duos” –  Peter Keller, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences

11:15–12:00 –  “Analyzing temporal dynamics in the experience of music:  Differential Calculus, Physics, and Functional Data Analysis Techniques” –  Bradley Vines, UC Davis

Noon–1:30 –  Lunch

1:30–1:50 –  Orientation to workshops –  Petr Janata, UC Davis

2:00–4:00 –  Workshops – Music, Flow, and the Groove

4:00–5:00 –  “Music and the Brain” –  Petr Janata, UC Davis

* PLEASE NOTE: Dr. Ed Large who was originally scheduled to give a talk titled, “Musical Experience and Musical Universals,” had to cancel due to unforseen circumstances.

5:00-8:00 –  Discussion/Reception/Center for Mind and Brain BBQ, with generative music by Custom Mixes

  5/9/2007 05/09/2007 9979 Television Production:  PBS, “A Brief History of Disbelief,”  Premiered May 4th A new  three-part documentary on public television will explore the hidden story of atheism and broaden the belief vs. disbelief debate.  This documentary is hosted by Jonathan Miller and titled:

“A Brief History of Disbelief”

Premiers on Friday, 4 May 2007

Please check the broadcast calendar at http://www.abriefhistoryofdisbelief.org/NewFiles/Disbelief%20Calendar.pdf .

This website lists when the documentary will be aired on different television stations around the country. 

For more information, visit: 
www.abriefhistoryofdisbelief.org

This documentary features Dr. Pascal Boyer an anthropologist and a grantee of Metanexus’ TARP program.  To learn more about Boyer’s work, visit: 
https://www.metanexus.net/tarp

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 This spring the debate over belief-disbelief-atheism intensifies with the national airing of A Brief History of Disbelief on public television stations, premiering May 4. Hosted by Jonathan Miller, the three-part series comes in the midst of the upcoming release of two provocative books on atheism: Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and Joan Konner’s The Atheist’s Bible.

God has rarely been such a contentious issue. Best-selling books The God Delusion, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation and Breaking the Spell have forcefully challenged the sacred cows, doctrines and dogmas of conventional religious belief.

A Brief History of Disbelief is a deeply intelligent and rational journey through the highly divisive topic. A Brief History of Disbelief premiers in the U.S. on most public television stations on Friday, May 4, 2007 (check local listings). The series is presented by the Independent Production Fund, executive director Alvin Perlmutter.

Written and narrated by acclaimed British intellectual Jonathan Miller — author, lecturer, TV producer/host, director of theater, opera and film, and neurologist — A Brief History of Disbelief originally aired on the BBC in the U.K. It was the first-ever historical look at the controversial topic on television. It is only during the last few years in the U.S. that atheism can be fully and widely discussed. Many leaders and celebrities are “coming out of the closet.” Just this week, U.S. Congressman Pete Stark publicly declared that he does not believe in a supreme being.

“This series is about the disappearance of something: religious faith,” Miller says in the opening. “It’s the story of what is often referred to as ‘atheism,’ the history of the growing conviction that God doesn’t exist.”

A Brief History of Disbelief combines an exploration of the origins of Miller’s own lack of belief with historical perspective and interviews with leading authorities, including biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, recently deceased playwright Arthur Miller, and physicist Steven Weinberg.

“In making this series I have inevitably discovered that the history of faith and doubt is a great deal more complicated that it might seem,” Jonathan Miller declares. Among the program’s surprising revelations is that philosophy, not science as often assumed, played a larger role in the gradual erosion of belief. And contrary to what many Christian fundamentalists today consider America’s founding principles, the first presidents were actually skeptical of religion. A Brief History of Disbelief traces the history of the first  “unbelievers” in ancient Greece through the role of disbelief in America’s founding to its flourishing today.

Part I: Shadows of Doubt

Miller visits the site of the absent Twin Towers to consider the religious implications of 9/11 and meets Arthur Miller and the philosopher Colin McGinn. He searches for evidence of the first “unbelievers” in ancient Greece and examines some of the modern theories around why people have always tended to believe in mythology and magic.

Part II: Noughts and Crosses

With the domination of Christianity from 500 AD, Miller wonders how disbelief began to re-emerge in the 15th and 16th centuries. He discovers that division within the Church played a more powerful role than the scientific discoveries of the period. He also visits Paris, the home of the 18th century atheist Baron D’Holbach, and shows how politically dangerous it was to undermine the religious faith of the masses.

The Final Hour

The history of disbelief continues with the ideas of self-taught philosopher Thomas Paine, the revolutionary studies of geology, and the evolutionary theories of Darwin. Miller looks at the Freudian view that religion is a “thought disorder.” He also examines his motivation behind making the series touching on the issues of death and the religious fanaticism of the 21st century.

A Brief History of Disbelief is presented by the Independent Production Fund, which has produced highly acclaimed information programming for over thirty years. The company and its producers have used television to educate, engage and challenge viewers to consider issues, ideas and public figures from new perspectives.

Major funding for A Brief History of Disbelief is provided by The Center for Inquiry, with additional funding from American Ethical Union, American Humanist Association, Institute for Humanist Studies, and HKH Foundation. 5/9/2007 05/09/2007 9980 Lecture Series:  The Warsaw Research Group Philosophy of Fundamentals of Science, “Science & Theology,” 10 May 2007 and 6 July 2007, Warsaw, Poland The Warsaw Research Group Philosophy of Fundamentals of Science, supported by the Metanexus Institute on Science and Religion,
in cooperation with the Academic Ministry at Campus Crusade for Christ, is pleased to announce and invite you to attend  the lectures on Science and Theology given by Guest Lecturers:

“Modernism and Postmodernism in Crisis” – Dr. Thomas Woodward (Trinity College of Florida, USA)

Thursday, 10 May 2007
1:30 p.m.

Polish Academy of Sciences
Institute of Fundamental Technological Research
Swietokrzyska 21 str., lecture room 108.
Warsaw

Intelligent Design Movement and Theology  Modernism and Postmodernism in Crisis – Dr. Stefano Visintin (Pontifical Athenaeum Sant Anselm, Italy)

Friday 6 July 2007
12:00 p.m.

Polish Academy of Sciences
Institute of Fundamental Technological Research
Swietokrzyska 21 str., lecture room 108
Warsaw, Poland

For further information, contact:
Boguslawa.Lewandowska@ippt.gov.pl

or

visit the Warsaw Research Group home page:
http://sophiawarsaw.ippt.gov.pl/

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Abstracts of lectures:

Modernism and Postmodernism in Crisis – Dr. Thomas Woodward (Trinity College of Florida, USA)

Shows the powerful role of modernism and postmodernism in taking over  the flow of thought in universities, and spotlights the revolution that is now  building against these two philosophical systems as they start to collapse.

Intelligent Design Movement and Theology  Modernism and Postmodernism in Crisis – Dr. Stefano Visintin (Pontifical Athenaeum Sant Anselm, Italy)

The Intelligent Design Movement is trying to explain phenomena of the physical and biological world postulating the existence of an Intelligent Being; and this, it is claimed, following a purely scientific way of thinking. In so doing it wants to give an explanation of our universe and of the origin of life that natural sciences can not explain in a satisfactory way. It also wants to build a bridge between modern natural sciences and theology, reintroducing the concept of a world seen as the plan of an Intelligent Being that has been the main link between these two disciplines from the beginning of modern science.

But is this a correct approach to this kind of problems? Is it really doing a good service to theology? And to what extent? Answering these questions will require clarifying the relation of theology with natural sciences. But this will give also the opportunity to see how theology deals with causality  and motivation.
5/9/2007 05/09/2007 9984 Book Announcement: Stephen Post, Ph.D. and Jill Neimark, “Why Good Things Happen to Good People,” Broadway Books, 2007 Broadway Books is publishing a new book, titled:

“Why Good Things Happen to Good People:  The Exciting New Research that Proves the Link Between Doing Good and Living a Longer, Healthier, Happier Life”

By:  Stephen Post, Ph.D. and Jill Neimark

With  a forward by Reverend Otis Moss, Jr.

On sale Tuesday, 8 May 2007
$23.95
978-0-7679-2017-9

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 “In my entire lifetime I have never read a book on the subject of giving and love that presents the truth of its benefits to the giver as a powerful science as well as this book does.”

-Robert H. Schuller, Founder, The Crystal Cathedral

Altruism and charitable giving is a popular new trend among billionaires (think Bill Gates, George Soros and Warren Buffet among others) and regular folks alike. Dr. Stephen Post is at the helm of the new breakthrough science connecting being good and doing well. As the President of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, his  research on the life-enhancing benefits of caring, compassion, kindness and altruism has been making headlines since the institutes’ founding in 2001. WHY GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE: The Exciting New Research that Proves the Link Between Doing Good and Living a Longer, Healthier, Happier Life  reports the latest findings from neuro-imaging, psychological measures, and major longitudinal studies that show how loving interactions and acts of altruism in our lives add up to big gains in health, quality of life and life expectancy.

WHY GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE is about a love that each and every one of us has at our fingertips: the ability to give, to be generous, to be generative. It is that part of love, new research is discovering, that is the key to health, happiness and a long life. Dr. Post shows us that there is more than one way to give, and none requires you to write a check. In fact, there are ten ways to give, in four domains of life (family, friends, community & humanity), all proven by science to improve your health, and even add to your life expectancy. They include:

– Celebration
– Humor
– Creativity
– Generativity (helping the next generation)
– And more…
 

Dr. Post has taken the research and distilled it into a much-needed inspirational message. WHY GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE movingly tells the stories of lives transformed by giving. What’s more, his unique “love and longevity scale” allows readers to test their own habits of giving, and a chapter by chapter plan teaches readers how to use the ten ways to change their own lives. The connection between generosity and health is so convincing that it will inspire readers to change their lives in ways big and small. This is a groundbreaking book on the new science of “goodness” that reveals how acts of giving add up to big gains in health, quality of life and life expectancy for the giver.

 
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Stephen Post, Ph.D., is Professor, Department of Bioethics, at the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, as well as Senior Research Scholar in the Becket Institute at St. Hughs’ College, Oxford University. He is President of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, founded in 2001 with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The Institute focuses on the scientific study of altruism, compassion and service.

Jill Neimark collaborated with Dr. Post on the writing of Why Good Things Happen to Good People. Her novel, Bloodsong, was a BOMC selection, published in hardcover and paperback, and in five foreign countries. She is a columnist for Spirituality & Health, has published three children’s books and is a former features editor for Psychology Today. Her journalism credits include The New York Times, Readers’ Digest, Discover and many others. 5/9/2007 05/09/2007 9985 Poetry as Revelation of Human Nature

      Whether it is the joy or the despair of love, the celebration of life or the gloom of grief, whether it is anger or anguish or mirth or moaning, every state of the human heart and every mode of the human condition has been brought to words by the poet’s pen. When we read the lines thus constructed,  the nature and pattern of our passions seem unveiled, for the poetic vision exposes the hidden facets of  tears and aches, the unreckoned recesses of laughter and love.  These are as real as any substantial thing, for they too exist, however subtly, in the universe in which the human mind dwells.

      Thus poetic vision creates a worldview which impresses on our very being experiences without material instruments. It incites feelings and emotions from totally intangible entities and happenings. It can also inspire action and activity for no apparent physical reason at all. The poeticic vision is  at the root of much of human culture and civilization. It is certainly one of the  most pristine manifestations of the human spirit. Its impact is inescapable, even on the least poetic among us, because its ancient vestiges are still powerful in human societies, and also because it resonates with our innermost being,  etched, as it were,  in the human psyche through some subtle genetic code. 

      In many ancient cultures poets narrated long stories, cladding  them  in the colorful costumes of  words that was their gift to conceive and concoct. It was thus that the great epics of the human family came to be created. The epics narrated momentous sagas in majestic meters, and the rhythmic lines with descriptions of the world around. They  influenced people’s perception of  the world, as when the Illiad speaks so often of rhododactynos Eos:  rosy-fingered Dawn. But in the process they also infused the listeners with a sense of action and participation, sometimes inspiring them to lofty ideals. Thus, when the heroic Hector declares in the Illiad,

            Let me at least not die without a struggle, inglorious,
            but do some big thing first, that men to come shall know of it,

a value is imprinted in our minds: that we should aspire to do something of significance during our lifetime. Which is what prompted Oliver Taplin to remark  that  “The Illiad is not so much concerned with what people do, as with the way they do it, above all the way they face suffering and death.”

            More importantly, the events and heroes of the epics, to all appearances emerging for the most part from poetic imagination around surviving anecdotal scarps of ancient beliefs and happenings, infused the characters and episodes with historical authenticity by the sheer power of words and rhythms. In the minds of the listeners, the grand narration and vivid descriptions on the lofty canvass of epic poetry were transformed into historical reports of things that  once did transpire. The charming stanzas of Homer paint a myriad facets of that ancient age, but  more significantly, through them the gods of pre-Christian Greece acquired a flesh of reality. The great god Zeus was prolific in progeny, both divine and mortal. Through his wife Hera he sired Ares,  but he fathered many more   through an array of other females also, though for Athena he needed no mate. Artemis and Apollo came to be because Zeus made love to Leto, and Maia was mother to Hermes, another daughter of Zeus. The poet speaks in solemn tones of Helen as born of  Zeus too: but now, it was as a swan that he seduced King Tyndareus’ wife Leda who thus conceived Helen, the fairest of the ancient. The  gods of Greece play their roles in these narrations, engaging in quarrels and conflicts, rivalries and tricks. Though few, if any,  in this day and age take these as anything but stories,  once in the faded past,  Apollo and Hercules were real beings who lived and lasted, the Greek gods  fought and prevailed. But in due course, even as  phlogiston  of eighteenth century chemistry gave way to newer recognitions of heat and fire, other more persuasive visions of the Divine dethroned Zeus and Ouranos, Apollo and Aphrodite, and all the rest of the gods of the ages from their  pedestal of reality, and reduced them to lively beings in the imaginary mythological realm.    

Whether it is the joy or the despair of love, the celebration of life or the gloom of grief, whether it is anger or anguish or mirth or moaning, every state of the human heart and every mode of the human condition has been brought to words by the poet’s pen. 5/10/2007 05/10/2007 9986 Careful Caring: We can’t always care, so why feel guilty when called uncaring?

“Don’t say I don’t care. I do care.”

Like many words, care means different kinds of things. It has its descriptive meaning–its denotation: Caring is a certain kind of behavior. But it also has its prescriptive meaning–its connotation: Caring is good. You should care. Being uncaring is bad.

Combining denotation and connotation you get a rule: if caring , then good ; if uncaring , then bad . Someone who calls you uncaring speaks with the authority of simple description–but smuggled into the description is an accusation that can make you feel guilty.

When you stop to think about the implied rule that caring is always good, it’s obviously absurd. If caring is always good, you should never stop caring about anything and anyone. You should always care about everything and everyone.

Since that’s impossible, we bend either the word’s denotation or its connotation. That is, we redefine caring behavior (“I do care; I just don’t feel like being with or helping you”), or we challenge the assumption that caring is always good (“It’s true, I don’t care anymore; I’ve chosen to move on”). The former is kinder, the latter more honest.

It would be nice if the rule for caring were as simple as always just do it . Realistically, what to care about is about the most important question in your life. And not just your life, but all of life. From evolution to the serenity prayer, it’s all about investing attention and effort in those things that pay off and not in things that don’t. For us humans, that includes caring for people who will care back. Perhaps it also means being careful how we define care, neither accepting nor imposing the absurd rule that caring is always good.

It would be nice if the rule for caring were as simple as always just do it . Realistically, what to care about is about the most important question in your life. And not just your life, but all of life. From evolution to the serenity prayer, it’s all about investing attention and effort in those things that pay off and not in things that don’t. Originally published on Mind Readers Dictionary; www.mindreadersdictionary.org. 5/10/2007 05/10/2007 9987 Poetry Transmission and Vision of Reality

Poetic visions often passed on from age to age through rote repetition. In our own times, not many learn to recite by rote a verse of even a dozen lines. But all the lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey were once transmitted from generation to generation through their imprints on human memory. Hundreds of humans served the cause of cultural continuity in a many societies. Thousands of lines of  the Üligers of Mongolia, lengthy narratives of ancient deeds of glory, used to be recited from memory by native rhapsodists. Here may be found historical personages like Genghis Khan , but also  manggus, the polycephalous monster. Then there were  the Chansons de Geste of the medieval French tongue which raised Charlemagne to lofty heights and spoke of happy days of yore when in the mornings birds would sing sweetly in Latin, and joy inflamed the universe at large:

                                    Et les oiseaux en leur latin

                                    Doucement chantent au matin,

                                    La joie enflamme l’univers.

But equally, in these and in other epics, the themes of the rise and fall and the re-emergence of things occur. For, often the reality exposed by the poetic vision is not so much the scenes or episodes presented, but an underlying pattern or motif in the scheme of things. The particular may be exciting and interesting as we read or listen to the story, but the general principles relating to the human condition are what make the epics insightful and everlasting.

The Anglo-Saxon Beowulf,  presumably born in England, speaks of a hero of another land. Though Grendel, the dragon who kidnapped and devoured warriors from King Hrothgar’s realm, may be sheer imagination for us of this age, medieval times when the work was composed, many common folk believed in their actual existence, with at least as much conviction as some in our own times who swear that the Lochness monster  and UFOs do exist.

The dragon represents in some way the halfway world between  scientific and poetic reality. For, its origins are in the serpents of the world, creatures that inherited the earth long before humans descended to the ground, but whose horizontal alacrity, subterranean habitat and venomous fangs spelled terror in the hearts of many ancient peoples. Poetic imagination, basing itself on stray instances of deaths from snake-bites, drew the image of a fearsome beast, out to wreak havoc on human life. So the Egyptian Ra fells Apophis who ruled a lightless realm, and Hebrews imagined the snake to be the cause of sin. The Gorgons and Hydra of ancient Greece were fearsome no less. But some, like the Romans, tried to appease the serpents in temples like Aesculapius, as was done in Hesperides and in India also, while Adisesha, the primordial serpent served as seat for the great Vishnu himself.  In China, the snake evolved to wingless dragons of mammoth proportions ruling  the air and duly worshiped by  gentle Taoists.  But from Homeric times to much of the Middle Ages, dragons were by and large evil creatures to be overcome by heroes, monsters to be subdued by the righteous and the mighty. Siergmund and Sigurd, Tristram and Lancelot, and a great many more of classic chivalry slew a dragon and won a name.

Today eager children listen the stories with eyes wide open, tasting to the full every moment of the thrill, but there was a time when dragons were no mere beasts of poetic conception. They were as real as the rhinoceros, not mere monsters made by the mind’s eye. As late as in the 16th century,  Konrad Gesner’s monumental Historia animalium listed dragons among the variety of species inhabiting the planet.         

Then there are the great sagas of Iceland telling of rival Norse knights and  magic potions, where Brunhild  in the Volsungasaga has her errant husband Sigurd killed, only to  give up her own life on his funeral pyre, not unlike some wailing widows in the Hindu world .

Deeds of bravery and revenge, acts of glory and heroism; beings strange and powerful, often superhuman; gods and godlings, the recall of events of a distant past: such are the ingredients of the great epics of humankind. The world they created, the personages they fashioned, the beings they conceived, all with the poetic clay, lived on for ages, and some live to this day, as part of what many thinking and feeling mortals regarded and regard as aspects of reality.

Deeds of bravery and revenge, acts of glory and heroism; beings strange and powerful, often superhuman; gods and godlings, the recall of events of a distant past: such are the ingredients of the great epics of humankind. The world they created, the personages they fashioned, the beings they conceived, all with the poetic clay, lived on for ages, and some live to this day, as part of what many thinking and feeling mortals regarded and regard as aspects of reality. 5/22/2007 05/22/2007 9988 Sweating the Petty vs. Petting the Sweaty: Two ways to play the game of life

“Life is a game.”

People interpret the parallel between life and games in two ways. The most common implies that like a game, life is no big deal, so you should just relax. This notion can be a comfort when you’re feeling stressed—stressed, in fact by the other way to take the statement: that in the game of life, you’re really trying figure out how to win, live right, make the world work better for you and others. And sometimes it’s not easy.

The first interpretation counsels looking beyond the game of life, as though the real action were elsewhere. The second interpretation counsels focusing on the game of life as if to say it’s no dress rehearsal.

This week I noticed that, simplifying a bit, the first interpretation reflects Plato’s contribution to philosophy and the second, Aristotle’s. Platonists, including most religious people, turn away from earthly matters to focus on the transcendental perfection of some other realm. Aristotelians, including most scientists, focus on earthly matters—seeing the potential for real action, progress, and improved understanding right here.

Which counts more, life or the afterlife? If religious doctrine is right that earthly life is merely a grubby boot camp test that will decide whether you will spend eternity (eternity!) in heaven or hell, then of course it pays to keep your eyes on the prize, which is elsewhere. Throughout much of history, widespread suffering, stress, and lack of earthly progress have dominated people’s experience. Think of how many people have been whipsawed from disease to torture, oppression to calamity without any prospect of an earthly explanation as to why.  It’s no wonder the Platonic idea that life is a simulation in the service of some higher, fairer realm has had a lot of appeal.

As with any of your life’s particulars—job, relationship, career—there’s no use flogging a dead horse. You shift your attention away from long shots so you can focus on the investments most likely to pay out. In a way, then, Plato and Aristotle squared off over this everyday question applied to life as a whole. If the chances of finding happiness here are vanishingly low, your mind naturally shifts to the potential elsewhere.

It’s also not surprising that the more stressful life is, the more attractive Platonic transcendentalism becomes. This worries me. In the years ahead, facing global warming and other large-scale discouragements, we may flock in ever greater numbers to Platonism, shifting attention away from the potential for earthly improvement just when we need it most. And towards what alternative? To Aristotelians like me, the battles between Shiites and Sunnis, Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Arabs are founded on ridiculously petty theological differences.  All these violent conflicts over imaginary afterlives and which rituals will gain you God’s grace—God isn’t dead, he’s deadly.

By 390 AD most of Aristotle’s writings were lost to the West. Christian leaders, campaigning to stamp out paganism, had burned many books, including Aristotle’s. Plato, commingled with Christianity, prevailed here through the dark ages (476-1000 AD) while Aristotle prevailed in the Muslim centers of learning such as Bagdad. The West rediscovered Aristotle during the Crusades (1095-1291). Aquinas (1225-1274) finessed an integration of Aristotle into Christianity, and the central power of the Papacy helped spread the new Aristotelian Scholasticism that resulted. In the 1600s the Aristotelian vision of continued earthly progress and innovation broke free from the Church’s insistence on a fixed, infallible dogma, and the rest is modern history.

To Aristotelians, Platonists seem obsessed with trivialities. With all the real-world challenges we face, why fuss over the details of some magically perfect, unseen metaphysical realm? To Platonists, Aristotelians seem too content to embrace this flawed earthly existence.

So take your pick: sweat the petty or pet the sweaty. I’d pet the sweaty any day. But then my days aren’t so stressful. I get to experience the extraordinary progress we’re making in the game of life. Good things happen for me every day. So, of course, I don’t sweat the petty details about how I can improve my chances of spending eternity in some alleged other world where good things supposedly happen. I’m Aristotelian because I can afford to pet the sweaty.

People interpret the parallel between life and games in two ways. The most common implies that like a game, life is no big deal, so you should just relax. This notion can be a comfort when you’re feeling stressed—stressed, in fact by the other way to take the statement: that in the game of life, you’re really trying figure out how to win, live right, make the world work better for you and others. And sometimes it’s not easy. Originally published on Mind Readers Dictionary; www.mindreadersdictionary.org. 5/22/2007 05/22/2007 9991 Book Announcement:  Paul Davies, “The Cosmic Blueprint:  New Discoveries in Nature’s Creative Ability to Order the Universe,” Templeton Foundation Press, 1988 Templeton Foundation Press has just re-released a book  first published in 1988 for the first time in paperback.

The Cosmic Blueprint:  New Discoveries in Nature’s Creative Ability to Order the Universe

By:  Paul Davies

978-1-932031-66-9
$16.96
Paperback

In this critically acclaimed book, first published in 1988 and now reprinted in paperback, scientist and author Paul Davies explains how recent scientific advances are transforming our understanding of the emergence of complexity and organization in the universe.

To read more about this book or to purchase, visit:
http://www.templetonpress.org/book.asp?book_id=67#author

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About the Author

Paul Davies is professor of natural philosophy in the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University. His research has spanned the fields of cosmology, gravitation, and quantum field theory, with particular emphasis on black holes and the origin of the universe. He is currently working on the problem of the origin of life and the search for life on Mars. He is a well-known author, broadcaster, and public lecturer and has written over twenty-five books. Among his better-known works are God and the New Physics, The Mind of God, About Time, The Fifth Miracle, and How to Build a Time Machine. In recognition of his work as an author, he was elected as Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature in 1999.

His contributions to science have been recognized by numerous awards, including the 2002 Michael Faraday Prize by the Royal Society and the 2001 Kelvin Medal and Prize from the UK Institute of Physics. In April 1999 the asteroid 1992 OG was officially named (6870)Pauldavies in his honor. His most significant award was the 1995 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, the world’s largest prize for intellectual endeavor.

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About the Book

 Melding a variety of ideas and disciplines from biology, fundamental physics, computer science, mathematics, genetics, and neurology, Davies presents his provocative theory on the source of the universe’s creative potency. He explores the new paradigm (replacing the centuries-old Newtonian view of the universe) that recognizes the collective and holistic properties of physical systems and the power of self-organization. He casts the laws in physics in the role of a “blueprint,” embodying a grand cosmic scheme that progressively unfolds as the universe develops.

Challenging the viewpoint that the physical universe is a meaningless collection of particles, he finds overwhelming evidence for an underlying purpose: “Science may explain all the processes whereby the universe evolves its own destiny, but that still leaves room for there to be a meaning behind existence.”

“ A provocative book that should be widely read.”—Library Journal

“ Unquestionably, Paul Davies has established himself as one of the most felicitous writers on physics at the frontier.” —Abdus Salam, Nobel Laureate in Physics, Nature

Highlights

    * An origin-of-the-universe classic, back in print
    * Insightful theories clarified for both lay readers and scientists
    * Perfect for classroom use

5/23/2007 05/23/2007 9992 Book Announcement:  Nicolaas A. Rupke, “Eminent Lives in Twentieth-Century Science and Religion,” Peter Lang GMBH, 2007 The Peter Lang Publishing Group has recently published a new book, titled:

Eminent Lives in Twentieth-Century Science and Religion

By:  Nicolaas A. Rupke (ed.)

Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2007.
255 pp.
ISBN:  978-3-631-56803-3

€ 38 / $ 49.95 / £23.10

For more information or to purchase the book, visit:
www.peterlang.de/index.cfm?vID=56803&vLang=E&vHR=1&vUR=2&vUUR=1

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Book Synopsis

Can science and religion coexist peacefully, even symbiotically? Or is conflict inevitable and are the enterprises mutually exclusive? In this volume an international team of distinguished scholars address these enduring yet urgent questions by examining the lives of eminent twentieth-century biologists, chemists and physicists whose careers were marked by the interaction of science and religion: Charles Coulson, Theodosius Dobzhansky, R.A. Fisher, Julian Huxley, Pascual Jordan, Ivan Pavlov, Michael Pupin, and E.O. Wilson. The team’s rich empirical studies show a diversity of creative engagements between science and religion that defy efforts to set the two at odds.

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Contents

Contents: Nicolaas A. Rupke: Introduction: Telling Lives in Science and Religion – Arie Leegwater: Charles Alfred Coulson: Mixing Methodism and Quantum Chemistry – Jitse M. van der Meer: Theodosius Dobzhansky: Nothing in Evolution Makes Sense Except in the Light of Religion – James Moore: Ronald Aylmer Fisher: A Faith Fit for Eugenics – Peter J. Bowler: Julian Huxley: Religion without Revelation – Richard H. Beyler: Pascual Jordan: Freedom vs Materialism – Torsten Rüting: Ivan Petrovich Pavlov: From Russian Orthodox Monastery to Big Science Laboratory – Edward B. Davis: Michael Idvorsky Pupin: Cosmic Beauty, Created Order, and the Divine Word – Mark Stoll: Edward Osborne Wilson: The Gospel According to Sociobiology – Ronald L. Numbers: Epilogue: Science, Secularization, and Privatization.

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About the Editor

Nicolaas A. Rupke is professor of the history of science and director of the Institute for the History of Science at Göttingen University. With a doctorate from Princeton, he has held research positions at Oxford and the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. His latest study of scientific biography is Alexander von Humboldt: a Metabiography (2005). Rupke is a fellow of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. 5/23/2007 05/23/2007 9994 Conference Call for Papers:  St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute, “Epistemological Paradigms of Science & Theology,” 14-18 November 2007, Moscow, Russia St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute is issuing an invitation and a call for papers for an international conference, titled: 

Epistemological Paradigms of Science and Theology:  Historical Dynamics and Universal Foundations

14-18 November 2007

Moscow, Russia

Abstract are due:
Saturday, 1 September 2007

For more information, visit:
www.standrews.ru

This international conference is supported by The John Templeton Foundation. 

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Since 2000 St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute with the support of the John Templeton Foundation has organized four International Conferences on the theme of religion and science dialogue: “Science and Theology” (2000), “Theology and Science: An Anthropological Perspective” (2003), “Responsibility of Religion and Science: Technology, Environment, Bioethics” (2005), “Ultimate Purposes of Theological and Scientific Understandings as Explored in Cosmology, Creation, Eschatology” (2006). Our next conference is devoted to epistemological paradigms of science and theology.

The Conference will take place in Moscow from 14 to 18 November 2007. Leading theologians, philosophers and scientists, who made important contributions into the development of religion and science dialogue are invited. The conference will include plenary and sectional lectures, discussions and cultural events.

THEME OF THE CONFERENCE

Epistemological issues have always been of great importance for the Christian thought. The problem of correlation between faith and reason, of connection between the divine revelation, rational discourse and empirical experience was a subject of constant discussion for theologians and philosophers. In the new time, one aspect of this problem, namely the question of relationship between science and religion, came to the fore. After Kant’s destructive criticism of metaphysics and rational theology, the Ockham model, separating the sphere of rational and empirical knowledge from that of divine revelation, seemed to be the best option. Science became an autonomous area with its own epistemological principles, independent of theological and metaphysical conceptions. Thus the ways of science and theology completely diverged. Science was considered a sphere of objective description of the observable spatial-temporal reality, whereas theology pretended to explicate the eternal divine truth. However, they had one thing in common. Both science and theology pretended to some pure knowledge, whose content is taken from an immutable source and does not (or, at least, should not) depend of particular circumstances of human existence. For science such a source was the world, for theology the divine revelation. Epistemological strategies of science were supposed to represent universal principles of knowledge, remaining the same for all epochs, cultures and societies. Theology did not develop its own epistemological principles, but it also claimed that its doctrines had universal character. At least its methods of argumentation, as well as formulated theological opinions (especially dogmas) were supposed to be independent of language and culture.

Modern philosophy of science does not allow holding this ideal of knowledge any more. Relatively short history of science demonstrates a quick change of world pictures and epistemological paradigms. Together with changes in culture, style of communication and social practices, epistemological principles and patterns of research change too. Methods of scientific research and criteria of plausibility turn out to be tightly connected with values and norms shared by the scientific society. In producing its results, science rests also on extra-scientific ideas. Therefore, even if we agree that there exists only one truth about the world, we must acknowledge that explication of this truth depends on the character of an epistemological paradigm shared by the scientific society.

To what extent does this situation apply also to theology? Is not theology dependent, like science, on cultural preconditions, communicative norms and social values? Many 20th century theologians addressed this issue and today it is clear that theology not only explicates divine truth but also expresses human attitude to it, which cannot be formed outside of a certain social and cultural context. In this sense it would be interesting to draw a parallel between changes of epistemological paradigms in science and theology, e.g. as these changes are described by Thomas Kuhn (for science) and Hans Küng (for theology). The most important question is how to explicate universal and immutable aspects of science and theology, acknowledging at the same time historical dynamics of scientific and theological paradigms.

Within the framework of the conference, a wide-ranging discussion will take up issues connected with paradigm approach to science and theology. In particular, the following questions will be addressed:
· Are there universal principles and norms of scientific and/or theological investigation?
· Is it true that different cultures predefine the character of scientific and theological paradigms?
· How does language influence the character of scientific knowledge and theological argumentation?
· To what extent does the content of theological doctrines depend on cultural peculiarities of the epoch when they were formulated?
· What is the role of the personal factor in scientific and theological investigation?
· How important is the aesthetical criterion in building scientific theories and theological constructions?
· How does contemporary science influence the character of theological argumentation?
· Do theological preconditions influence epistemological strategies of science?

The given list does not exhaust all the aspects of the topic announced in the title of the conference but provides a focus for the expected discussion.

KEY SPEAKERS

Adrian Lemeni, Ph.D
Professor of Dogmatic and Fundamental Theology at the University of Bucharest. Secretary of state in the Romanian Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs

Nancey Murphy, Ph.D., Th.D.
Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. Ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren. Member of John Templeton Foundation Board of Advisors.

Rev. Canon Keith Ward, D.D., FBA
Gresham Professor of Divinity, Gresham College, London, Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the University of Oxford. Member of John Templeton Foundation Board of Advisors.

Michael Welker, Ph.D.
Chair for Systematic Theology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Director of the Internationales Wissenschaftsforum der Universitat Heidelberg, a center for international and interdisciplinary research. Member of John Templeton Foundation Board of Advisors.

Grigoriy Goutner, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Chair of Philosophy at St. Philaret’s Orthodox Christian Institute, Moscow. Professor of St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute. Author of a number of publications.

Alexei Nesteruk, Ph.D.
Researcher in cosmology and quantum physics in the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, England, and a research associate in the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge, England. Visiting Professor of St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute, Moscow.

Vladimir Porus, Ph.D., D.Habil.
Professor, Chair of Ontology, Logic and Epistemology at Moscow Higher School of Economics. Author of numerous books and articles. Chairman of St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological College monthly academic seminar “Theology, Philosophy and Science”.

PAPERS AND PUBLICATION

Those who wish to present a paper should send a summary (1000 words at most) by e?mail to St. Andrew’s by 1 September 2007. The Organizing Committee selects papers for the Conference and sends invitations to the speakers. The full text of all the papers selected will have to be submitted by 1 October 2007. However, it will be possible to participate without a paper (some priests, teachers, and students are expected to be present). The working languages of the conference will be Russian and English.

Upon arrival at the conference every participant will receive summaries of all the papers presented and the conference programme. Plenary and sectional papers are scheduled for 30 minutes each. Some papers will be published in St. Andrew’s quarterly Pages: Theology, Culture, Education and we will publish a collection of papers in a separate volume. Summaries and papers should be sent to:

Mikhail Tolstoluzhenko
St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute
Jerusalem St. 3, Moscow, 109316, Russia
Tel/Fax: +7 495 6702200; +7 495 6707644
E-mail: info@standrews.ru

ORGANIZATION AND ACCOMMODATIONS

The Conference will assemble on Wednesday, 14 November for a reception and opening ceremony in the evening. Participants will depart after breakfast on Sunday, 18 November. The price of a single room and full board will be approximately €70 per day.

REGISTRATION

Numbers are limited and early registration is strongly advised. Registration will become effective when the registration form and the full conference fee have been received and acknowledged by the registration officer. The conference fee covers registration, accommodation, meals, participation in all conference activities, excursion, conference dinner and entitles the participant to receive summaries of all conference papers.

Early conference fee (before 1 July 2007):
– accommodation in single room  €395
– accommodation in double room  €305
   
Late conference fee (after 1 July 2007):
– accommodation in single room  €435
– accommodation in double room  €345

A limited number of scholarships will be provided – mainly for speakers from Eastern European countries. Should you cancel your registration before 1 October, €30 will be deducted and the remainder of your conference fee will be refunded. No refund is possible after 1 October. Payment of conference fees may be made by bank transfer or by check in US$, EURO or UK pounds.  Please write to the registration officer for advice.

All registration forms must be sent to the registration officer:

Ms. Olga Bogoslovskaya
St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute
Jerusalem St. 3, Moscow, 109316 Russia
Тel./Fax: +7 495 6702200; +7 495 6707644
E-mail: info@standrews.ru 5/23/2007 05/23/2007 9995 Lecture, “Society for the Integration of Science and Human Values (SISHVa), “Organ Transplantation, Ethics & Religion,” 1 June 2007, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka The Society for the Integration of Science and Human Values (SISHVa) is hosting a lecture, titled:

Organ Transplantation, Ethics & Religion

By:  Arjuna Aluwihare – Emeritus Professor

Friday, 1 June 2007
11 AM – 12:30 PM

Arts Faculty Seminar Room
University of Peradeniya
Peradeniya, Sri Lanka 5/23/2007 05/23/2007 9996 Workshop:  University of Lincoln, “The Religious Roots in Information Systems (RRIS),” 24-26 May 2007, Lincoln, UK The University of Lincoln is hosting a three-day workshop funded by the Metanexus Institute, titled:

The Religious Roots in Information Systems (RRIS)

24-26 May 2007

This event is free and open to the public.

For more information, pleas contact the Editorial Team at:
editorialteam@lincoln.ac.uk

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The main activity of RRIS is exploratory discussions aimed at developing a new approach to insight into the tensions in the field of IS that arise from religious presuppositions. Such questions include the issue of artificial intelligence; diversity of information and communication technology (ICT); development of systems and artefacts; problems in methodological development of IS in relation to historical and contemporary shifts in determinism to freedom in cultural, religious, and scientific endeavour; the difficulty in predicting and ensuring the benefits of technology; and ICT, technological determinism and society.

This group joins together scholars of philosophy, information systems, gender studies, Christianity and contemporary culture, critical theory, biology, and ethics in technology to collaborate in understanding information systems (IS) through the lens of philosophical and theological thought.

This workshop intends to open up and explore the general area of faith influences within IS and organisational practice. The workshop aims to explore the religious roots of information systems and the link to the tensions that emerge as a result of religious motivations.

We welcome attendees from all backgrounds who are interested in these debates and would also like to extend an invitation to individuals interested in submitting papers or hosting discussion groups.

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Timetable of the Workshop

Thursday 24th

– Introduction to the workshop by Carole Brooke and Andrew Basden
– Group Discussions
– Dinner at ‘The Bowlful’ restaurant 6:30 for a 7:00pm start

Friday 25th

9:30 – 12:30 Presentations and discussions
12:30 – 13:30 Lunch (Will be provided by the University)
13:30 – 16:30 Presentations and discussion
Dinner at ‘Café Zoot’ restaurant 6:30 for a 7:00pm start

Saturday 26th

9:30 – 11:00 Presentations and discussions
11:00 – 12:30 Round-up and summary of the workshops (report to be produced)
12:30 Lunch (Will be provided by the University) and depart

5/23/2007 05/23/2007 9997 Book Announcement:  Beverly Lanzetta, “Emerging Heart:   Global Spirituality and the Sacred,”  Fortress Press, 2007 Fortress Press recently published a book, titled:

Emerging Heart: Global Spirituality and the Sacred

By Beverly J. Lanzetta

Item Number: 978-0-8006-3893-1

Price: $18.00 / CAN $21.50 / UK £9.99
Specs: 5.5” x 8.5”, paperback, 176 pages
 
To order, call Fortress Press at 1-800-328-4648 or visit the Web site at www.fortresspress.com.
 
To request review copies (for media) or to inquire about speaking opportunities and interviews with the author, please call 1-800-426-0115 ext. 234 or e-mail toddb@augsburgfortress.org. 

To request exam copies for classroom use, (professors) go to www.fortresspress.com/examcopy. 

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“Beverly Lanzetta is a powerful voice for those who find truth and beauty in a global spirituality. Emerging Heart presents us with her journey toward spiritual nonviolence and engages the reader with the core ideas of such spiritual teachers as Ewert Cousins, Raimon Panikkar, Mohandas Gandhi, Thomas Merton, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and the Dalai Lama. Readers should be put on notice that this book may well change the way they see the world.”

—Harold Kasimow, George Drake Professor of Religious Studies, Grinnell College

Beverly J. Lanzetta is Research Associate at the Southwest Institute for Research on Women at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is the author of Radical Wisdom: A Feminist Mystical Theology (2005, 978-0-8006-3698-2).

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Millions of Americans have adopted and adapted spiritual practices and virtues from a variety of traditions. What are they looking for? Theologian and retreat leader Beverly Lanzetta believes that our contemporary world desperately seeks a shared spiritual foundation adequate to meet our most pressing moral, religious, economic, and social issues. We need, she argues, a spiritual vocabulary to describe the unspoken, to interpret our common humanity, and to articulate our earthly concerns in a way respectful and inclusive of all. In her latest book, Emerging Heart: Global Spirituality and the Sacred, Lanzetta provides readers with a powerful exploration of an emerging global spirituality with justice at its core.

Highlighting pioneers of global spirituality such as Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, Abraham Heschel, Mohandas Gandhi, Howard Thurman, Bede Griffiths, and Dorothy Day, Emerging Heart shows how a variety of religious traditions emerge from and converge on a divine nature and mystic quality that creates a loving heart. Lanzetta first describes this phenomenon in her own experience and then elaborates on that mystical core, the notion of the divine, the new shape of interreligious dialogue, pioneers of this new global spirituality, and the personal, spiritual, and ethical challenges that it poses to us.

This is a book of breathtaking insight and high moral ambition to restore our sense of human possibility and high purpose.

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“Emerging Heart is an immensely moving account of Lanzetta’s own spiritual experience combined with probing reflections on the mystical heart of world faiths, the significance of interreligious dialogue, and the reality of a newly emerging global spirituality. An inspiring vision inviting to daring ventures.”

—Ursula King, Professor Emerita of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Bristol,

Professorial Research Fellow, University of London

“Emerging Heart is Lanzetta’s most personal and most profound book. She weaves together a tapestry of personal narrative, interreligious reflection, and spiritual insight with eloquence and force. This book heralds—and helps to catalyze—the emergence of a global spiritual wisdom grounded on interfaith exchange, contemplative practice, and creative participation in Mystery.”

—Jorge N. Ferrer, Associate Professor, California Institute of Integral Studies

 
5/23/2007 05/23/2007 9998 Publication Announcement:  Basarab Nicolescu (Director) and Magda Stavinschi (Editor), “Science and Religion:  Transdisciplinary Studies,” Curtea Veche The Curtea Veche editing house in Bucharest, Romania is publishing a new transdisciplinary review, titled:

Science and Religion:  Transdisciplinary Studies (SRTDS)

Editorial Board consists of:

– Basarab Nicolescu (Director)
– Magda Stavinschi (Editor)
– Philip Clayton
– Thierry Magnin
– Ioan Chirila
– Radu Constantinescu
– Adrian Lemeni

Our magazine is peer-reviewed. We have the ambition to gradually introduce high standards in the acceptation of contributions. However, at the same time, we wish to keep an accessible level for any cultivated reader and for students from different specialties.

SRTDS comports four sections: Studies, Research Works, Book Reviews and Events. The magazine has the form a book and therefore has not a given periodicity. However, our aim is to publish at least two issues per year.

Contributions can be presented in three languages: English, French and Romanian. English is, beyond doubt, the dominant language today. French is very important in the context of Europe and francophone areas of the world. We accept also contributions in Romanian, in order to encourage the development of the science and religion dialogue in a country still marked by the memory of a totalitarian system which had forbid such a dialogue for a long period of time.

We would be happy if you can contribute to the issue No 2 of  Science and Religion:  Transdisciplinary Studies (SRTDS). The texts must not to exceed 10 pages in Times 12 (single space) and they have to be sent in electronic form to Basarab Nicolescu at nicol@club-internet.fr  or to Magda Stavinschi at magda_stavinschi@yahoo.fr.

Contributions are due:
Saturday, 1 September 2007

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Of course, there are several transdisciplinary magazines in the world, but this is the first one completely dedicated to the dialogue between science and religion. Also, in comparison with the multi- and interdisciplinary magazines in the same field, the present one is focused on the transdisciplinary methodology of the dialogue: identification of levels of Reality, use of the logic of the included middle and full consideration of complexity.

Homo religiosus probably existed from the beginnings of the human species, at the moment when the human being tried to understand the meaning of his life. The sacred is his natural realm. Homo economicus is a creation of modernity. He believes only in what is seen, observed, measured. The profane is his natural realm. The transdisciplinary hermeneutics, natural outcome of the transdisciplinary methodology, is able to identify the common germ of homo religiosus and of homo economicus and to engage them in a constructive dialogue.

The transdisciplinary dialogue between science and religion can not be conceived in isolation from other fields of knowledge, like arts, poetry, architecture, mass-media, economics, social life and politics, so crucial in the science/religion debate. This is the reason why our magazine will be also open to contributions concerning other fields of knowledge.

We acknowledge support, in making possible such a magazine, from the Templeton Foundation (USA), the Association for the Dialogue between Science and Theology in Romania (ADSTR), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Orthodoxy (IASSO) and the editing house Curtea Veche.
 
 
   5/24/2007 05/24/2007 9999 Seminar:  AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships Seminar, “The Language of God:  A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” 30 May 2007, Washington, DC, USA This years AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships Seminar is titled:

The Language of God:  A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

Speaker:
Francis S. Collins, MD, Ph.D.
The Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute

Wednesday, 30 May 2007
Beginning at 6 PM
With a book signing and reception to follow

AAAS Auditorium
1200 New York Avenue, NW
Washington, DC

Please RSVP by Friday, 25 May 2007 at:
www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=984923873655

 
Please contact Emily MacGillivray at emacgill@aaas.org if you need further information.

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Dr. Collins is recognized for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP), a multi-institutional, international effort to map and sequence all human DNA.  His accomplishments have been recognized by numerous awards and honors, including election to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.  He is the author of the book “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief”, and he is invited to many settings to discuss his views on Christianity in debates about the existence of God and evolution.
 

  5/24/2007 05/24/2007 10000 Conference:  SophiaEuropa, “Human Persons and the God of Nature,” 3-6 September 2007 SophiaEuropa in association with the Ian Ramsey Centre, Theology Faculty, University of Oxford, UK is hosting a conference, titled:

Human Persons and the God of Nature

3-6 September 2007

Oriel College
Oxford, UK

Supported by Metanexus Institute and The John Templeton Foundation.                

Further details (including the draft programme) and for booking details consult: www.ianramseycentre.org/
or email margaret.yee@theology.ox.ac.uk  (Conference Director)
 

Early booking discounts apply before July 1st

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Speakers and Participants

Prof. John Brooke                                              Dr. Collete Moloney
Prof. Ronald Cole-Turner                                   Prof. Nancey Murphy
Prof. Eamonn Conway                                        Prof. John Ozolins
Ms. Fiona Dowling                                              Prof. Roberto Poli
Prof. Jürgen Ehlers                                             Dr. John Polkinghorne
Ms. Amanda Hayes                                             Dr. Patricia Rehm
Prof. Edward Henderson                                     Prof. Antonio Russo
Prof. Michael Howlett                                          Mr. Colin Tudge
Ms. Angeliki Kerasidou                                        Prof. Stephan Schaede
Prof. Burkhard Liebsch                                        Dr. Eric Weislogel
Prof. Thomas Moellenbeck                                  Dr. Margaret Yee

5/24/2007 05/24/2007 10002 Conference:  Metanexus Granada, “El Conflicto de Racionalidades” or “Struggle of Rationalities,” 20-23 September 2007, Granada, Spain

LSI METANEXUS GRANADA, FACULTY OF THEOLOGY

Leandro Sequeiros, Director of the LSI Metanexus Granada invite you to participate in the meeting about
 

Struggle of Rationalities

El conflicto de racionalidades
Organized by A S I N J A
c/ Alberto Aguilera, 23 – 28015 Madrid
Tel. 91 542 28 00 – E-mail:asinja@hotmail.com
_________________________________________________

P R E S E N T A C I Ó N

          El tema que queremos analizar en estas Jornadas es el “Conflicto de racionalidades”, un tema básico para cualquier debate interdisciplinar y, probablemente, una clave de comprensión de buena parte de los conflictos de nuestro tiempo y de las dificultades del entendimiento entre individuos y culturas. Se trata de analizar el conflicto que se puede plantear entre diferentes racionalidades, modos de pensamiento, presupuestos epistemológicos, ideologías (científicas, técnicas, éticas, políticas y religiosas). Nos interesan los temas de controversia, pero, sobre todo, y principalmente, el porqué de dichos conflictos. Cuáles son los elementos que obligan a mantener una postura, unos presupuestos innegociables o una ideología incontrovertible, y cómo ello imposibilita o complica una discusión y hace imposible el entendimiento. Cómo la inmersión en un cierto paradigma condiciona y determina las posiciones. Por qué hay tanta dificultad para flexibilizar las posiciones y escuchar comprehensivamente al interlocutor.

P R O G R A M A

Jueves 20 de Septiembre
19.00h. Actividad cultural preparatoria: Proyección de película
22.00h. Actividad cultural: Coloquio sobre la película.

Viernes 21 de Septiembre
9.30h. Primera ponencia: “Conflictos de racionalidades en el pensamiento. Perspectiva desde la filosofía”
           Ponente: Mercedes Torrevejano. Profesora de Filosofía. Universidad de Valencia
12.00h. Comunicaciones
16.30h. Segunda ponencia: “Conflictos de racionalidades en el mundo actual. Perspectiva sociológica “
           Ponente: Juan Luís Pintos. Profesor de Sociología. Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
19.00h. Comunicaciones

Sábado 22 de Septiembre
9.30h. Tercera ponencia-debate: “Bioética: autonomía y gestión del cuerpo”
           Ponentes:       Javier Sádaba. Profesor de Filosofía. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
                                       Juan Carlos Álvarez. Profesor de Bioética. Universidad Pontificia Comillas. Madrid
9.30h. Exposición ponente 1: “Identidad humana e Ingeniería Genética”
10h. Exposición ponente 2: “Bioética: autonomía y gestión del cuerpo”
13.00h. Comunicaciones
16.30h. Película para debate: “¿Y tú qué sabes?” (What The Bleep Do We Know? 2004)
             Presentador: Leandro Sequeiros. Profesor de Antropología filosófica y de Teoría del Conocimiento.
                                    Facultad de Teología de Granada
19.00h. Asamblea General de ASINJA

Domingo 23 de Septiembre
9.30h. Cuarta ponencia-debate: “Cosmología y teología: sentido o sinsentido de la creación”
           Ponentes:       Luís Joaquín Boya. Catedrático de Física Teórica jubilado. Universidad de Zaragoza.
                                  Manuel García Doncel. Profesor emérito de Física Teórica, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. Director del     
                                  Seminario de Teología y Ciencias de Barcelona (STICB)
9.30h. Exposición ponente 1: “Cosmología científica: exposición y presentación de puntos de vista de científicos actuales”
10h. Exposición ponente 2: “Sentido teológico de la creación en evolución”
13.00h. Reunión conclusiva: Evaluación y cierre de las Jornadas. Propuestas para el año próximo
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COMUNICACIONES PREVISTAS
 
1. Leandro Sequeiros y Cándido M. García Cruz: “Conflictos de racionalidades en las Ciencias de la Tierra, El caso del conflicto de Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) con las ideas darwinistas”
2. Antonio Blanch: “Conflicto de interpretaciones desde una misma fe cristiana”
3. José Luís San Miguel: “Tradiciones culturales, paradigmas e intolerancias”
4. José Ramón García-Murga: “Teología trinitaria, racionalidad, conflicto, empiría”
5. Lydia Feito: “Cerebros de mujeres y cerebros de hombres: ¿conflicto de racionalidades?”
6. José Miró Nicolau: “Una causa racional de los conflictos entre racionalidades”

for further information: Leandro Sequeiros lsequeiros@probesi.org
www.upcomillas.es/centros/cent_asoc_asinja_pres.aspx 

5/24/2007 05/24/2007 10003 Human Evolution from an Anthropic Universe (Report of the Iberia-Network of LSI)

This paper concerns some specific aspects of the combined research promoted by the Iberia-Network of LSI. A general scheme of the combined research was already presented in Metanexus Conference, June 2006: “Human Evolution – Script for Research Project to be carried out by the LSI and the Iberia-Network in Spain.” This is a restricted research project, carried out in parallel to the Sophia-Iberia in Europe Project by a team of approximately thirty university researchers and professors. It will deal with “Human Evolution” using the same general approach as the Sophia-Iberia in Europe Project. This research project will be enriched by the same course of reflections begun by Sophia-Iberia in Europe.

The study of human evolution enables us to obtain a scientific knowledge of the processes and causes which lead to the appearance in time and the constitution of human reality. This knowledge has two aspects: 1) knowing how nature has formed human nature through evolution as a biological system which has a number of psychic faculties and processes (sensation, perception, conscience, attention, memory, knowledge…) which permit specifically human action; 2) the specific products of human action which have constituted and continue to constitute history: the human being uses faculties to produce emotions, perceptions, knowledge, organizing a memory which accesses history, language, etc., and forms culture. This process, as a whole, constitutes human evolution: and this can be expressed very specifically in computational terms as the fact that human evolution occurs in the formation of the “hardware” of the biological system and in the production of the specific “software” with which each individual and each culture has filled his own history with content.

Evidently the theology of any religion always refers to the real man: it is the real man who, using his psychic powers, constructs in his mind, let us say, the “software” of a determined religion in response to the stimulus of his own nature in the universe. Moreover, in the Christian religion, the comprehension of the supposed Revelation in the history of Israel and in Christ is always made by constructing a theology founded on certain idea of the human being (conditioned by the circumstances of a time in the history of culture). Consequently, if the image of human evolution in modern science helps us to draft an image of the real man, this must be considered to be a basic presupposition for a Christian theology which “understands” Revelation from the parameters of modern culture. This new “explanation” (or hermeneutics) of Christianity would be a candidate to substitute the “explanation” generally presented, at least, in the Catholic Church, from within the parameters of Greek Philosophy and its image of man.

Research on human evolution in the Iberia-Network of LSI is oriented towards theology. Therefore, the study of human evolution is a means to present and discuss the type of theology the new image of man in science leads us to. However, in this communication for the 2007 Philadelphia meeting, we are not going to deal with theological conclusions, but with another more specific aspect, which is also related to our research o the human evolution: the roots of human evolution in an anthropic universe. Thus, we limit ourselves to this methodological question.

We use the term “anthropic” in the “weak” sense. We mean that, if man has been produced in the evolutionary process of the universe (and this is the presupposition for the principle of science), thus, the supposition should be established that only an anthropic universe can provide sufficient explanation of the real presence of man in its interior, where “anthropic universe ” is understood to be a universe which includes the necessary, or at least the appropriate, ontological properties so that the evolutionary emergence of man might be possible. Another case would not be justified in science. This is really a question of the classical Scholastic axiom “ab esse ad posse valet illatio” (from the factual being it is possible to correctly infer the possibility of its beginning).

Thus, we say that the universe is “anthropic” but not in the sense that the universe which produces man is a universe which responds to the “design” of a superior intelligence. We address this problem in our research, but not in this communication in which by “anthropic principle” we only understand the initial “weak” presupposition that from the fact (man) it is possible to infer his possibility (in the ontological conditions of the universe).

Human Evolution from an anthropic Universe begins from the ontological conditions of the universe in evolution until the appearance of man with his own psychic faculties and the exercise of these faculties in history. The evolutionary universe constitutes man and man constitutes history as he appropriates himself of objective possibilities. Of especial interest among the past, present and future possibilities opened up by history are the appearance and meaning of religion (theology) within the framework of human evolution.

Consequently, a basic aspect of the study of human evolution must consist of the ontological properties of the universe which have made this possible. In fact, the roots of human evolution in all its aspects must be found in the germinal properties of the universe. This must be “anthropic” in the weak sense. If it were not so, or, and this is not the same, if science were not capable of describing an anthropic universe to us, then, human knowledge would fall into a dramatic state of confusion: or “reduce” the explanation of man without assuming aspects which are essential to our human experience (reductionism), or “postulate” that man is not explained by the universe and is “something else” (dualism). In fact, reductionism and dualism radical adversaries in the theory of man in recent years. This dispute has today been transformed into the struggle between a non-humanistic idea of man (computational reductionism) and another humanistic idea (represented by emergentism).

In any case, the study of human evolution cannot be done properly without taking into account its cosmic roots. These must be analyzed with “anthropic” correction in order to avoid both reductionism and dualism. However, what is the method for studying the anthropic properties of the universe? Evidently there must be a “heuristic” method for searching for anthropic properties.

The objective or finality of Human Evolution from an anthropic Universe is not to make a complete, in depth study of the whole process of human evolution.

Its first objective is selective. First, the selection of evolutionary states: the selection of some important states which contain the keys to the process which makes human evolution possible and enable us to understand its nature. Second, the selection of relevant evolutionary profiles: at each of these evolutionary states and the selection of certain properties, states and processes which, in fact, contribute to the constitution of evolutionary lines which will make man possible. These will be the anthropic profiles, principles, content or properties which make man possible.

Its second objective is synthetic. That is to say, to relate these with each other, coordinating the evolutionary states and the relevant evolutionary profiles in a unit with sense in order to understand how and why and how human evolution makes religion (theology) possible or not possible.

In order to achieve these two objectives, selective and synthetic, we need an epistemological criteria: that is to say, previous principles which make it possible to construct arguments to select the evolutionary states and the relevant evolutionary profiles. This criteria must be epistemological because epistemology is the discipline which tells us which productive method we must follow (methodology) in order to achieve a certain type of knowledge (intention of knowledge). For us, the intention is to scientifically know human evolution and the methodology is the form of the cognitive process which leads us to this knowledge.

The basic criteria is offered by epistemology in the general form of all scientific explanations.

A) In the first place, this always supposes the selection of a natural phenomenon, termed explicandum (what must e explained). It is not possible to explain something if we do not know what we want to explain. Therefore, the explicandum must be first delimited with precision: this task is called “phenomenology” (the objective description of the phenomenon). Science must explain what has made it possible for us to be where we are and where we cannot doubt that we are. Thus, anthropic research of the universe will consist of seeking those properties of the universe which make the “phenomenological man” who constitutes our personal and social experience possible. Which phenomenological characteristics does our human experience present? For the study of human evolution it is essential to formulate these precisely as they constitute the obvious point of arrival: what currently constitutes our personal and social human experience. In a way, these are the “explicandum” of a scientific reconstruction of human evolution: namely the knowledge of the causes which have made it possible to reach here. We will stress four contents which are considered to be essential in our phenomenological experience.

B) However, in the second place, the scientific explanation also supposes knowing the causes (or “reasons”) which make it possible to understand why this phenomenon (explicandum) has been produced in nature: the set of explanatory causes are termed scientific explicans (that which carries out the explanatory function).

Therefore, all scientific explanations consist of referring a phenomenon or explicandum to a system of causes or explicans. The explicandum always carries out a control function in the knowledge process (science) which makes it possible to reach the causes. First control the search for the causes aiming at where they are probably located. Second, once a certain proposal of the causal system is reached, a check must be made whether it effectively enables an “explanation” of all the content and nuances in the phenomenological description of the explicandum. The “facts to be explained” (or explicandum) are thus the appeal court in which to judge the pertinence of the scientific explanations (or explicans) proposed.

However, returning to the objectives of the workshop, we can now specify and order them better, in the light of the epistemological criteria of how a scientific explanation is constructed.

a) For us, human evolution is the explicandum. Therefore, it is not possible to move forward unless we start from a phenomenological description of the fact whose scientific explanation we are trying to construct. Human evolution, or man as the terminal result of his evolutionary process, is the terminal phenomenological experience of a process which leads to man for us. It is a question of proposing the phenomenological description of its content in such a way that its serves as a control to orientate the search for its explicans (the causal system which produces the human phenomenon): both for controlling the search and for controlling the explanatory proposals.

b) The evolutionary states and the relevant evolutionary profiles are the explicans. In fact, the selection of evolutionary states must be made depending on their importance for human evolution. However, the selection of relevant evolutionary profiles, within each one of these states, must be made with the same criteria: its contribution to causing human evolution. Both aspects (states and profiles) must be explained (explicans): what causes have made man, what we see phenomenologically today, and why religion (theology) finally appeared in his mind.

We now refer, first, to human evolution as the phenomenological explicandum where we must start from. Then, in the second place, we refer to both aspects, evolutionary states and relevant evolutionary profiles, as the explicans selected to propose a causal system of human evolution.

Human evolution as the phenomenological explicandum

The human sciences normally understand phenomenological as “reality as it is presented in ordinary experience”. It is not a question of establishing what reality is like in itself, but how it appears before us objectively. That it appears as we verify it cannot be doubted: what must be sought are explanations that it appears as such. These explanations can also lead, perhaps, we do not know, to constructing explanations on what reality is like in itself (ontologically) to a greater or lesser degree.

Therefore, we then make a selection of the phenomenological content or features present in our human experience. We live these as the terminal result of an evolutionary process which finally makes us human. In synthesis they respond to an experience already described at the dawn of Western Philosophy in Greece: the experience of unity and difference.

a) A time-space world of differentiated objects. Each man as a living being has an individual condition (his body), differentiated from other objects, living beings and men, which permits him to occupy a determined place and time in time-space. Thanks to this construction of the universe, known phenomenologically, man can move among things and live his life adapting to physical and social environment.

b) A world of stable, determined events. Both the psychobiophysical constitution and human action are possible because the universe is stable and the changing processes are determined by a number of regularities and laws. Thus, man knows that his body is “reliable”. Moreover, the interactions are firm and man can design his life knowing that the world will behave regularly and his actions will be possible. Furthermore, the human reality as a species which transmits the same human condition by inheritance would not be possible without a world of determinations which functions with stable, genetic regularities.

c) A world which produces holistic states. Human phenomenology shows the evidence that the world produces holistic environments: that is to say, environments in which differentiation seems to disappear and unified wholes are formed. Holism already appears at different levels (a body, although it is differentiated and located in time and space, it is holistic). However, it is in psychic experience that a more stunning type of holistic experience appears: the experience constituted from the systems of sensation-perception-consciousness, principally in self-perception and in vision (as described in the phenomenology of the American Psychologist, James J. Gibson).

d) An open world of indetermination and freedom. The experience of what it means to be a man goes together with the experience of being in an open universe where human freedom can plan several vital routes: all are possible and dependent on being taken, that is to say, assumed by human freedom. Thus, the phenomenological experience situates us in an open universe which creates its own future through choices, therefore, it is partly absolutely indeterminate (indetermination compatible with the part of determination mentioned above). This flexible oscillation regarding the choice of the future by “creative self-determination” is known intuitively by extension throughout all of nature, especially in the animal world.

e) A world open to the emergence of reason. In the human experience of the phenomenological exercise of reason, can be seen the unity of the four phenomenological contents mentioned (points a-d). Reason would not be possible without a stable and determined world which forms the solid ground on which reason may walk. However, reason is in itself the experience that this world of stable determinations has generated in reason itself as the power to weigh up, criticize and choose a future through free, responsible options. This is the synthesis of creative determination and indetermination.

In conclusion, we can say that the phenomenological experience unifies and lives the contents we have just summed up: differentiation, determination, holism, indetermination-freedom and reason, as simultaneously possible and factually non-contradictory. The phenomenology of human self-experience is not only an isolated psychic experience of the “world”, but is rather the unitary experience of a physical body among objects in a differentiated world of fields of time-space interactions, energy, stability, in which psychism occupies a congruent place and makes existence possible. It is a personal and social experience, agreed to inter-subjectively; This consensus gives meaning to society and culture.

Man is conscious of his phenomenological self-experience in this way (explicandum) and this means that human evolution has been the process which makes this possible. Therefore, the scientific explanation of human evolution must know the system of causes (explicans) which have produced this. If the universe was produced from primordial matter which derived towards its organisation as universe and as life, it is not possible to doubt that we are factually obliged to admit that the real matter-universe-life system has anthropic properties: that is to say, they make life possible as this would not have occurred with something else. These anthropic causes are essential to know the nature of human evolution.

If the expectations of science is that all that has been produced in the universe is explained from the same dynamic properties of matter in evolution, then, undoubtedly science also has the interdisciplinary expectation that all that man sees in his psychobiophysical constitution (by phenomenology) has been produced from the germinal properties of the matter whose organization has given rise to the universe.

Therefore, it is evident that physics as disciplinary scientific knowledge can methodologically dispense with biology, psychology, philosophy and anthropology. However, from an interdisciplinary perspective which seeks the unity of knowledge (an eminently scientific pretension), physics cannot dispense with being firstly “bio-pic” and, in the end, “anthro-pic”. That is to say, must first make life intelligible and, then, man. Otherwise, it would not be an acceptable science.

If physics does not achieve this “living” and “human” intelligibility, it would place the interdisciplinary project of science in a serious position: having to accept a view which is non-congruent with cosmic facticity (life and man), and would have to retreat towards reductionism or dualism. However, science, correctly understood, must flee from this radicalism in order to adapt its image of matter and the universe and provide them with congruence with the facts and explanatory capacity regarding life and man. That is to say, when the physical image of matter and the universe becomes interdisciplinary science, it must become an “anthropic” image.

Thus, the heuristic approach of our research on human evolution assumes that understanding the evolutionary emergence of the human being cannot be achieved without reference to the ontological roots of this evolution in the ontology of matter and in the construction of the universe –world as the human habitat. Consequently, the study of human evolution logically commences by “anthropic” physics: the physics which endeavors to collect the properties of the matter-universe which make man possible and explain essential aspects of human ontology and its psycho-bio-physico functioning.

The phenomenological aspects mentioned connect with properties which are recognized in the ontology of matter-universe: intense holism from quantum mechanics, the differentiation of matter and genesis of the classical macroscopic world, the persistence of intense or holistic environments in the classical macroscopic world, determination and legality, indetermination, either by the classical, chaotic, probabilistic, statistic way, etc. Drafting the “anthropic” profiles of the physical image of matter-universe in this way is the first step in a study of the human evolution which can, as we have said, form the basis of the subsequent argumentation of a theology of science.

Evolutionary states and relevant evolutionary profiles as explicans of human evolution

Where is this system of evolutionary causes which lead to the constitution of humans found? The control of where to search and the pertinence of the causes found depend on human phenomenology, and these must lead to where we are now. The project has made a selection of evolutionary states where the relevant evolutionary profiles can be sought and these will make it possible to explain human evolution. In a way, human evolution has been possible because our universe was formed in accordance with certain anthropic conditions (which made man possible). The explanation and evaluation of human evolution and the nature of man cannot be achieved without understanding these anthropic conditions at the different evolutionary states.

These are the following:

a) Matter. This is the first evolutionary state from which everything is produced. A certain type of matter would not have made human evolution possible. What are the properties of matter which lead to the production of life and man?

b) Universe. The organisation of mater is produced in the form of the universe. What are the anthropic conditions of the universe which make man possible?

c) Life. Life arises from the physical universe. It represents a first evolutionary step towards the remote anthropic properties of matter/universe. Life emerges really and proximately within the universe in an intermediate stag which in turn generates new anthropic properties, more proximate to the emergence of humans.

d) Man/Neurology. The evolutionary appearance of man through the formation of his mind by his neuronal system becoming more complex is the result of anthropic evolution of matter/life/universe. What evolutionary possibilities does the human mind lead to?

e) Formal Sciences. Formalisation is one of the most relevant products of the human mind. The formalising capacity of the mind makes it possible to probe the hyper-complex profiles of future human evolution.

f) Religion/theology. Another of the historically more relevant products of human evolution is the metaphysical, religion, theology. Why did the human mind create theology? Will current scientific knowledge of human evolution permit the human mind to be occupied in the construction of theology? What type of theology does the image of human evolution in science lead to?

Each one of these six points responds to a part of the project. The first five evolutionary states will make it possible to discuss the relevant profiles which constitute the evolutionary appearance of man as described phenomenologically. In the sixth state, the way in which human evolution enables access to the evolutionary state in which the human mind opens up to the metaphysical can be studied within the framework of religious and theological speculation.

This paper concerns some specific aspects of the combined research promoted by the Iberia-Network of LSI. It deals with “Human Evolution” using the same general approach as the Sophia-Iberia in Europe Project.

The study of human evolution enables us to obtain a scientific knowledge of the processes and causes which lead to the appearance in time and the constitution of human reality. This knowledge has two aspects: 1) knowing how nature has formed the human being through evolution as a biological system which has a number of psychic faculties and processes (sensation, perception, conscience, attention, memory, knowledge…) which permit specifically human action; 2) the specific products of human action which have constituted and continue to constitute history: the human being uses faculties to produce emotions, perceptions, knowledge, organizing a memory which accesses history, language, etc., and forms culture.

The theology of any religion always refers to the real man. Research on human evolution in the Iberia-Network of LSI is oriented towards theology. Therefore, the study of human evolution is a means to present and discuss the type of theology the new image of man in science leads us to. However in this communication we are not going to deal with theological conclusions, but with another more specific aspect, which is also related to our research o the human evolution: the roots of human evolution in an anthropic universe. Thus, we limit ourselves to this methodological question.

We use the term “anthropic” in the “weak” sense. We mean that the supposition should be established that only an anthropic universe can provide sufficient explanation of the real presence of man in its interior, where “anthropic universe ” is understood to be  which includes the necessary, or at least the appropriate,The anthropic research of the universe will consist of seeking those properties of the universe which make Human evolution as the phenomenological explicandum: a) a time-space world of differentiated objects. b) A world of stable, determined events. c) a world which produces holistic states. d) an open world of indetermination and freedom. e) a world open to the emergence of reason.

The project has made a selection of evolutionary states where the relevant evolutionary profiles can be sought that make it possible to explain human evolution. These are the following: a) matter. b) universe. c) life. d) man/neurology. e) formal sciences. f) religion/theology.

5/24/2007 05/24/2007 10004 From Quarks to Human Communities, Towards the Triune God.  A Transdisciplinary Integral Approach of the Evolutionary Creation

1.- Introduction

There are solid evidences of the way the Universe evolved from the initial Big Bang to human beings ruled by different physical laws and by natural selection of random mutations. Atheists are convinced that natural laws and chance are enough to explain our existence. On the contrary, believers are convinced that the Universe was created by God in an act of love, although there are different theological theories about the action of God after that initial moment. There is the question whether the Creator made an unique initial divine act, and after that the Universe is evolving by its own physical laws, as defended by deists, or, on the contrary, there is a continuous divine influence on it. Even more, Creationists will defend that not only there is a continuous influence, but also a direct interventions with definite purpose, but we scientist believe that the physical laws of nature are not violated by the Creator.

This question is difficult to explain and it is easy to fall into many difficulties. For instance, if God does not exert His action, there is no room for Divine Providence, and if we can not interact with Him, there is no way to express the reciprocal love between Creator and creatures.

On the other hand, if we accept a direct Divine intervention, the problem of evil arises. For example, if God is driving evolution through gene mutations, why He selected an eye with myopia instead of selecting a better one not needing glasses? or why He designed a genetic code prone to mutations that can cause cancer?

In this paper we will review different alternatives to these questions specially by three different authors (Karl Rahner, Karl Schmitz-Moormann, and Denis Edwards) always keeping in mind that God does not ordinarily violate the laws of the nature, and that evolution is perfectly compatible with creation. But first we will take a look at the way our cosmo-bio-evolution is happening.

2.- Scientific view of cosmo-bio-evolution

Only 50 years ago, it would be impossible to even pose fundamental questions that we are trying to answer now. Our knowledge about how are beings able of thinking in the universe is based on a limited amount of observational data, together with accurate enough theories, trying to explain them.

An enormous amount of work has been done in many different areas, as quantum and gravitational physics, biochemistry, biology, and mathematics, and new theories have been proposed. Different discoveries, as the inhomogeneities in the cosmic microwave background radiation or the DNA structure, are corroborating our theories. Also the development of mathematics and the use of powerful computing simulation programs are helping in obtaining models for the evolution from big-bang to humans. Nevertheless, there are still huge gaps that we can not explain. Of course, scientists are not still, and newer concepts have been developed, as chaos theory and emergence. Despite our ignorance in many aspects, there is also large consensus in a lot of them.

It is widely accepted that initially it was something like a big explosion and only pure energy existed. We do not know what happened in the initial point, we can not even ask about that moment, as there are no physical theories describing it. We can only explain from an initial time _tp, called Plank’s time that is in the order of 5´10^-44 seconds.

After this initial moment, different structures began to appear. It is important to point out that in each step of evolution a higher degree of complexity emerged. In principle these complex states are not inferred from the elementary constituents. From the point of view of information, each new state can accommodate more information than the single constituents by themselves. Also, each state of complexity implements new ways of communication among the different elements, and again, this new ways of communication are not inferred from the single parts.

In short, the cosmo-bio-evolution is based in the standard Big Bang theory and in the Darwinian evolution theory, and we can distinguish the following steps:

1) Physics domain
Universe emerged from an extremely dense and hot singularity 1.37×10¹⁰ years ago. We do not have information about what was before Planck’s time. From that moment space and time appeared and the universe started expanding at the speed of light. Only energy existed at the beginning, but soon quarks, that is, matter was originated from energy. Also gravitational force is differentiated from the rest of forces.

Later, at about 10^-36 seconds, strong force is also decoupled. From 10^-36 to 10^-32 an extremely fast expansion, called inflation occurs, like a universe phase transition. At this moment it was only energy —that is, photons— quarks and antiquarks, and the exchange particles, named gluons. Due to the high energy density, quarks can not bind to form larger particles (baryons) and form what has been named quark-gluon plasma. Later, at about 10-¹² seconds, weak and electromanectic forces are also separated, yielding to the final four forces, as we observe now.

As the universe continued growing in size, the temperature dropped, and quarks can combine to form protons and neutrons (baryons) at 10^-5 seconds. All the different types of particles that are a part of the present universe were in existence, even though the temperature was still too much high for the formation of nuclei. At this point a not well understood symmetry breakdown occurs, and the equality between matter and antimatter is unbalanced. As a result of this process, a small excess of ordinary matter over antimatter remains, and it is the matter we are made of and we observe nowadays.

As the universe becomes colder, below 10⁹ K, elements start to be formed. Initially only deuterium and helium in a process called primordial nucleosynthesis. Around 200,000 years, gravitation starts having importance, gas clouds, galaxies, stars, planets are formed. Later, heavier elements are formed inside stars: C, O, N, … At 380,000 years, matter becomes neutral atoms and radiation is decoupled from matter, the Universe becomes transparent, leaving behind the cosmic microwave background radiation.

In summary, at this physics level, the only basic building blocks we can observe are the elementary particles. The information is identified with the support, and the only information is the particle itself.

A preliminary way of information exchange or interrelation can be identified in the four forces of the nature: gravitational, strong, weak and electromagnetic. These forces act by means of virtual boson exchange between particles. Table 1 shows the complete set of elementary particles and forces. There is also a complementary set of anti-particles, not present in nature, only observable in laboratories.

Table 1: types of elementary particles and forces

2) Chemistry domain
After the explosions of supernova, with the formation of secondary stars, with planets rich in bio-elements already formed and the temperature low enough it is possible to form complex entities by combining atoms. The earth was formed 4,600 million years ago. Then, during a phase of slow cooling of planets, with high pressures, and moderate temperatures, simple inorganic molecules, as silicates or carbonates appear by means of chemical bonds that are mediated by interchange of photons, electrons or protons (Hydrogen nucleus forming a hydrogen bridge). These primary molecules were necessary for the next evolutionary step, the formation of complex molecules.

At this level, there is a new source of information as in addition to the chemical formula, the spatial arrangement of atoms, driven by chemical bonds in molecular orbitals which is key for the chemical activity.

3) Biochemistry domain
Biomolecules are complex molecules composed primarily of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen along with nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. Other elements also form part of biomolecules, but in very small proportions. This biomolecules are the chemical compounds that naturally occurs in living organisms The main classes are carbohydrates, amino acids and proteins, polysaccharides, lipids, and nucleic acids, as shown in Table 2, and they are often long chains,

Table 2: Types of biomolecules

The particular series of amino acids that form a protein is known as that protein’s primary structure. Proteins have several, well-classified, elements of local structure and these are termed secondary structure. The overall 3D structure of a protein is termed its tertiary structure. Proteins often aggregate into macromolecular structures, or quaternary structure.

At this stage of complexity we can identify a new source of information in the folding of the macromolecules. For instance, in the case of proteins, the particular linear series of amino acids that form the proteins configures its primary structure. There is a secondary structures made by local amino acid arrangements (in helices or sheets). The overall 3D structure of a protein is the tertiary structure. And often there is a quaternary structure when proteins aggregate into macromolecular compounds.

This macromolecules interact and eventually replicate in adequate environments by means of chemical reactions.

4) Biology domain.
Biomolecules combine, and the structure of surface membrane is developed. From it, between 3,900 to 4,100 million years ago, a new structure appears: the cell with the genes. It has a very high complexity level, and has the capability of growth and self-reproduction. We can say that for the first time in the cosmo-bio-evolution history living organisms, with the capacity of reproduction, exist. Initially cells were simple prokaryotes, without nucleus.

In a simplistic way, a unicellular organism is a series of complex chemical reactions, nevertheless, to reduce life to mere chemistry is an error. It is the entire organism, as a whole that determine their adaptation to the environment and their survival.

Organisms are semi-closed chemical systems. Although they are individual units of life they are not closed to the environment around them. Each cell interact with to its neighbors by chemical interchange, and a new degree of relationship and complexity emerged.

1,400 million years ago, more sophisticated cells with a nucleus (eukaryotes) appear. And later, 700 million years ago, multi-cellular organisms emerged on the earth, starting cell specialization. A group of specialized cells form a tissue. Several types of tissue work together to form an organ to produce a particular function. Several organs functioning jointly conform an organ system. Finally, many organisms are composed of several organ systems which coordinate to allow for life.

Table 3: Domains and Kingdoms of living organisms

The organism information is stored in DNA molecules located in cell nucleus, constituting the genome. This information is also transferred to descendents. The DNA information can mutate by influence of external media: temperature, chemicals or radiation, in a random process.

The information is written in an alphabet based on four different letters, that are nucleotide bases named: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T). In RNA, thymine (T) is replaced by uracil (U).

A typical cell has about 10,000 different proteins, and it has about 1 million molecules of each kind in average (it can range from 10,000 to 10 millions), this means 1010 protein molecules.

The genetic information written in the DNA molecules of the cell genome is translated into proteins by means of a genetic code. Every set of three nucleotide bases (named codon) determines one of the 20 different amino acids that in long sequences form proteins. This genetic code is shown in table 4.

Table 4: The genetic code

All living organisms share the same cellular structure and genetic code, so there is a solid evidence that all living organisms share a common ancestor, from which all of them evolve.

5) Zoology domain
In further evolution steps, from chordates to vertebrates, animals with a true neural system and a brain appeared. Having a new complexity level, new ways of information appear, vertebrates manipulate information using neurotransmitters and electrical pulses inside the nervous central system. There is also communication between individuals by chemical compounds as pheromones.

6) Ethology domain
Primates. They have superior brain functions that are unveiled for example in their ability of self-recognition. For the first time in evolution there are entities that feel themselves as individuals. There are some polemics if other mammals as elephants or dauphins also can recognize themselves, but to fix from which degree of brain development this is true is not relevant. Primitive forms of culture also appear in apes, teaching and learning can be observed, that is, there are primitive ways of transmitting information between individuals. There are also primitive languages based on gestures.

7) Psychology domain
At the top of the evolution, the humans appear. The most relevant aspect is self-consciousness: for the first time the creation is thinking about itself. In terms of information, language means a breakthrough. Information is stored outside the living organisms in books or other physical supports, and information reaches a planetary scale.

8) Sociology domain
Humans are not fully developed unless they live in relationships with other people. Humans are social animals, and it is in communities where we reach the highest degree of development by means of interpersonal love. Civilizations are a higher degree of evolution. Humans are a symbiosis of genes and culture. But humans are something more. Already in very primitive humans (Homo neanderthalensis) we discover burials that denote an idea of transcendence and religious sense. We can say that humans are capable of God and are able to respond the initiative of the Creator.

9) Information domain
From the point of view of human development, certainly the previous step is the last one. Nevertheless, from the point of view of information maybe we can consider a new one in computers and Internet, although in my opinion this is arguable.

Even though it is not yet fully developed, Internet introduces ubiquity and immediacy. It is not difficult to imagine, in a not so distant future all the people, on Earth interconnected all the time and having access to huge amounts of information. But it is important to point out that the information has been created by humans. Computer can help humans, but not develop its own conscious.

Information in general, in contraposition as its support, has to be considered non material. In the history of evolution, we observe that information is step after step less material, more effective, more spiritual. With humans, new concepts as beauty, mysticism and religious beliefs appear.

3.- Scientific theories

The previously described cosmo-bio-evolution is based on well established theories, the main of them are:

1) Gravitation or general relativity
It describes the geometrical structure of space and time. With current physical instruments, the accuracy of the theory has been proven up to one part in 10¹⁴, which is really amazing. This theory is used to calculate gravitational attraction and trajectories of bodies for example. In principle it is a deterministic theory, but if a systems offers chaotic behavior it is impossible in practice to predict the evolution of it. Simplifying, chaotic systems are systems very sensitive to initial conditions and small changes on them yield big differences in the final state.

2) Quantum theory
It describes the behavior of elementary particles or very small bodies. The most relevant point is that it introduces the notions of uncertainty and probability. Instead of corpuscles with their observable physical magnitudes we consider systems with their states that are represented by a wave function. The wave function does not correspond to definite values for each of the observables, but to a probability distribution of them.

This uncertainty is ontic, and not due to our ignorance of the state of the system. When quantum systems interact in a way that a magnitude should be fixed, in a process called measure, one possible states is randomly fixed. We call this process wave function collapse.

The interpretation of this theory is not yet clear. Some scientists think that it is an incomplete theory, but all the experiments point in the direction that there is no a hidden mechanism, but pure randomness. The main consequence is that it is not possible to predict the future of quantum systems as they are randomness in the evolution of them.

Although these theories are able to describe with very high precision many aspects of the world, they still have many unknowns. Gravitation and quantum are not compatible among them, and there are no satisfactory ways to mix both in a unified Quantum Gravity.

For complex organisms it is not possible to apply quantum theory directly. If they are many different bodies the wave function is not useful as the total uncertainty is too big. Then we have to appeal to statistics. We can mention two theories based on statistics.

Statistical mechanics
On top of these two physical theories we also have a statistical theory named statistical mechanics that reinterprets thermodynamics. Is does not introduce new natural laws, but offers a mathematical description of the behavior of systems with an extremely large number of elements. The main prediction is that entropy, interpreted as improbability or disorder, always increases in closed systems (those that do not exchange energy, matter and entropy with the exterior). To increase the order (or decrease entropy) we have to expend some energy and also expulse some entropy to another place.

Usually statistical mechanics is limited to closed systems in equilibrium, but living organisms are open systems not in equilibrium, and therefore it can not be used to describe them. Nevertheless, there are attempts to extend the theory. Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) proposed the dissipative system as an attempt to address the behavior of systems far from equilibrium. A dissipative system is an open system which is operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium. A dissipative system is characterized by the spontaneous appearance of symmetry breaking and the formation of complex, sometimes chaotic, effects.

Darwinian evolution theory
Is a biological theory proposed by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in 1859, which tries to explain how living organisms evolve from one species to another. It is based in species evolution by means of natural selection and random mutations through self-replication (inheritance). Evolution does not act in a linear direction towards a pre-defined target, it only responds to various types of adaptive changes.

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975), in 1937 proposed the Synthetic evolution theory or neo-Darwinism, that is a combination of Darwin’s concept of natural selection, Mendel’s basic genetics, along with the facts and theories of population genetics. It was later modified with the discovery of DNA double helix and the ulterior studies of molecular biology and genetic code.

Nevertheless, it is a controversial theory, as it has several unclear points. Many people questions if only chance can produce the continuous progress in the speciation, as nature shows a clear but never explained tendency towards complexity. Also there is the problem of lack of continuous intermediate species.

Dobzhansky, in his book The Biological Basis of Human Freedom (p.68) in 1956 proposed the “genetically controlled adaptive plasticity of the phenotype” as a complement to Darwin’s theory applicable to the evolution of superior primates to humans.

Another step towards the knowledge of speciation was the publishing of the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium en 1992 by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) that is a theoretical model of evolution in which species remain unchanged for long periods of time and then at times rapidly change as a result of major alterations in the environment and, subsequently, in natural selection.

Emergence and self-organization theories
Emergence is the appearance of new properties in complex system that can not be traceable to their components. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And we call self-organization this increases in complexity produced without any guidance by an outside source, but as a result of internal properties of the complex system. The motivation is well explained by Anderson:

“The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts.”(Anderson 1972)

For the biologist and complex system researcher, Stuart Kauffman (1939- ), it is necessary something more than natural selection to explain biological evolution. He looks for a previous organizative order previous to selection. This leads him to the study of life as global phenomenon of complex systems in regions of order close to deterministic chaos and to the search of general purely statistical laws of self-organization that show the characteristics of life. As an example, he describes cellular life as a collective self-catalysis. Cellular life is studied with simplified mathematical models of graphs in which the points represents the different proteins (in some cells more than 10,000 different), linked by chemical reactions (synthesis and division) controlled by catalytic enzymes, that are, in turn, proteins of the system (the cell). It is a complex system of molecules whose presence or absence depends on the presence or absence of others, leading to chaotic systems, with their attractors.

The physicist Per Bak (1984-2002) introduced a theory to explain the non-continuous rhythm (as the Darwin’s model predicts) of speciation and extinction of species that corresponds to avalanches that follows a classical statistical law (Frequency = k/Intensity) that could explain the Punctuated Equilibrium of Stephen Jay Gould.

Self-Organized Criticality (SOC): it is known that in artificially imposed critical situations, order is created (phase transitions), but Bak proposes that there are other natural criticalities that are self-organized. A typical example are sand piles formed by a sequential fall of sand grains in random locations. Avalanches are produced when the last grain fall in a critical location, but it is produced naturally by the previous grains fallen. The magnitude of avalanches is governed by a reverse law with the probability of occurrence. A similar law is found in many other natural phenomena.
4.- Metaphysical perspective
We can observe from the evolutionary history that each time a more complex entity appears, it is more than the sum of its parts. Karl Schmitz-Moormann (1928-1996) in his book Theology of Creation in an Evolutionary World, chapter 2, with a brave philosophical view, changes our traditional metaphysics of being in a metaphysics of becoming through union. It is inspired in the Union Metaphysics by Teilhard de Chardin:

Plus esse = plus a pluribus uniri

That is, being more means being more united from more elements.

This explains the continuous growing of the evolutionary progress previously presented. He points out that, in this continuous growing, there are evolutionary steady states, as the landings in a stair, that are the states of successive “uni-totalities” (an English neologism translating German Ein-Ganzheit) or “united totalities”.

This metaphysics fits our knowledge of the evolutionary science. The elements are richer and richer, and the unions more and more perfect. Going back to our scientific cosmo-bio-evolution, we can present the list of “united totalities” in table 5.

Table 5: “United totalities” along cosmo-bio-evolution

5.- Theological perspective
In our classical theological view, creation is an act from God. God creates everything:

“We believe in one God, the Father the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen”

And, in consequence, all that has been created has to be good as it proceeds from an act of God. This view contrasts with our knowledge of the Universe originated in a Big-Bang and continuously evolving.

God could have chosen to create a finished world, but instead he choose to given existence to an universe that creates by itself, developing even human beings. In this way, humans have total freedom and are capable of loving other humans and God or to reject Him.

In order to allow the human freedom, God should avoid presenting Himself in an epiphanic way. Believing in God is not the result of a formal logic deduction, it is a matter of faith. Nevertheless, I believe that we can find the lovely call of God in the creation from the evolution.

Karl Rahner (1904-1984), the German catholic theologian, proposed a new view of the causality for explaining evolution inspired in his Transcendental Metaphysics. Aristotle had proposed a transient causality based on four different causes: material, formal, efficient and final. This view was dominant over many centuries. All these causes are external, coming from outside of the effect.

Aristotle could not see anything about evolution, he could perhaps observe the larva transforming in a chrysalis and finally in a butterfly, but this ontogenetic example can not help to understand the evolution of species.

The scholastic tradition, based in the Genesis description and this philosophical Aristotelian view of causality, could not consider a creation with evolution. Creation is an initial making of things followed by their conservation. A process of progressing evolution or a sense of spontaneous improvement or overcoming is not easily considered.

Rahner (The Problem of Hominisation, 1961) therefore, in his philosophical and theological reflections on evolutionary vision, considered an immanent causality, acting on the same agent or efficient cause. And this immanent causality enriches the agent itself. As an example, if a person has an idea, the idea originates from inside the person, and remains inside himself (the idea could be later separated from him and even publish, but this is not relevant now). The human being with the idea is more that the human being alone. It has been a process of growth.

We can now question what is it needed for this growth. Where is the origin of the enrichment? And the answer from Rahner is God’s action. But not a “categorical” action of God, that is, a direct production of this growth by an irruption of God in our world that directly produces the effect. It is not God who places the idea inside the person’s brain. If so it would be a God’s idea, not a person’s idea. It is enough a “transcendental” action of God. This Transcendental action of God is an action that sustains the created agent and its capability of causing, and is common on all creatures because of their contingency.

This is the Rahner’s explanation of why it can be something new:

person + idea > person

The origin of this growth is the support of God. But for the person, the growth is a “self-overcoming”, a “dynamical self-transcendence”, sustained by the transcendental action of God.

This self-overcoming operates in the becoming of every “united totality” of the universe, from the initial Big-bang. It operates from quarks interacting by means of gluons to form protons to persons expressing the interpersonal love in human communities, passing through all the stages in our evolution. The transcendental action of God operates even in the case of catastrophes or when somebody is sinning, but this is the cost of world autonomy and human freedom.

The crucial thesis of Rahner concerning this paper is that the dynamical self-transcendence sustained by the transcendental action of God is enough to explain all the cosmo-bio-evolution, including hominization. Other theologians claim for categorical actions of God, at least in the hominization, but following Rahner, these actions are no needed.

The others say that in the evolutionary context the hominization is just the emergence of spirit from matter. But following Rahner, although spirit is clearly different from matter, this emergence can be defended because of the existing “kinship” between them. This kinship is proven by philosophical and theological reasons (the latter grounded in the common becoming of matter and spirit in the creation, Incarnation and eschatology). To express this kinship, he even calls the matter “frozen spirit”.

Rahner, nevertheless, explains from his point of view the traditional doctrine of “the immediate creation of the human soul”, both in the evolutionary hominization and in present procreation of human beings. This creation can not mean a categorical action of God, independent from the action of the parents, but it means the transcendental action that sustains it. We could analogously speak on the creation of life, but we refer only to the mentioned traditional doctrine of the human soul because of its theological relevance: the emergence of a human being capax Dei, a being able of entering in communication with God.

Karl Schmitz-Moormann, as we have seen, presents his theology of creation in the context of the evolution and in the metaphysics of union inherited from Teilhard de Chardin. He does not distinguish a primordial creation and further conservation, but he explains it as a unique and eternal continuous creation of God unfolded in time. He also mentions Rahner’s concept of dynamical self-transcendence, widely spread in the theological literature. But he vividly presents his own concept of continuous creation under three different aspects in the chapter 6 of his cited book.

Continuous creation is a “creatio appellata“, a “called creation”, in which God pronounces His creative call. This, more than a fiat lux (“let there be light”, Gn 1, 3) is a “come!, approach to Me!” not locally, but ontically understood: “approach to My richness of being”. In this way He invites both the not-yet-being and the evolving beings to constitute “united totalities” more and more perfect, and more and more alike to the “Supreme United Totality” that constitutes our Trinitarian and Creator God. Trinity, which we conceive as Persons united by interpersonal love (using analogically these concepts of person, totality and love).

In this view, each emerging “united totality” in the evolutionary process constitutes a trace or footprint of the Creator, and the interpersonal totalities united by love bonds constitute a true image of the Creator (“God created man in His image; in the divine image He created him; male and female He created them”, Gn 1, 27).

Continuous creation is also “creatio informata“, a progressive creation of information, which means a continuous spiritualization of the world making it more similar to the “Supreme Information” that is God. This allows the Creator to transmit his information to the world by means of “top-down causality” (also conceived as “whole-part causation”).

Downward causation is the way a process at higher levels of complexity influences those at lower levels, (for example, the mind that can move the arm). Schmitz-Moormann proposes an analogous mechanism for the exercise of God’s Providence in the world: God transmits only information, and does not violate any of the laws of nature, in particular, the energy is conserved.

Continuous creation is finally a “creatio libera“, a creation that respects the autonomy of the world and the human freedom. This freedom emerges at the expense of wastefulness and physical evil. But the Creator wants it because only free beings are responsible and capable of love. And, as stated in the Christian Anthropic Principle of George Ellis, the purpose of the creation is that love can exists beyond the eternal interpersonal relations of the Trinity, in the human persons among them and in relation to Divine Persons.

We present finally the proposal of the Australian catholic theologian Denis Edwards (1943- ), that has strongly influenced the science and religion dialogue, specially by instilling the Trinitarian concept of God as “persons in communion” instead of the philosophical concept of actus purus (pure actuality).

Inspired by Rahner and his concept of dynamical self-transcendence to explain the evolutionary process, he develops a theology of the Holy Spirit as Creator in his recent book Breath of Life. The book is based in two building blocks: the view of modern cosmo-bio-evolution and the doctrine about the Holy Spirit by Saint Basil from Caesarea (c. 330-379). Although Saint Basil died two years before the council of Constatinople (381), his work had a great influence in the formulation of our Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.

We have traditionally conceived the Holy Spirit as the Koinonía or Communion both in the Trinitarian relations and in Christian human assemblies. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit is also the Divine Breath of Life which is immanent in all creatures, at the bottom of their hearts, and is the Giver of life (Zoopoiuntos, maker of life).

Edwards reasons that we can conceive the Holy Spirit today as the support of the creation in his existence and his capability of progressive evolution (presented by Teilhard and Schmitz-Moormann as the enrichment of the successive totalities by union), and formulates his central thesis: “The Spirit of God is the Source of the new in an emergent universe“. This corresponds to the same transcendental action of God, from Rahner, but presented in a theological Trinitarian view.

6.- Final considerations
The former Theological reflections do not fix clearly the combination with natural laws. There is the question of how it can be combined the Divine Call and the Holy Spirit action with the laws, without violating them.

We think that the Universe is open in the sense that not everything is defined in it since the beginning. Quantum uncertainty, and probably also chaos theory, opens the door to new information creation. That is, the Universe admits new information entering on it without violating any law. And this new information could come from God. This uncertainty is also the key point for human freedom. We are not pre-destined, we have some control on our acts, and we also have the freedom to approach God by means of love or not.

We do not know the physical mechanism of this Divine action, and we will not speculate with anyone in this paper. Some authors propose different options, as for instance wave function collapse induced by God. There is also an open question on energy balance. The input of new information from God has to be done without any energy consumption, or there would be a violation of energy conservation principle. The Universe would allow that input through quantum probabilities, for example. It is compatible as long as there is not a categorical intervention, but just an invitation.

This Call of the Holy Spirit could also explain Divine Inspiration through an action in the brain. The way the brain creates thoughts is a mystery, but we want to point out that some authors, as the physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose (1931- ), sustains that brain thought is based on quantum behavior of neurons. If this was true, the brain would also be open to input of information, and we could feel the Divine invitation to join Him.

It is also missing in this theological view of Rahner, Schmitz-Moormann and Edwards to distinguish when the divine action is purely the transcendental action that supports the creation and its growing and when it is an action of the Holy Spirit, that, as Rahner’s “Non-created Grace”, truly raises the human creatures to a supernatural order. It would be necessary to define the transition from one kind of action in the whole world to the other one proper of human beings.

7.- Bibliography
Anderson, P.W. “More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science”, Science 1972 (177) 393-396.

Dobzhansky, Theodosius. The Biological Basis of Human Freedom. Columbia Univ. Press, New York, 1956.

Edwards, Denis, “Breath of Life”, Orbis Books, New York, 2004.

Edwards, Denis, “The Discovery of Chaos and the Retrieval of the Trinity” in Russell, R. J., Murphy, N. and Peacocke, A. R. Eds. Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, Vatican Observatory and Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1995.

Heffner, Philip. The Human Factor: Evolution Culture and Religion” Fortress Press Minneapolis, 1993 (especially chapter 7).

Overhage, Paul & Rahner, Karl, “Das Problem der Hominization”, Quaestiones Disputatae, 12/13, Herder, Freiburg, 1961. English translation: “Hominisation”, Herder and Herder, 1965.

Schmitz-Moormann, Karl, “Theology of Creation in an Evolutionary World”, Pilgrim Press, 1997.

There is solid evidence of the way the universe evolved from the initial Big Bang to human beings ruled by different physical laws and by natural selection of random mutations. Atheists are convinced that natural laws and chance are enough to explain our existence. On the contrary, believers are convinced that the universe was created by God in an act of love.

In this paper first we take a look at the scientific cosmo-bio-evolution. Initially it was something like a big explosion and only pure energy existed. After this initial moment, different structures began to appear. In each step of evolution a higher degree of complexity emerged. We classify these steps as 1) the physics domain, 2) the chemistry domain, 3) the biochemistry domain, 4) the biology domain, 5) the zoology domain, 6) the ethology domain, 7) the psychology domain, 8) the sociology domain, and 9) the information domain.

Next we review the main nature laws or scientific theories: Gravitation or general relativity, quantum theory, statistical mechanics, Darwinian evolutionary theory, and the new emergence and self-organization theories that are trying to explain how very complex systems, as living organisms, can appear from nature. Then we present a short metaphysical perspective following Karl Schmitz-Moormann concept of united totalities, and we show a list of them corresponding to the different evolutionary steps.

Later we study different theological perspectives to explain the influence of God in the evolution by three different authors (Karl Rahner, Karl Schmitz-Moormann, and Denis Edwards). First, the crucial thesis of Rahner concerning this paper is that the dynamical self-transcendence sustained by the transcendental action of God is enough to explain all the cosmo-bio-evolution, including hominization. Second, we present the theology of creation from Karl Schmitz-Moormann framed in the context of the evolution; he explains the process of creation as a unique and eternal continuous creation of God unfolded in time, and presents his own concept of continuous creation under three different aspects: “creatio appellata”, “creatio informata”, and “creatio libera.”

We present finally the proposal of Denis Edwards, based on the Trinitarian concept of God as “persons in communion” instead of the philosophical concept of
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cosmochemical