Emergence in theological perspective: A corollary to professor Clayton's Boyle Lecture 1
2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 4; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14746700600953629
ISSN1474-6719
Autores Tópico(s)Plant and Biological Electrophysiology Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 What follows is a response to Philip Clayton's Boyle Lecture 2006. The lecture and response were given for a general audience at the Church of St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, London on 22 February 2006, where also the original Boyle Lectures were delivered 1692 – 1732. I am grateful to Michael Byrne for discussions of an earlier draft to this paper. 2 Philip Clayton, Mind & Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Philip Clayton and Paul Davies, eds. The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 3 Robert Boyle, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. T. Birch (London: Millar, 1744), vol. II, 464. 4 Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), vol. 5, 175 – 176. 5 Boyle, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, vol. II, 474 (Italics Boyle's). See Thomas Kuhn, “Robert Boyle and Structural Chemistry of the Seventeenth Century,”Isis 43:1 (1952): 17. 6 Boyle, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, vol. III, 88 (Italics mine). Quoted from Kuhn, op. cit, 26. 7 See, e.g. Jason C. Jenson, “Innateness, Developmental Systems and Explanation,” onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/ooo494.htlm, December 2002 (accessed February 14, 2006). 8 Niels Henrik Gregersen, “From Anthropic Design to Self-Organized Complexity,” in From Complexity to Life: On the Emergence of Life and Meaning, ed. Gregersen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 206 – 234. 9 George F. R. Ellis, “The Theology of the Anthropic Principle,” in Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, eds. Robert J. Russell, Nancey Murphy, and C. J. Isham (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Publications/Berkeley, Calif.: CTNS, 1993), 367 – 406. 10 Robert John Russell, “Cosmology, Creation, and Contingency,” in Cosmos as Creation: Theology and Science in Consonance, ed. Ted Peters (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 196 – 204. 11 Boyle, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, vol. V, 163. 12 A helpful historical overview is offered by Michael Ruse, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution have a Purpose? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 13 Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga, just to mention two prominent design theorists, who have not been convinced that ID-proponents have redeemed their high promises. 14 A very concise critique of Michael Behe's claims is presented by the biologist Kenneth R. Miller, “The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of ‘Irreducible Complexity,’” in Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, eds. William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 81 – 97. Concerning the wider perspectives relating to emergence and self-organization, see Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew, “Darwinism, Design and Complex Systems Dynamics,” in Debating Design, eds. Dembski and Ruse, 173 – 190. 15 C. Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution (London: Williams and Northgate, 1923). 16 David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 479 – 490. 17 Niels Henrik Gregersen, “The Complexification of Nature: Supplementing the Neo-Darwinian Paradigm?,”Theology and Science, vol. 4, no. 1 (2006): 16 – 19. 18 See Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew, eds., Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), especially Terrence W. Deacon, “The Hierarchical Logic of Emergence: Untangling the Interdependence of Evolution and Self-Organization,” 273 – 308. 19 David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). It should be noted that Chalmers resists being labelled a standard epiphenomenalist; he nonetheless argues that “experience (is) explanatorily irrelevant. We can give explanations of behaviour in purely physical or computational terms, terms that neither involve nor imply phenomenology” (Ibid., 156). Furthermore, processes of natural selection “cannot distinguish between the effects of my consciousness and an hypothetical zombie twin placed in the same physical situation” (Ibid., 120). The former conclusion is the one that I am going to question, following the emergentist argument. Interestingly, Chalmers has very recently conceded the plausibility of the thesis that “there is exactly one clear case of a strongly emergent phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of consciousness,”“Strong and Weak Emergence,” in The Re-Emergence of Emergence, eds. Clayton and Davies, 244 – 254, here 246, see no. 1. However, Chalmers here distinguishes between strong emergence as “a strongly emergent quality” (what usually is termed weak emergence with the only exception that it cannot be deduced from physical laws, as we know them) and potential cases of “strong downward causation.” Chalmers still does not find downward causation in consciousness (Ibid., 249), unless quantum mechanics could be shown to offer the fundamental psycho-physical laws, as argued by, e.g. Henry Stapp. A forceful criticism of Chalmers' original theory is presented by John R. Searle, “Consciousness & the Philosophers,”The New York Review (6 March 1997): 43 – 49. 20 I have discussed the status of the emergents in more detail in “Emergence and Complexity,” to be published in The Oxford Handbook in Science and Religion, ed. Philip Clayton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 767 – 783. 21 Terence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 69 – 101. 22 Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (New York: The Humanitarian Press, 1920), vol. I, 357 and 397. 23 Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 106 – 107. Translation mine. 24 In discussion with five theological models I have argued so in “Emergence: What Is at Stake for Religious Reflection,” in The Re-Emergence of Emergence, eds. Clayton and Davies, 279-303, no. 1. 25 This is the view of creation that has been especially emphasized in Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican traditions, since these traditions in particular the ubiquity (“everywhereness”) of God's human presence in creation. Conc. the Anglican tradition, see Arthur Peacocke, “Nature as Sacrament,” in Vision or Revision: Seeing through the Sacraments, ed. Jeremy Morris (London: Affirming Catholicism, 2000), 16 – 31; for the Lutheran tradition, see Niels Henrik Gregersen, “Unio Creatoris et Creaturae: Martin Luther's Trinitarian View of Creation,” in Cracks in the Wall: Essays on Spirituality, Ecumenicity and Ethics, eds. Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen and Johannes Nissen, (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 43 – 58. 26 The blind alleys of the two-natures doctrine have been analyzed sharply by Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968), chap. 8, yet without giving up the basic motivation behind the vere deus, vere homo.
Referência(s)