The Sacred Feminine Today

Dan Brown's hugely popular, terribly controversial suspense thriller The Da Vinci Code takes as one of its themes the idea of the "sacred feminine": from the earliest times in human culture, the mythic representation of the Mother Goddess, symbolized through images and events connected with fertility and reproduction.

Brown's novel contends, counter-factually, that Jesus of Nazareth married Mary "Magdalene" and fathered a daughter, the truth of whose existence was suppressed by the Early Church. Jesus's putative wife and daughter, as vessels of ongoing human devotion to the sacred feminine, had to be blotted out from history by a church bent on establishing a patriarchal male priesthood and clamping down on female sexuality, not to mention sexual freedom in general.

The facts of history are all against Brown. Jesus had no wife and daughter, the church did not hide them from the eyes of the world, Leonardo Da Vinci coded no secret information about the sacred feminine in his paintings, and no one buried in Westminster Abbey — neither Sir Isaac Newton nor anyone else — was in on this secret. And, whatever the Holy Grail was, it was not a stand-in for the fruit of Mary of Magdala's fertile womb.

Still and all, the sacred feminine has been and remains a real desideratum of human spirituality, which I expect partly explains the massive impact of The Da Vinci Code despite its odious historical errors. Never has the vaunted "willing suspension of disbelief" been more willing on the part of millions of Brown's readers — myself included.

These thoughts cross my mind as I ponder the thrust of Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, the new book by Stuart A. Kauffman, implications I first dealt with in Reinventing the Sacred, Part 1. Kauffman's stated mission is to establish a new scientific paradigm, that of emergence. Emergence lies "beyond reductionism," which is the longstanding assumption that nothing in the universe is really real but the fundamental particles of physics — or, below them, the theoretical "strings" of string theory — along with, of course, the particles' or strings' motions and interactions.

Emergence recognizes, above and beyond the dance of particles, the hard reality of higher-level entities that somehow arise from that dance. These realities include life itself, on earth and possibly elsewhere, plus abstract realities such as functions, actions, and intentions; agency; consciousness; values and meanings.

It also recognizes the ceaseless creativity of the cosmos, endlessly moving from the "present actual" into the "adjacent possible" ... and the next, and the next, and the next, on and on and on. Each "salient" or bubble at the edge of advancing actuality spawns new items to be added to the list of "furniture" of the universe, items whose advent was impossible to have predicted in advance.

This ceaseless creativity has nothing to do, says Kauffman, with the Creator God of Abrahamic tradition, whether Jewish or Christian. I'm not all that certain of that, but I still find Kauffman's ideas about reinventing the sacred compelling.

When I put Kauffman's ideas together with what little I know about the sacred feminine as alluded to ceaselessly by The Da Vinci Code, I have to think that what Kauffman means when he extols "reinventing the sacred" might in fact be a renewal of devotion to the sacred feminine.


I do know that the late explainer of myth Joseph Campbell taught that ancient cultures personified gods as masculine father images and goddesses as various feminine incarnations of the Earth Mother Goddess.

Every mythic hero figure, Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, has to undertake a perilous journey outward/downward to unknown realms and back again home with some sort of material or spiritual boon in tow, a precious prize or elixir that will feed his needy people.

During the course of the adventure, between his departure and his return, the hero typically undergoes an initiation. Two of the six canonical parts of the hero's initiation, not all of which are necessarily present in any particular hero myth, are his "meeting with the goddess" and his "atonement with the father."

In the former, there is "a mystical marriage ... of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World" (p. 109, in my edition of the book) — a personage who may be seen as gentle and benign, or hostile and castrating. In either case, the hero typically succeeds in passing her test:

The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity. (p. 118)

Yet the initiation, at least in some hero myths, is as yet incomplete. The hero must still achieve atonement with the male personage who represents his father figure. If Stuart Kauffman would like to reinvent the sacred, he must accommodate not only the Mother Goddess but also the Heavenly Father. In the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity, Yahweh, the Creator God whom Kauffman does not believe in, fills this role.

Usually the mythic hero's biological father is unknown to him, having disappeared from the scene prior to, or not long after, the hero's birth. At some point the now-grown hero begins to ask, Where is my father? No one really can answer his question, and so his mythic journey, full of peril, is motivated specifically as a father hunt.

If on this journey there is along the way a sacred marriage between the hero and the Queen Goddess of the World, it is merely a preparatory step for his ultimate encounter with the Father who lives outside the world and is fully transcendent of it. Clearly, in these father-quest myths, the hero's difficulty in going to his transcendent, supernal Father patterns with his inability to find and be reconciled with his actual, biological father.

The questing hero, of course, finds his path inevitably leads him to his transcendental father's house — the difficulty in finding it having proved surmountable — where he has no choice but to seek admission if he wants to complete his journey. But the father rebuffs him, demanding that he perform certain impossible feats first.

Here is where the imagery Campbell alludes to — "the arrow, the flames, and the flood" (p. 129) — take a decidedly Judeo-Christian, Old Testament turn. The supernal father first appears to the hero as a wrathful ogre bent on punishing him for (among other things) having succumbed to the blandishments of "woman as the temptress," the stage of the initiation process that canonically comes between "the meeting with the goddess" and the "atonement with the father."

Some of the ancient hero myths involve the hero's failure to satisfy the unapproachable father, in which case the hero must turn trickster and steal the father's elixir, so to bring it home to his, the hero's, expectant community as the requisite boon.

Other myths have the hero properly perform the set tasks — often with the mother-wife-goddess's secret or not-so-secret aid. In succeeding in performing the tasks the hero can be said to be, in words familiar to Christians, born again:

The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father. It can never be quite explained. Therefore, in every system of theology there is an umbilical point, an Achilles tendon which the finger of mother life has touched, and where the possibility of perfect knowledge has been impaired. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate the key knot of his limited existence.

The problem of the hero going to meet his father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands — and the two are atoned.

To be born again at the end of a father quest is to attain atonement ("at-one-ment") with the father. Of course, the mythic hero is a stand-in for all of humanity: for each one of us, whether male or female.

Accordingly, Campbell (who was a lapsed Catholic) sees Jesus Christ as a consummate hero whose death and resurrection brings the boon of his own perfect at-one-ment with his heavenly Father to each of us. To be born again is, for the Christian, an act by which we recapitulate Jesus' trials and accept this boon.

So, whether from the Jewish or from the Christian point of view, Yahweh/God represents an essential piece of the human spiritual puzzle: the yearning for atonement with a distant and/or judging father figure. The real question is, How can we harmonize devotion to the Earth Mother (which Kauffman's reinvention of the sacred puts on a scientific footing) with the equally important need to locate and be reconciled with an at-first-missing (because he transcends the physical world) Heavenly Father.


Campbell finds throughout his writings that the monotheistic religions we have today descend from incursions starting around 2400 B.C. into the Fertile Crescent — the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers — by Semitic tribes originally from the Syro-Arabian desert to the south. Among the monotheistic religions that originated with the Semites in the Near East are Judaism and Christianity.

These religions differ in their foundational mythology from those of other prehistoric cultures. In the late Paleolithic and early Neolithic periods prior to the invasions, in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere in Europe and Asia there lived the earliest sedentary humans. These people were agrarian, depending for their livelihood on planting, not hunting or slaughtering animals. To them, the primary deity was the Goddess.

The invaders and, ultimately, conquerors who came into the Fertile Crescent from the south were nomads whose lifestyle depended on animals for both transport and food. Their main gods were tribal deities whose principal function was to support the tribes in conquest. By contrast, the Goddess of the conquered agrarians was a universal deity whose principal function was to bring all humans into harmony with the natural forces inside themselves, as well as in the external world.

In Transformations of Myths Through Time, Campbell shows that ancient gods were indeed of two orders, ones representing the universal powers of nature that operate externally and internally within each of us, and ones that are "specific patrons of the tribe" (p. 54). With the coming of the Semite conquerors, then, the latter became preeminent over the former ... and the latter were the principal gods of a "patriarchal warrior people," while the former were "earlier mother goddess systems."

Complicating the mythological history of the human species, however, is a third ancient system of mythic understanding: the Indo-European. In the same general time as the one in which the Semites were mounting their incursions into the domains of settled farming communities in the Fertile Crescent, the Indo-Europeans (sometimes referred to as Aryans) were moving into and taking over the agrarian settlements from the north.

The Indo-Europeans, like the Semites, were nomads dependent on animal-derived energies rather than on sustenance derived directly from plants. They were hunters and domesticators of the horse — while the Semites domesticated the dromedary/camel and slaughtered the goats and sheep they herded for food, rather than hunting wild animals as the Aryans did.

The Indo-Europeans, like the Semitic tribes, no longer worshiped the Earth Goddess as their principal creator deity, owing their primary allegiance instead to a male god who was held to be the direct source of supernatural power.

While the Semites were responsible for generating the monotheisms of the Near East, the Indo-Europeans were influencing what would become the classical cultures of Greece and Rome, and also shaping the religious atmosphere of India, the continuing home of Hinduism and the original source of Buddhism.

The Indo-Europeans and the Semites were alike in having moved the Mother Goddess out of the limelight in favor of a male gods or God. But they differed in terms of the ways in which, once the male deities' preeminence was established, they allowed (or refused to allow) the Goddess back into the picture.

The flavor of the discrepancy can be gleaned from an essay by Campbell, "Of Harmony and of Discord," which appeared in his book The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987. (The essay may be read here.) In the essay, Campbell alludes to "the Heroic Age":

... those centuries of barbaric invasions and wiping out of cities that we find celebrated in the Indo-European Iliad and Mahabharata, as well as throughout the Old Testament, [in which] there were brought onto the historic stage two sorts of nomadic, herding, and fighting peoples bearing analogous, though significantly differing, sociologically oriented systems of mythology inspired by notions of morality wherein the high concern was not of harmony with the universe in its mystery but of the aggrandizement and justification of some local, historical tribe or cult. The whole character, as well as function, of mythology was thereby transformed; and since the myths, ideals, and rites of the new orders of justified violence overlay wherever they fell the earlier of an essential peace at the heart of the universe, the history of mythology in a great quarter of the world for the past three thousand years has been of a double-layered continuum. In some parts, notably India, the mythology of the Goddess returned in time to the surface and even became dominant.

In India we have an example of a culture in which the Indo-European mode of re-harmonizing the primordial Goddess with the usurping male deities established a preference for harmony rather than discord as a way of life. The same sort of thing happened in ancient Greece. But in the Near East, the cultures influenced by (or constituted by) the Semites produced a negative take on the rightful place of Goddess worship. Thus, per Campbell, we read in 2 Kings 23 in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament of the "very good King Josiah of Judah (ca. 640-609 B.C.), when he":

... deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places at the cities of Judah and round about Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Ba'al, to the sun, and the moon, and the constellations, and all the host of the heavens.

Deposing "idolatrous priests" who "burned incense to Ba'al, to the sun, and the moon, and the constellations, and all the host of the heavens" was a way of not coming to terms with the Neolithic Great Goddess whose place (or places, plural) Yahweh usurped.

Campbell summarizes:

As a consequence of ... truly unspeakable violence and barbarity over an immense part of the already civilized portion of Europe and Asia (only Egypt on its desert- and god-protected Nile remained through those millennia unbroken), what the historian of mythologies everywhere uncovers, from the British Isles to the Gangetic Plain [the area of the River Ganges in India], is a consistent pattern (retained in religions even to the present day) of two completely contrary orders of mythic thought and symbolization flung together, imperfectly fused, and represented as though of one meaning.

The first and elder of the two orders of mythic thought is that of the Great Goddess who embodies "the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of life itself as motherhood and as birth, as growth and as transformation terminating in a return to the mother in death, out of which source appears new life."

Campbell does not in this essay completely characterize the follow-on orders of thought, whether Indo-European or Semitic, in which the Great Goddess was succeeded by a male deity ... and then found her way back into the mythic traditions in positive and negative, overt and hidden forms.

In fact, Campbell seems bent on showing how, even in the Near East where the worship of the Goddess was officially deprecated by the Hebrew champions of the male God, Yahweh, the Goddess reasserted herself in various ways:

Thus the force of the underlying layer, even where officially suppressed or apparently forgotten, worked its influence, often in subtle ways; as for example, in the instance already recognized, of the number 86,400 concealed in the length of years of the biblical antediluvian age.

(Apparently, 86,400 was a number associated in some way originally with the Goddess cult.)

On the other hand, in The Power of Myth Campbell makes clear how odd the religions of today that bring forward the early monotheistic orders of myth — principally Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — are with respect to the religions of the "perennial philosophy" whose antecedents are more in the Indo-European, rather than Semitic, mold.

Responding to a question from his interviewer, Bill Moyers, about the (Judeo-)Christian idea of the Creation and the Fall, Campbell said (p. 66):

I once heard a lecture by a wonderful old Zen [Buddhist] philosopher, Dr. D.T. Suzuki. He stood up with his hands slowly rubbing his sides and said, "god against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature — very funny religion!"

Our "very funny religion" has a creation myth of Adam, Eve, the Garden of Eden, and the Fall, in which Adam's temptation by Eve (after Eve was tempted by the Serpent) is the root source of sin. It is not likely that such a religion would easily come to comfortable terms with the Great Goddess whom Eve is the stand-in for.

In my own analysis — I have no reason to be sure Campbell would have agreed with this — I come to the conclusion that we in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition are heirs to the ancient Hebrews' designation of the fecundity of the female womb as being the property of male humans — fathers, brothers, husbands, the male community in general — and ultimately of the male deity, the Lord God of Hosts, Yahweh.

Female fecundity is, of course, the focus of Goddess worship, what devotion to the Goddess was all about. When the energies of the female side of the cosmic equation reappear in a specifically Christian guise, they revolve around the Virgin Mary, whose son Jesus was the Son of God ... and was himself God.

Campbell in The Power of Myth shows how Mary's virginity ought to be interpreted, in his estimation: as a model of sacred (re)birth out of the physical body and into the life of the spirit. The question of how Mary physically got pregnant is of no importance here.

Campbell compares this idea of the Virgin Mary's instrumentality in all sacred birth and rebirth with ideas found in India about the spirit's ascent, above the bodily centers associated with physical urges and desires, to the level of the compassionate heart. Here again are found images of being "born again of water and the spirit," just as in Christianity.

In fact, Campbell has ways of harmonizing just about all the images and symbols of Christianity with the underlying images and symbols that derive, often stealthily, from modes of myth less inimical to the Great Goddess, for whom Mary becomes, again, the stand-in.

For Campbell, it is possible to map Christian and Jewish (not to mention Islamic) symbology back to that of the "perennial philosophy" of the rest of the world and thus rescue monotheism as we know it from being a "very funny religion."


A case in point is found in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in the chapter titled "The Keys." In the pre-Vatican II rites of Holy Saturday in the Catholic Church — the book was published in 1949 — are found, says Campbell, echoes of the making of fire in the belly of the whale, a motif found in hero myths around the world.

The hero is consumed by a monstrous whale and enters the realm of the dead. In Christian belief, on the day before Christ's resurrection, Jesus descends to hell and rescues the souls imprisoned there. The resurrection is Easter. The vigil on the Holy Saturday preceding Easter Sunday commemorates Christ's final victory over hell and death.

In the canonical belly-of-the-whale legend, the hero brings about the whale's death and his own release by making a fire in the gut of the monster, using two sticks (see p. 248). He rubs together a socket-stick, which represents the female sex organs, with a phallic spindle-stick. The flame which is thereby sparked "is the newly generated life," and the motif as a whole is "a variant of the sacred marriage."

So when on Holy Saturday the Catholic priest blesses and lights a paschal candle, then carries it to the baptismal font whose waters he blesses and makes holy, the fact that he touches the candle to the "immaculate womb of the divine font" three times and thrice calls the "virtue of the Holy Ghost" to come into and inhabit the symbolic womb echoes the spindle-and-socket pattern of all fire-making myth. Here, Jesus Christ is the male hero who slays death ... with the transformation attendant upon baptism in blessed water, a symbol of the waters of the female womb.

Similar symbology is found in India, where the male organ is represented ir religious symbology as the lingam and the female as the yoni. But in Christianity, "the popular interpretation of baptism is that it 'washes away original sin,' with emphasis on the cleansing rather that the rebirth idea" (p. 251). The latter idea brings too close to the surface of awareness the realization of the paschal candle as a phallic symbol and the font as a womb symbol.

Since The Hero with a Thousand Faces was written some sixty years ago, our culture has striven mightily to rid itself of such overweening delicacy. Indeed, we have grown not just frank but coarse. Meanwhile, the life of the spirit has become a closed book to many of us, partly in consequence of our incessant "keeping it real." A hefty minority, meanwhile, is fighting a rear-guard action against anything which threatens the old-time religion ... with its core values that, at the extreme, demand that we denounce whichever of the Teletubbies happens to be gay.

Somewhere in the middle, between cynicism and fundamentalism, most of the rest of us find ourselves. We long to reinvent the sacred, we yearn to participate in the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of regeneration and rebirth that our Earth Mother teaches and embodies, and we also struggle for atonement with our Heavenly Father.

Stuart Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred can help us here. Though it's not yet clear to me how his viewpoint might foster atonement with the Father, it does seem to furnish a ready antidote to this gloomy pronouncement by Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science or history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.

Only a few years after Campbell wrote that, Watson and Crick discovered DNA, and human characteristics seemed to be reduced to genes. Now Stuart Kauffman gives ample reason to look beyond that reductionism (and to believe that DNA and genes were latecomers to the party of life). In a universe that ceaselessly creates itself through the processes of emergence, there is more to reality than the dance of particles. There is life, consciousness, value, meaning. On our way to atonement with our transcendent, supernal Father, we need to enter once again into sacred marriage with our eternally fertile cosmic Mother.

High-School Pregnancy Pact

Susan Reimer's article "Babies as something fun" appears today's Baltimore Sun's Sunday Ideas section. It comes in response to recent news stories about a "pregnancy pact" at a Gloucester, Mass., high school: a number of girls under 16 years of age set out to all become pregnant at the same time and raise their babies together. At least 18 of them have succeeded in getting pregnant.

This comes on the heels of the much ballyhooed pregnancy of unmarried 17-year-old "tween" idol Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney's younger sister.

Even worse, Reimer writes, "declines in teen sex and improvements in contraceptive use have leveled off and ... the teen birth rate is on the rise for the first time in 15 years."

In view of some pretty liberal things I have said in earlier Sex and Spirit posts to this blog, including The End of Traditional Sexual Ethics, I feel I need to acknowledge that much of today's sexual behavior can be truly scary.

The TIME Magazine reporter who broke the high-school pregnancy pact story, Kathleen Kingsbury, offered this explanation of the girls' bizarre behavior: "They didn't have anyone really instructing them on how to create a life plan ... . Some of them decided that this was going to be their life plan, that they were going to be mothers, and by being mothers, they would be someone."

Not being instructed on "how to create a life plan" strikes me as something that never used to be a problem. In the good old, bad old days, young men and women were instead initiated into a traditional "life plan" that read: remain chaste until marriage, finish school, get married under the auspices of your church or congregation, surrender your virginity on your wedding night, stay married 'til death do you part, remain one-hundred percent faithful to your spouse, have plenty of children together, and bring them all up in the same way.

This "plan" was part and parcel of the teachings of your church or congregation or holy scripture. If you were Jewish, the plan was the same as if you were Christian, owing to the fact that Christianity is rooted in Judaism and shares Judaism's basic axioms regarding sex, marriage, and procreation. You may not have been taught the theology of human sexuality in any direct form, but you had no doubt that God was on the side of purity, fidelity, and chastity. There was no question but that your life plan needed to be, reproduction-wise, equally pure, faithful, and chaste.

In the good old, bad old days, in other words, your sexuality was held in check by your spirituality. What we need today is to get that back.

A tall order, that. I see the recovery of a spirituality which reins in our sexuality as part of the topic I first broached in Reinventing the Sacred, Part 1.

In that post I talked about Stuart A. Kauffman's new book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. Kauffman is a scientist who has been in the forefront of complexity theory, the discipline which investigates how living and lifelike systems "self-organize." As they evolve, these systems produce stunning "order for free." The wondrous diversity of life on earth — the complexity of the "biosphere" — comes from the way in which nature's self-invention complements Darwin's basics of evolution: heritable variation culled by natural selection, in a world with too few resources for all organisms that are born to survive, thrive, and reproduce.

In his new book, Kauffman extends self-organization into the more general realm of "emergence." The diversity we see all around us, whether biological, cultural, technological, or economic, sprouts forth from the workings of the laws of physics without that sprouting process being prestatable or predictable. New categories of being/actuality simply emerge all over the place.

A simple example Kauffman gives is the "chirality" of many of the protein molecules produced by the body. There are "left-handed" proteins, for instance, which preponderantly "break symmetry" by twisting in one direction and not the other (or "right-handed") direction. Nothing in physics accounts for this non-random chirality or "handedness" choice made by the preponderance of protein molecules, or, indeed, for the fact that entities in the universe break symmetry at all. Chirality is wholly emergent, as are the entities which display it.

By extending the notion of emergence to ever more abstract levels of being, Kauffman shows that agency, functional causality, human will and consciousness, and the values, purposes, and meanings we attribute to the world around us are all emergent categories of being. As entities that help compose the "furniture of the world," they are as real as the fundamental particles and forces of physics, as real as molecular chirality, as real as you or I. They arise in ways that do not break the laws of physics. Yet their emergence is only partly lawful, since emergence qua emergence is ultimately ungovernable and spontaneous, incapable of being prestated and predicted, and outside the bounds of accurate pre-modeling in computer simulations.

But human free agency, human causality, human will and consciousness, and human values, purposes, and meanings are the stuff of all human spirituality, morality, and religious thought. Scientific reductionism — which holds that all such categories are fundamentally illusory, in that nothing is truly real but the tiny building blocks which physics studies — tends to undermine spirituality's power to rein in our sexuality and the other aspects of our moral lives.

This, Kauffman would have it, is the upshot of the fact that scientific reductionism has tended to produce all sorts of schisms in our understanding of the world and our place in it. The reductionist project in modern science drives a wedge between faith and reason, spirituality and science, the humanities and the "practical" disciplines, values-meanings-purposes and brute facts, human progress and religious tradition.

I would extend Kauffman's thinking on this matter to include the wedge driven between our sex lives and the rest of our "life plan." Sex has been denatured and has become a minefield of such horrors as pregnancy pacts, surgical hymenoplasty to "restore" virginity, and the media's sexualization of very young girls, M. Gigi Durham's topic in The Lolita Effect.

What needs to be restored is spirituality's power to rein in our sexuality and have it serve our lives, not ruin them.

There are two possible paths to so re-empowering spirituality. One is to restore our culture's deep faith in the basic axioms regarding sex, marriage, and procreation that have been the cornerstones of religious understanding in what Stuart Kauffman calls the Abrahamic faiths in a Creator God referred to as Yahweh, as represented by Judaism and Christianity.

The other possible path is the one Kauffman favors: reinventing the sacred as the worship of the sheer ungoverned fecundity of nature, giving rise as it does, all on its own, to all the diverse "furniture" of reality we find in the universe — including agency, life, meaning, purpose, and value as the prerequisites of human morality, sexual or otherwise.

I support Kauffman in his efforts to reinvent the sacred in this way, in part because (as I detailed in The Anti-Defilement Covenant and other previous posts) I see no intellectually honest way to fully harmonize the Abrahamic faiths — though I count myself a Catholic! — with such ideas as a woman's right to choose an abortion, gay rights, and using artificial means of contraception. Indeed, I see ideas about male "ownership" of female fecundity as the mainspring of monotheism, no matter how deeply these ancient ideas have been buried in modern expressions of belief in God.

Still, I don't feel it necessary to insist on giving up standard monotheist worship. If it gives you the spiritual grounding you need to keep your sexuality in check, fine. But for those who, like me, are looking for a different spiritual basis for sexual and other forms of morality, I can recommend Stuart Kauffman's ideas about reinventing the sacred.

Reinventing the Sacred, Part 1

Stuart A. Kauffman is a university professor and an early advocate of complexity theory. His earlier book At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity is one of my favorites. His new book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, is truly transcendental.

Since the earlier book, which was published in the mid-1990s, Kauffman has moved from being a leading light at the famed Santa Fe Institute, where the study of complexity theory first reached critical mass, to becoming founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

Complexity theory, one of Kauffman's constant topics, is the scientific study of how complex systems crop up and evolve in nature. One such complex system is the biosphere, the sum total of all life on Earth in its nexus of interrelationships and interactions. In At Home, Kauffman shows how the biosphere operates as a much greater whole than would be expected by merely adding up the "sum of its parts."

The earlier book can be considered a prologue to the new one. At Home extended the standard Darwinian understanding of biological evolution by heritable variation (mutations, etc.) and natural selection to add a third sort of evolutionary process: "self-organization." Living systems self-organize, said Kauffman, which means their internal dynamics tend to create surprising yet stable patterns of organization that occupy and exploit novel niches of lifestyle possibilities. These niches are co-created by the very same process, self-organization, taking place on multiple levels at once: molecules, cells, organs, organisms, populations, ecosystems, the biosphere. Self-organization is thus the "handmaid" of natural selection, giving selection abundant candidate material to sift through in implementing Darwin's "survival of the fittest" and bringing about the "origin of species."


Now, in the new book, Kauffman sets many of the same themes in a broader interpretive context, that of "emergence." As biological evolution proceeds, there arises in inanimate matter several hitherto unforeseeable characteristics, such as agency, the ability of individuals to choose certain acts over others. Events which transpire at the activity level of intelligent life are, he says, "doings," while events that take place at the bedrock level of the basic physical particles from which life constructs itself are mere "happenings."

Mere happenings are brute facts without possible value or meaning. The doings of autonomous agents take on meanings and possess values.

Since the earliest days of modern science, scientists have increasingly insisted on "reductionism," the premise that everything in the universe can be fully understood by applying the laws of physics at the level of fundamental particles — the most fundamental particles known today being quarks and gluons — or of the electrons, protons, and neutrons made of quarks and gluons, or of atoms, or molecules, or what-have-you.

Today, some physicists' theories reduce everything to the strings and superstrings that make up quarks, etc. But the reductionistic principle remains the same: explain everything with reference to what happens at the "happenings" level of the basic building blocks of the cosmos.

Kauffman shows that such a strategy simply disqualifies such things as life, agency, consciousness, value, purpose, and meaning from being real, and thus from requiring explanation. "Life" is simply what happens when enough quarks are put together in just the right way, and does not really "exist" in the same way as the underlying particles do. Ditto, with suitable modification, the other examples of "emergent" phenomena — agency, will, consciousness, value, purpose, meaning, etc. — all of which are, from the perspective of strong reductionism, fundamentally illusory.


But, Kauffman shows, there is no need to buy into strong reductionism. We can shift our scientific perspective to one of "emergentism," such that things and events at levels higher than that of the basic particles are deemed fully real.

Admittedly, human knowledge of events at the level of particles is not sufficiently rich to allow us to derive the particles' so-called "emergent" phenomena just from knowing the positions and velocities and capacities for interaction of the myriad bits of matter. Reductionists rule our ability to predict emergent phenomena out solely on the basis of the incompleteness of our knowledge of events at the level of basic physics. That we cannot truly come to grips with them is chalked up entirely to a defect of epistemology.

But that possibility is, Kauffman says, not only epistemologically ruled out; it is ontologically out of the question as well. Emergent phenomena do exist and are real — but they exist only at higher levels of existence/reality than that of fundamental particles and their interactions. Reductionist explanations could never account for emergent phenomena because reductionism cannot truly see them.


At the inception of reductionism, faith begins to come apart from reason. If nothing is real except for purposeless events happening to meaningless particles, then the cornerstone of spirituality — the sense that life has purpose, meaning, value — dissolves. Faith increasingly relocates the source of life, meaning, purpose, etc. as identical with that fountain of all creativity, God. Turning inward and going fundamentalist, faith next claims to preempt science, while actually welcoming the scientific dictum that all besides the Creator God — assuming as a matter of faith that God exists — reduces to meaningless interactions of dumb particles.

Fine, fundamentalism says in the face of scientific reductionism. Reductionist materialism just helps to put our focus where it belongs anyway: on God.

Except ... huge numbers of people don't see it that way, becoming agnostics, atheists, and secular humanists instead. Using philosophies like French existentialism in the mid-20th century, they make elaborate excuses for the central fact that the world is meaningless.

But, says Kauffman in Reinventing the Sacred, we can instead move beyond reductionism. In so doing, we can re-integrate faith and reason, spirituality and science, the humanities with the hard sciences, values-meanings-purposes with brute facts, humanism with religion. The schisms inaugurated by the rise of modern science can be healed by taking the next logical step, which is to move beyond reductionism: to honor as real the things which are given rise to, in our world, only emergently.

It goes yet deeper than that: Kauffman says our world in which new levels of being sprout from the stark soil of particle interactions is quintessentially creative. What it creates and when cannot be predicted with any fine degree of accompanying detail. Though there are laws of physics in the picture, the creativity of the universe extends beyond natural laws, which amount to "compact descriptions beforehand of the regularities of a process" (p. 5). The fruits of emergence can't be described or predicted beforehand — no even by a Creator God. Accordingly, the irrepressible, unpredictable creativity of the universe itself can be reverenced as a God in its own right.

(You can listen to a KUOW-FM interview of Stuart Kauffman about his new book Reinventing the Sacred by clicking here. You can read more about that program here.)

Strange Loops and Magical Thinking

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, as I said in Strange Loops and Souls, has it that to believe in the soul as anything more than a paradoxically self-aware symbolic structure within the brain is to commit the error of "magical thinking."

In the guise of "consciousness," Hofstadter's symbolic "I" purportedly accounts for what certain other philosophers treat as something "extra" in the mind, above and beyond the mind's ordinary functions. This extraordinary something — consciousness — is said to be the human capacity to intuit what is the essence of being (for example) a red tricycle, whenever we are perceiving a red tricycle. Specifically, the perception of (say) red triggers a certain one of the many experiential "qualia" built into the human mind. These inbuilt qualia, sniffs Hofstadter, are made of magic stuff he refers to as élan mental.

Hofstadter's overarching belief is that there is no such thing as élan mental, no such thing as magic stuff, no such entity (beyond the "I") as consciousness or the soul.

Magical thinking is accordingly what we commit when we affirm the existence of an indissoluble soul, one each per person. As either the soul of western religious tradition or the Cartesian ego described by the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes, this understanding of the individual self is a figment, Hofstadter says. He compares it to an illusory marble his fingertips are sure they feel when he clutches a perfectly aligned stack of envelopes.

I don't think Hofstadter's logic is impeccable in this. Just because the mind is capable of placing imaginary marbles where no marbles exist does not prove there is, in a human being, neither consciousness nor a soul.

Just because Hofstadter's successfully likens the human "I" to any self-extensible symbol set capable of computational universality, à la Principia Mathematica after Kurt Gödel gave it unsuspected wings of formal incompleteness, does not prove that this explanation, which accounts well for our mysterious capacity of self-awareness, necessarily covers consciousness or the soul.

Just because non-magical thinking — a.k.a. science — works so well in any number of physical venues does not prove there is nothing at all magical, supernatural, or transcendental about reality.

Just because our "classical" categories of thought about who and what we are insist on there being a unique, indelible conscious soul inside us, somehow, does not mean we now need to set such categories aside in the way that Einstein's special theory of relativity displaced "classical" Newtonian mechanics. Hofstadter commits a fallacy to assume that all "classical," intuition-friendly understandings ought to be marked with a skeptical asterisk, just because one of them has successfully been superseded.

What seems to be going on here is that Hofstadter starts from a deep-seated commitment to a thoroughly materialist, physics-only, non-dualist view of the world. He is also fond of mathematical paradoxes in all of their loopy manifestations, so he sets his cap for coming up with an explanation of the self-aware "I" in terms of these "strange loops."

In this quest he succeeds marvelously. He shows how the brain is, at a level above its elementary particles and neurons, but a network of symbols. Beyond some minimal threshold of complexity, any network of interlocking symbols becomes implicitly self-referential. When implicit self-reference becomes explicit, you have the makings of a self.

Then it is as if Hofstadter says, "My model works so well with respect to explaining self-awareness, I wonder if it also accounts for those other two perennial mysteries of the human mind, consciousness and the soul."

Here, unfortunately, he takes a shortcut. He simply declares the latter pair to be illusory ways in which the "I" tries to account for itself to itself. Along these lines there is a lot of hand-waving, a lot of noticing how magical thinking always generates more unanswerable questions and further mysteries.

This is, to Hofstadter, an unacceptable result, since one of the corollaries to his postulate that all things are physical is that they can all be explained naturally — that somewhere there has to be an end to unanswerable questions and further mysteries.

Hence, his argument that the Gödelian nature of self-awareness also explains consciousness/the soul holds water only as long as you assume with him from the get-go that all things are physical and all scientific explanations are possible.

Because of this circularity, it would be wrong to imagine that the success of his Gödelian model of the self proves the truth of his materialist prejudice in general.

Strange Loops and Souls

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, as I said in More about Strange Loops, accounts for the soul — the self, the "I," the supposedly unique and indelible person that one thinks of oneself as being — as what emerges when a human brain, capable of symbolically representing anything, so represents itself.

The brain represents all of reality in terms of symbols. Each symbol corresponds to a category into which we are capable of assigning the various things we perceive. Symbols interconnect to form larger symbols. Symbols can refer to other symbols. They can combine into symbol sets. They can symbolically represent said symbol sets ... sets that contain symbols that represent these very sets themselves. It all gets very incestuous. It's like a neurosurgeon doing brain surgery on herself ... except that it's all happening on a symbolic level, not on a physical level.

A symbol is not a physical structure in the brain. It is a pattern of neuron firings. When a symbol in the mind signifies the totality of that mind itself, then that intrinsically recursive, all-inclusive super-symbol is what we call the "I" or self.

Hofstadter advances the view that this all-inclusive self-symbol, embellished by the brain over the course of a lifetime of elaboration and refinement, is tantamount to the soul. The soul does not inhere in any "extra level of being" above and beyond our merely physical "stuff": the cells of the body and brain and the patterns of our brain's neuronal interconnections. The set of patterns constituting the "I" can grow without limit, once the underlying symbol set becomes capable of self-reference.

The "I" pattern set emerges only gradually, starting out small and simple, or barely even there, and ideally getting more elaborate, subtle, and capacious as life goes on. The upside of this growth potential of the human "I" is that the more "I" we develop, the greater the size of our soul.

The downside is that our supposedly fixed "identity" is actually changing, impermanent, illusory. It is, after all, a trick the brain plays on itself. Hence there is no fundamental reason why our identity — our supposedly unique and indelible soul — could not be transfered to a different body, provided that body were sufficiently like the original ... perhaps after teleportation of our physical "stuff" to a different planet.

The brain of an atom-for-atom, quark-for-quark transposition of the body elsewhere would necessarily contain all the same neuron-firing patterns and mapping categories of symbolic representation as were materialized in the original body, and so produce a duplicate "I." In other words, whenever our body is precisely enough replicated somewhere else, our soul gets cloned as well.


Some philosophers of mind distinguish between self-awareness, à la the "I," and a separate thing called "consciousness," which for them is the capacity to undergo the ineffable "inner experience" associated with perceiving whatever it is we happen to be perceiving and categorizing at the moment. For instance, the what-it-is-like feeling that goes along with seeing a purple flower is, on this view, separate from the underlying act of perception/cognition of the flower.

According to this wing of philosophy of the mind, consciousness arises from and accompanies physical brain states and processes, but it is not itself physical. It is an immaterial "extra."

That may or may not mean it equates to the God-given soul spoken of in religion. In past installments of my Consciousness series of posts, I discussed The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, a book by philosopher of mind David J. Chalmers. Chalmers thinks consciousness (at least to a first approximation) is epiphenomenal; it is natural and not mystical, yet it cannot directly or indirectly cause any physical events to happen in the material world.

Chalmers does not adhere to any belief in God. He has no religious ax to grind, and yet I thought it might be a good idea for me to try to show how the "extra" mind feature he calls consciousness might equate to the entity that my religion calls the soul.

Hofstadter devotes a chapter of I Am a Strange Loop to explaining why he thinks Chalmers' theory of consciousness is bunk ... even though Chalmers is a good friend of his, and a former student, to boot. To Hofstadter, there is nothing more to the soul than the "I" pattern that emerges and manifests itself in the neuronal organization of the brain.


Still, Hofstadter believes in something he calls "greatness of soul": magnanimity or empathic generosity. Different people have souls of different sizes measured, in the final analysis, by how open each person is to admitting the "I" symbols of others into their own "I" symbols.

A person that has developed only a "small soul" has, ipso facto, only an impoverished set of symbols that form the basis of his or her own personal super-symbol, the "I." Such a person, commonly spoken of as having a "large ego," actually has a tiny "I." He or she is self-centered and capable of only the most rudimentary sort of empathy with others. People whose "I" starts out minute and stays minute amount to psychopaths with no loving-kindness whatever and zero empathy for others.

But the "great of soul" — Hofstadter mentions Albert Schweitzer — are willing to vicariously incorporate into their own lives and concerns the sufferings not only of their own closest family members and loved ones, but also of humanity at large ... and even of supposedly brute animals.

Hofstadter does not mention Jesus in his short list of the great of soul, but it seems to me that empathic generosity toward "the least of these" was his stock in trade. It could be imagined that Jesus' soul was as large as a soul can get. It could even be thought that Jesus' message was, in Hofstadter's terms, quintessentially about opening up the "I" to the "I"'s of others, so as to allow our own souls to become as close as possible to his in capaciousness.

More about Strange Loops

It's been nearly a year since I last mentioned Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, in Back to Dualism. I've picked up the book again after stalling out on it about halfway through.

Hofstadter's quarry is an understanding of the soul — the self, the "I," the unique person referred to by that pronoun. What is it about the human mind that makes the conscious "I" possible?

Is the "I" equivalent to the brain itself? Is it part of the neural wetware of the human cerebrum in particular? Or is the fissured and involute organ inside the cranium something of a sideshow, with the "I" or conscious soul being instead a pattern of signals among the cells that make up that organ? Isn't the self or soul but a super-rich symbol system, a mega-concept housed in a brain but ultimately independent of the brain?

Hofstadter likens the conscious "I" to a mathematical system, Principia Mathematica, devised in the early 20th century as an attempt to subsume all of mathematics into a single symbol system independent of everyday language's inescapable ambiguities. It was hoped by the authors of PM, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, to develop a system by means of which every true mathematical proposition could be derived and proven, while all false propositions could be exposed as such.

But then the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel showed two things about PM:

1. Self-referentiality: PM contains a back door by which it can be used to construct symbol strings representing propositions about itself.
2. Incompleteness: At least one such self-referential proposition (and in fact an infinite number of them) exists which can be demonstrated outside PM to be true — since denying the truth thereof creates a manifest paradox — but which PM itself cannot internally prove ... thus making PM inescapably "incomplete" as a truth-proving engine.

To Hofstadter, the neural structure of the human brain is, like PM, capable of

• manufacturing and using symbols
• making and testing the validity of propositions couched in the form of combinations of these symbols
• doing so with or without being expressly aware that that is what is going on — the symbol processing per se can either be unconscious or raised to the level of consciousness
  
• doing so in tandem with, but ultimately independently of, the use of natural language
• generating and testing self-referential symbol strings/propositions that underpin the emergence of the conscious "I" super-symbol
  

The brain is therefore like PM, an artificial product of two brains, those of Whitehead and Russell. Messrs. Whitehead and Russell wanted to use PM to bypass the brain's difficulty with doing formal mathematical logic to perfection. Instead, Gödel showed that PM, and by extension every symbol-manipulating engine powerful enough to generate self-referential propositions, shares the same inability to decide all truth without getting tangled up in paradox instead.

Hofstadter's own lifelong intellectual journey seems to have picked up first on Gödelian incompleteness as of primary interest to his mathematician's mentality, then to have realized that Gödelian self-referentiality trumps even that — because it gives us a basis for explaining the conscious "I" we call the soul.

He shows that Gödelian self-referentiality, the potential for "I"-hood, is first cousin to universality, the principle established by British mathematician Alan Turing at the dawn of the computer age by which it can be determined whether a computer is capable of being programmed to do anything any other computer does. The critical condition for universality to hold is that the computer be able to manipulate symbolical representations of its own capabilities: self-referentiality.

Virtually every computer in common use today can do that — which is why, among other things, the Mac I am writing this on is capable of pretending to be a Windows machine.

So universal computers running appropriate software can in effect emulate themselves, a capacity which at least potentially means they could generate arbitrarily complex symbol sets, up to and including the granddaddy of them all, the conscious "I."

(Why is it that I'm wondering at this moment whether my Mac may be laughing at me?)

The human brain has enough neural connections to be Turing-universal, and to generate an "I," but animal brains probably don't. The capacity for having what we call a human soul probably appeared somewhere along the evolutionary path from the last common ancestor we share with the other primates, such as chimpanzees, to our species, Homo sapiens. The first possessor of a human soul was very likely a Homo, but not a Homo sapiens.

All this, I note, chimes with A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Seattle University philosophy professors Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete, which I discussed most recently in Faiths of Our Fathers. It argues that Catholics such as I should be open to a pro-choice position concerning abortion because the church, prior to the seventeenth century, held that the fetus in a human womb lacked a human soul until late in pregnancy.

St. Augustine and, later, St. Thomas Aquinas believed that the soul of a fetus prior to some indeterminate point of blossoming into a full-fledged human one went through merely vegetative and animal stages first.

Abortions were immoral no because they destroyed ensouled human beings. They were wrong because they frustrated the only defensible use of the sex drive: procreation.

At the dawn of the scientific age, the Augustinian theory of late ensoulment (aka delayed hominization) was supplanted by a belief in the instant arrival of the human soul from the very moment of an egg's fertilization by a sperm. This was a logical consequence of a mistaken scientific theory of the day. The sperm was thought to be a very miniaturized but fully-formed human being, the "homunculus," complete with human soul.

Later, the microscope debunked the homunculus theory — but by that time, the church had hinged its objection to abortion on the idea of immediate hominization that went along with it. To abort an early-stage fetus was as immoral as aborting a late-term fetus, and for the same reason: it was the murder of a being, however tiny, with a human soul.

But if Douglas Hofstadter is correct, the human soul is the conscious "I" that can only develop when the brain of the human fetus is fully "wired up," such that it can (immediately or eventually) turn to constructing symbols of itself. Specifically, suffering as we know it is not possible until there can be an "I" to do the suffering.

And thus it can be seen that thinking like Hofstadter's is not really compatible with traditional religious thought about the soul — although it is compatible with the thought of the early Church Fathers, long since abandoned but ripe for recovery.

Mystery and Theodicy

James Wood's book review in The New Yorker of June 9, 2008, Holiday in Hellmouth, tackles an almost forbidden subject these days in religious circles: the problem of why a good, all-powerful God up there in heaven permits such suffering and devastation down here on earth. Bart D. Ehrman's new book, God’s Problem, is the occasion for Wood's review/essay. (Full disclosure: I have not read either of Ehrman's books to date.)

Ehrman, a scholar/skeptic of religion, famously wrote the 2005 bestseller Misquoting Jesus debunking the reliability of the very text of the Bible, especially the New Testament, as an inerrant guide to faith. The new book makes Ehrman's own atheism explicit:

“I no longer go to church, no longer believe, no longer consider myself a Christian,” he announces on the third page. “The subject of this book is the reason why.” In a nutshell: “I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. . . . The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith.”

To be sure, says Wood, this is not an outright denial of God's reality. It is, rather, anti-theodicy: "wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God it is supposed not to believe in." Theodicy is argumentation in support of continued faith in God, as we experience a world shot through by woe. Anti-theodicy is the position that such pro-God arguments won't wash.

Wood, Ehrman's reviewer, explains that he himself lost the conservative faith his family imbued in him, when, as a late teen, he confronted two issues. The first was the fact that prayer quite apparently does not avail to relieve or forestall suffering, and the second was the problem of suffering itself. Why does a mighty God not put an end to evil and woe, right here, right now?

Wood says the problem of suffering and evil would not have impressed Westerners as a reason "to reject the idea of God [, until] about 1700, at the very earliest." Before that, it merely occasioned (albeit sometimes tortured and Job-like) inquiry into "how to understand God and how to relate to him, given the state of the world.”

My reaction to that tidbit is to wonder what changed to allow the premise "An all-powerful, all-good God exists" to be conceivably negated, whereas it had originally been more of an unassailable axiom than the hypothetical premise of an argument. Did we start to whittle away at Christendom's longstanding axiom set — everything known to be true beyond argument or evidence — in the West? Or did we simply become more insistent that no proposition be deemed acceptable if the argument toward it creates logical quandaries?

One name for any assertion about bedrock reality that ineluctably ties further attempts at reason in knots is "mystery." Theodicy in its purest form is something we in recent centuries have invented to try (Ehrman and Wood would claim without success) to

crush [the mystery of] suffering down to the logician’s granules of P and Q . (“Let P be the proposition that God is benevolent, and let Q be the existence of ... useless suffering.”)

Ehrman and Wood object to the "scholastic" obviousness of reducing a mystery to a formula of logic in this way. The "entrapped invocation of a God who is not believed in but is nonetheless despised [which] gives [Ehrman's] book a rough power" avoids that sort of dry reductionism. However, neither Ehrman no Wood seems able to swing his mental pendulum fully back in the other direction and admit to the ultra-basic "rough power" over our souls of mystery-qua-mystery.

In other words, taking the mystery out of human apperceptions of God does indeed leave us with seeming contradictions between theology and manifest reality that seem to impugn theology more than reality.

On the other hand, taking the mystery out of God leaves us with a mere conceptual abstraction, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob ... and Jesus. Showing that that abstraction of a divinity makes no sense and therefore could not reasonably be said to exist is in no way binding on Yahweh, the Lord of Hosts, who for Moses' own protection appears to Moses as a Burning Bush.

A God of Fluctuations?

My previous post, "Let There Be Light" and Entropy, suggested that the universe's conspicuously low physical entropy at the time of the big bang — entropy measures disorder, so low entropy means high order — corresponds to the lowering of informational entropy that comes with the production and receipt of any message or utterance. The state of things prior to the utterance is high-entropy: there are any number of possible utterances that can be made/heard, and thus the crystallizing of many possibilities into one actuality dramatically lowers entropy.

So when the Bible attributes the utterance "Let there be light" to the Lord at the dawn of creation, may it not have been right after all? Isn't this a poetic way of saying that the universe as we know it began when God delivered to it the entropy-lowering command of all entropy-lowering commands?

If so, then it looks as if the physical concomitant of that poetic utterance may have been a single paltry "fluctuation." According to cosmologist Sean M. Carroll in Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes? (Scientific American, June 2008) physicists believe that a lot of abstract entities can experience fluctuations, and when they do, new worlds can emerge into existence:

In the presence of dark energy, empty space is not completely empty. Fluctuations of quantum fields give rise to a very low temperature—enormously lower than the temperature of today’s universe but nonetheless not quite absolute zero. All quantum fields experience occasional thermal fluctuations in such a universe. That means it is not perfectly quiescent; if we wait long enough, individual particles and even substantial collections of particles will fluctuate into existence, only to once again disperse into the vacuum. (These are real particles, as opposed to the short-lived “virtual” particles that empty space contains even in the absence of dark energy.)

Among the things that can fluctuate into existence are small patches of ultradense dark energy. If conditions are just right, that patch can undergo inflation and pinch off to form a separate universe all its own — a baby universe. Our universe may be the offspring of some other universe.

In an earlier post, Chance ... or God, I also spoke of "fluctuations" in so-called dissipative systems. These systems, among which are all living systems, take in energy that propels changes in the systems' own states of organization. The processes of change traverse "bifurcation points" at which one new state is chosen, seemingly arbitrarily, and other equally likely possibilities are discarded for all time. What decides which new state is chosen? A quantum fluctuation or perturbation.

Such a fluctuation is treated as happening at random, by sheer chance. There is, for scientists, no possible further explanation.

The genetic mutations that are the raw material for Darwinian evolution may be, at bottom, products of quantum fluctuations in living matter. Again, the scientist is committed to attributing them to blind chance.

Notice the commonality here? Novelty — cosmic or biological — is born of random fluctuations. At such a juncture, entropy is lowered by virtue of the choice of one actuality out of a bevy of (henceforth foregone) alternative potentialities. In both the cosmic case and the biological one, there is an available parallelism between the physical lowering of entropy and the lowering of entropy that information theory would associate with receipt of a message or command ... in this case, from God.

"Let There Be Light" and Entropy

Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?, asks cosmologist Sean M. Carroll in the June 2008 Scientific American.

He says a not-very-well answered question in physics is why time never runs backward in our universe. The inexorable arrow of time corresponds to the evolution of entropy. The universe is a closed system, since no energy is ever added or subtracted. In a closed system, entropy — a measure of the disorder of the system — never decreases. Typically, it increases.

The early universe had very low entropy, just after the big bang. Today's universe is medium-entropy. In the very distant future the disorder will be maximal, and the cosmos will contain virtually nothing worthy of mention.

Carroll asks how we can explain the very low entropy just after the big bang. Present attempts at explanation, he says, only give the illusion that anything has been accounted for. He posits instead that the universe had a pre-history, before the big bang. It originally had high entropy. Then things happened — "fluctuations" — that caused a new, low-entropy baby universe to inflate into what became the cosmos we know today.

As one who is forever inclined to look for ways in which religion an science might harmonize, I am much interested in the fact that entropy was at its lowest in the very beginning, and we can't really explain why. Postulating a high-entropy cosmic pre-history — one that probably cannot be verified empirically — doesn't really tell us what caused the "genesis fluctuation" to happen.

Could it have happened when God said, "Let there be light"?

In theology, "Let there be light" is a divine command.

In information theory, "Let there be light" is a message. As with any message, its basic characteristic is its ability to reduce entropy.

Any message source, before the message is sent, has entropy, the measure of the number of possible messages it can send. A message source that consists of a single bit of computer memory has just two possible messages, "on" and "off." Its entropy is low for this reason. When an actual message is produced — say, "off" — there is only a minimal reduction in the amount of entropy.

More complex message sources have much higher entropy, because the number of possible messages is larger. When an actual message is received — say, "Let there be light" — the reduction in entropy is huge, simply because of the sheer number of alternatives — "Let there be chaos," "Let there be little green men," "Let it be," "Eat at Fred's," etc. — that have been ruled out.

Maybe "Let there be light" stands metaphorically for the capacity of the very first divine command to reduce entropy mightily in the communications-theoretical sense, such that the infant universe was indeed a place of surprisingly low entropy in the cosmological sense.