Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002),
This book deals with fresh perspectives on science and the resulting new willingness of scientists to entertain the notion of emergence. Within this book, Morowitz looks at various different examples of emergences in nature, and attempts to demonstrate how emergence itself, even with all of its uncertainties, helps explain the unfolding of the cosmos.[1] Morowitz tries to synthesize everything from the Big Bang to the Trinity with the modern vocabulary of emergence. Evolution is the overall process, but emergence itself punctuates the steps of the evolutionary epic. The emergence of complexity generates the needed novelty to drive evolution. However, in the absence of a definitive metric of complexity, it is difficult to formulate a comprehensive analysis of evolutionary biology. For example, although genome size is an important metric of complexity within prokaryotes, the number of cell types seems to be the appropriate gauge for eukaryotes. It should be noted that all evolution, in a sense, is coevolution, since the various species within any given ecosystem are all interdependent. Emergence shows that the unfolding of the cosmos is neither totally determined, nor totally random.[2]
Morowitz argues that the Spirit powers – even empowers – emergence. He does so by noting that the Spirit is the selection rules between God’s immanence and the development of the earth. Indeed, “emergence selects the restricted world of the real from the super-immense world of the possible.”[3] So then, according to Morowitz, the Spirit is the intermediate between physical laws and humanness. Thus, emergence is crucial to understanding not only science, but also natural theology as well.
Science, generally speaking, is a discipline that seeks to understand hard questions that we are unable to fully answer by analyzing the answers to smaller questions that we are able to answer. Biology, which began the twentieth century as an observationist type of science, gradually morphed into the most reductionistic, atomistic, and structural discipline of all the sciences by the close of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, however, there arose also a growing understanding that biology dealt with not only matter, energy, and structure, but also information. The study of information, tied with biology, in time greatly led to the “emergence” of emergence theory. It must be noted that emergence is the opposite of reduction.[4] There are numerous pages of discussion of early Christian thinking and an extensive apologia for the Jesuit paleontologist, and Morowitz’s role model, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.[5]
Emergence, as seen within the cosmos, is similar to the way biologists view evolution in that novelty occurs through mutation, selection, and differential survival. New structures, new species, and new ecosystems thereafter emerge.[6] Emergence became a concept within evolutionary biology with C. Lloyd Morgan’s 1923 book, entitled Emergent Evolution. In 1964, Henry Quastler wrote The Emergence of Biological Organization, which dealt with how biological information arose within the cosmos. In the middle of the twentieth century, Teilhard wrote The Phenomena of Man, an evolutionary work that views a directionality (or teleology) to be present within the cosmos. Telhard claimed that scientists begin with observations, and to deny the observation that the cosmos has an observed direction is to be non-empirical. John H. Holland, in Emergence: From Chaos to Order, notes that emergence occurs when the sum of the activity of the parts do not seem to equal the sum of the activity of the whole. For emergence, in contrast, the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Morowitz notes that with the emergence of the human mind, God became transcendent.[7] Morowitz writes, “Note that God’s transcendence was not meaningful before the emergence of humans and human culture. Violation of the natural law is only meaningful to individuals capable of knowing natural law. Divine transcendence arose from immanence and emergence and coevolved with Homo sapiens. Transcendence is an emergent property of God’s immanence and rules of emergence. We Homo sapiens are the mode of action of divine transcendence.”[8]
Morowitz claims that the emergence of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which states that no two electrons within the same structure can share the same four quantum numbers, is extremely important to all subsequent emergences, and that it hints at “something deeper” at work within the evolutionary epic.[9] In fact, Morowitz claims that the Pauli Exclusion Principle organizes all of physics and chemistry.[10] Bacterial motilitiy looks causal, Morowitz notes, and the endpoint appears also to be teleological, as the movement requires sensing the environment, and responding to the various concentration gradients within which the bacterium is located.[11] With the emergence of self-replicating protocells, the competition of resources arises, and hence earth is thereafter driven by Darwinian principles.[12] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggests that from the emergence of the mind, the emergence of spirit is the next logical step, according to Morowitz.[13]
Morowitz admits that his purpose in the book is somewhat theistic: “This book has proceeded with two agendas: to study emergence by examining a number of examples, and to seek for the nature and operation of God in the emergent universe.”[14] And on the next page Morowitz says, “[w]e are just beginning our understanding of emergence, and hence must be patient about understanding how the Word becomes flesh.”[15]
There are some comments by Morowitz that utterly disturb me, however. For example, he writes that since we are the transcendence of the immanent God, “[w]e are the third part of the Trinity… [w]e are God.”[16] However, these qusi-heretical statements aside, I agree with Morowitz in that “[w] study God’s immanence through science.”[17]
[1] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 16.
[2] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 193.
[3] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 197.
[4] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 14
[5] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 15.
[6] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 20.
[7] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 24.
[8] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 195.
[9] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 28.
[10] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 101.
[11] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 102.
[12] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 29.
[13] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 37.
[14] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 197.
[15] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 198.
[16] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 196.
[17] Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 197.