Modern advances in scientific study reveal a vastly more complicated world than the reductionist program of the late nineteenth and twentieth century’s ever envisioned. In the book entitled The Re-Emergence of Emergence, Philip Clayton (Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Claremont Graduate University and Ingraham Professor at the Claremont School of Theology) and Paul Davies (Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney) contend that emergence is a viable option in contrast to the waning explanatory power of physicalism and dualism, its competitors. No longer can one seek to explain all things as being merely reducible to their physical entities or microphysical causes (i.e. physicalism), as physicalism is inconsistent with standard research theories and practices within biology. Physicalism is also incompatible with emergence because it rules out forms of natural causality that are more than merely a sum of physical forces. Although substance dualism was probably the dominant metaphysical view in Western history from Aristotle to Kant, one cannot continue to seek to explain all things as being composed of bipartite construction of physical components and spiritual components. Emergence is, in brief, the view that novel and unpredictable occurrences are naturally produced in nature, and that said novel structures, organs and organisms are not reducible to their component parts.
This book, composed of fourteen chapters by thirteen different authors, arose out of papers delivered at a multi-disciplinary conference on the topic held in Spain in 2002, introduces readers to emergence theory, outlines the major arguments in its defense, and summarizes the most powerful objections against it. It provides a clear explication of this exciting new theory of science, which challenges the reductionist approach by proposing the continuous emergence of novel phenomena. Emergence, Clayton notes, has grown out of the successes and failures of the scientific quest for reduction (1). Whereas weak emergence (i.e., that the properties of the higher level are not expected based on the knowledge of lower levels) is the starting point for most natural scientists, strong emergence (also known as ontological emergence, i.e., that knowledge of higher levels cannot in principle be derived from lower levels) has received much support in recent years, and several authors of this text (including Ellis, Silberstein, Peacocke, Gregerson, and Clayton) argue that it is also a viable option in the contemporary natural sciences. This book is divided into four distinct parts, covering the Physical sciences, the Biological sciences, Consciousness and Emergence, and Religion and Emergence. The various authors within this volume contend that emergence is a fruitful paradigm in explaining evolutionary progress in the physical world, which represents explanatory power beyond that of physics alone.
For example, George Ellis in his contribution, ‘On the Nature of Emergent Reality’, gives a basic understanding of how complexity emerges at higher levels of the hierarchy of structure on the basis of the underlying physics, leading to emergent behaviours that cannot be reduced to lower level phenomena (79). Ellis argues that key characteristics of emergent qualities, such as intelligence affection, agency, rationality, and self-understanding entail the depth of humanity (96–97). Terrence W. Deacon argues that the term ‘emergence’ connotes the image of something coming out of hiding, coming into view for the first time, something without precedent and perhaps a bit surprising (121). Deacon’s main thesis is that emergent phenomena grow out of an amplification dynamic that spontaneously develops in interacting elements that become expressed as system-wide characteristics. Lynn J. Rothschild, in ‘The Role of Emergence in Biology’, notes that there are many examples of form and function within biology can be analyzed from the perspective of emergence (chapter 6). In fact, she contends that the biological world contains a multitude of examples of emergence, perhaps greater than found elsewhere in nature (152).
Jaegwon Kim, in ‘Being Realistic about Emergence’, notes that there are two challenges to emergence: how to show that emergence is not reducible to epiphenomenalism, and to give examples of emergence that go beyond supervenience and irreducibility (201). David Chalmers, in his depiction of ‘Strong and Weak Emergence’, asserts that if there phenomena that are strongly emergent with respect to the domain of physics, then our conception of nature needs to be expanded (245). Arthur Peacocke argues that there are good grounds for re-introducing the concept of emergence in naturally occurring, hierarchical, and complex systems that are made up of the basic parts of the physical world (in chapter 12, ‘Emergence, Mind, and Divine Action’). Gregerson, in chapter thirteen, ‘Emergence: What is at Stake for Religious Reflection?’, notes that presence of God must be part of any ultimate explanation of why the course of evolution is moving upwards in the direction of increased complexity (300).
In sum, the term emergence refers to the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The concept of emergence in science has been attracting considerable attention recently, and for one looking for further reading regarding this important topic, I would suggest the following: J. Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (2000), S. Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (2002), H. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex (2002), and R. B. Laughlin, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (2005). For the present volume, however, I would recommend it for graduate students are working in the dialogue between science and religion.
Bradford McCall
Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA