Emergent Realities with Causal Efficacy–Some Philosophical and Theological Applications

Abstract

Those who have been long engaged in the dialogue between theology and the natural sciences have good cause to be permanently grateful to Robert John Russell. For he has not only headed and orchestrated the magnificent enterprise of the Center in Berkeley of which he is Founding Director but has also been an inspiration to and coordinator of the unique, interdisciplinary conferences on ‘Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action’ which have been convened over the last decade or so in cooperation with the Vatican Observatory. He has himself been the Editor-in-Chief of the five (six with the initiating) state-of-the-art volumes emerging from these essentially research enterprises. As the continuing Editor of these volumes, he has contributed to all but one a remarkable series of ‘Introductions’ which manifest omnivorous reading, insightful and fair judgments, the highest quality of scholarship, and an ability to create a comprehensive overview shared by hardly anyone else in the field. His own particular research contributions to those volumes, and elsewhere,have been characterized by a sustained attempt to relate divine action, in general, and biological evolution and human thought processes, in particular, to what we know about the quantum level of physical reality. I have been one of those who has not fully agreed with his proposals but have had to recognize the cogency and integrity of his arguments for them. The following essay, which I gladly offer for this Festschrift to celebrate his sixtieth year, develops a way of thinking about emergent realities, including human mental capacities, which I surmise provides a context to which all proposals about divine action may have to relate, not least his own challenging and stimulating ones. I hope he will receive it as a recognition of my indebtedness to him and to his work. In this essay I shall attempt to extend the concepts necessary for theunderstanding of relationships between the various levels of organization, and so of description, that have developed in recent years from scientific analyses of complex physico-chemical and biological systems to wider issues in philosophy and theology.