Relationalism and Caritas

I have religious and philosophical convictions that might be labeled "relationalist." I believe that reality is constituted by relations among entities, more than by entities themselves. Taken to an extreme of which I am by no means certain, but suspect may be correct, my relationalist philosophy would have it that there are no entities, only relations.

Sidestepping that issue for the moment, I posit that entities (under the working assumption that they even exist) may (or, under other circumstances, may not) relate to one another in ways that give rise to emergent wholes greater than "the sum of the entities." My philosophy of relationalism is acordingly emergentist and holistic. It has it that the emergent properties that distinguish holistic entities — wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts — characterize most or all of reality.

I'll call such relating entities "relatants." The relatants of such a holistic system can and do interact in ways that produce "order for free," a phrase Stuart Kauffman uses in At Home in the Universe to express the idea that the evolving biosphere on Earth "self-organizes." For Kauffman, self-organization is the handmaid of natural selection in explaining (along with random genetic mutations and similar sources of heritable variation) how new species arise. To him, each new species is a unique manifestation of order for free.

So relationalism, holism, and emergentism are all synonyms, roughly speaking, in my estimation.

In self-organizing systems, the relatants' interrelationships have to be just so for new "reality" — new order for free — to emerge. Kauffman's research has pinned down some of the necessary characteristics of systems that, as I put it, "go critical" and become evolutionarily fecund. These characteristics don't pertain just to biology, but also to human culture, technology, and economic marketplaces. One of these salient characteristics is that the degree of interlinkage among relatants must be rich but not too rich. If the interlinkage is just right, the system gravitates to and operates in a dynamical zone called the "edge of chaos," where new order can, first, emerge, and then stick around to undergo further evolution.

It is also possible to apply these self-organizational concepts at multiple levels or tiers of complexity. For example, a cell, an organ, a developing embryo, an ecosystem, and a bioshpere all can be considered examples of such self-organizing, "complex adaptive" systems. A holistic, emergent whole which appears at one level becomes a candidate relatant at the next higher level.

Accordingly, much of what we think of as reality is something of a "house of cards," dependent on certain finely tuned and balanced relationships among the "cards" (the relatants) themselves, all taken with respect to a "base" or "platform" (the next lower level of complexity) which itself is yet another house of cards!

We can conceivably descend from the level of biology to that of chemistry and then to that of physics in this way ... and eventually we encounter those hard-to-answer questions about how quantum-level phenomena undergird the "hard" reality we deal with in classical physics. You've heard Stephen Hawking's anecdote about "it's turtles all the way down"? In this case, it's relatants all the way down.


To me, all this patterns with my religious convictions as a Catholic Christian. It does so in at least two ways.

First, it seems to me that the Gospel message is basically a call to love God without stinting, to love our neighbors in the same way, and even, as Jesus said, to love our enemies.

Put another way, the message of the Gospels seems to be that God loves us all without reservation or qualification. The Father sacrifices the Son in a maximally painful, maximally ignominious way so that our sins and shortcomings do not prevent our entry into the kingdom of heaven. The relationship between us and God as "relatants" must accordingly be one of love.

Likewise, the relationship between us and our fellow humans, as "co-relatants," must be one of love.

Out of these relationships of love will — not may, but will, say the Gospels — emerge the kingdom of heaven.

That's the Gospel message in a nutshell. How relationalist, how emergentist, how holistic can you get?


The second way in which my relationalist philosophy patterns with my religion is the idea that Christians (for the most part, Unitarians and some others notwithstanding) can't talk for long about God without recalling that God is actually three "persons" in one "being." The Holy Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (I'm getting these ideas, by the way, mostly from Denis Edwards' The God of Evolution: A Trinitarian Theology. Edwards is a Catholic priest with an interest in reconciling evolution science with religious understanding. My apologies to him if I've misconstrued his beliefs.)

These three persons are said to "abide with" one another eternally — even if the Holy Spirit "proceeds from" the Father and the Son. The three holy persons are, in effect, "relatants" whose relationship is said to be one of pure, unadulterated love.

I must now acknowledge that what I am about to say is not universally accepted theology in my church or elsewhere. I imagine that the "abiding with in love" which the three persons of the Holy Trinity engage in furnishes what I might term a metaphysical base or platform for the entire material universe which Christians call God's Creation.

That is, when the divine Godhead or Holy Trinity "empties itself" (to use well-known theological jargon pointed up by Fr. Edwards' book) and "makes room" for the physical universe to appear and evolve, the principle of "abiding with" carries over to material reality. If created relatants "abide with" one another in the "proper" sorts of relationships — very loosely speaking, "loving" ones — then "good" things will happen. There will be new, emergent instances of order for free that piggyback upon one another in a multi-tiered, evolving arrangement that can produce, eventually, creatures for whom the word "love" has far richer overtones than apply at earlier, lower levels.

Love itself evolves, becoming richer and more complex.

So love is, at base, any "proper" or "good" or "fecund" schema of relatants' interrelationships, leading to the successful emergence of new order for free, blessed by God.


The emphasis on love (charity, or caritas) in Christian belief /practice goes along with its moral and ethical "rules" — thou shalt do this, thou shalt not do that. I see these rules as guidelines for knowing what relationships are indeed loving, good, proper, and evolutionarily fecund in a God-created world.

I have no intention of making any attempt to justify the various moral precepts that are called into question today by those who feel Christianity is historically too repressive. I can't really say that I, personally, accept some of these hot-button dictums. (For example, my church says ysing artificial birth control is wrong, but the "rhythm method" is fine; I don't get that.) But I can say that I believe the morality taught by my church — assuming the church has got it right in all its details — is a way of guiding us to properly loving, good, evolutionary fecund relationships among ourselves and with God.

Hence, I see the moral and ethical teachings of religion as the bylaws of an enterprise in evolution ... not of the biological variety, but cultural evolution.


And I see "creation," understood as the act by which God brings the universe into existence out of nothing, as being nothing like our usual, common-sense notion of "making" something. Rather, God "empties himself" or "self-vacates," and a world appears.

We don't have a way of imagining this kind of "negative creation," so we insist of visualizing God as making everything as if out of molded clay or the gears and cogs of a pocket watch. From this inadequate sort of metaphor comes creationism and all the fuss and fury over intelligent design and the theory of evolution.

My philosophy of relationalism doesn't jibe with traditional creationism or with so-called Intelligent Design. It does jibe with theories of self-organization à la Stuart Kauffman, taken as scientifically valid adjuncts to standard neo-Darwinian evolution theory.

I and Thou and Charles Darwin

Scientific American, Sept. 2005, features an item titled "Clash in Cambridge: Science and religion seem as antagonistic as ever," by John Horgan. It isn't about evolutionary science per se, but rather the general rift between science and faith.

In it, the article's author tells of a recent two-week lecture series at Britain's Cambridge University, under the aegis of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship, which brought together 10 journalists and several speakers from the world of science. The lecturers "included four agnostics, a Jew, a deist, and 11 Christians." Many of them "saw no unbridgeable chasm between science and their faith."

Biologist and Darwin defender Richard Dawkins, described as "an agnostic leaning toward atheism," was among the notable lecturers in the series. So was philosopher Nancey Murphy, "a materialist who also adheres to nonscientific ideas, such as the resurrection of Christ." Other luminaries who offered various ways to bridge the science-religion gap included Cambridge biologist Simon Conway Morris and physicists John Barrow, John Polkinghorne, and Paul Davies.

"Murphy acknowledged," writes Horgan, "that at times the discussion between science and religion 'breaks down' because they involve 'incommensurable schemes' for understanding reality'." More on that in a minute.

Peter Lipton, a Cambridge philosopher, said he practices his faith, Judaism, even though he doesn't actually believe in a supernatural God:

"I stand in my synagogue and pray to God and have an intense relationship with God, and yet I don't believe in God" ... He [Lipton] compared his religious experience with that of someone who gets pleasure from a novel even though he knows it is not literally true. "Are you having your cake and eating it, too?" asked journalism fellow Shankar Vedantim of the Washington Post. "I'm certainly trying to," Lipton replied.

Maybe, one speculates, God is in the relationship between Lipton (or any one of us) and the Lord. Maybe our assumption that God exists first and foremost, and then we optionally establish a relationship with him or her as an objective reality, is what's confusing us here. Maybe God isn't anything like an object. Maybe Martin Buber was right about the fundamental necessity of having an I-Thou relationship with divinity, or none at all.

Buber would probably have said — I'm interpreting his book I and Thou here — that religion isn't really supposed to be (in Murphy's phrase) a "scheme for understanding reality" at all. Maybe to "understand" something means to objectify that something, to treat it as an "It," a mere thing. The relationship is one of I-It, not one of I-Thou, and spiritually it has to be unsatisfactory and false.

It's hard for us to grasp what Buber means about I-Thou relationships, just as it's hard to think about God as anything but an objective It (or He or She). Peter Lipton seems to have caught onto the trick though, which is why he can pray so easily to a Thou he doesn't "believe in."


Which brings me to "Say Anything," Jim Holt's critical essay in the Aug. 22, 2005, issue of The New Yorker. This one is not even about science at all, much less evolutionary science, but it's relevant nonetheless. It's about bullshit.

Holt's takeoff point is a consideration of moral philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt's short paper, recently re-issued as a hot-selling book, called "On Bullshit." Frankfurt defines a bullshitter as, worse than a liar, one who is wholly indifferent to (in Holt's words) "the authority of truth." At least the liar, just like the truthteller, is "guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are." The bullshitter doesn't care.

Holt discusses a number of reasons why Frankfurt might be wrong in drawing such a clean line between the bullshitter and the liar. I find that part to be of moderate interest to me, at best, but then he brings up various currents in postmodern thought which "seem to undermine the commonsense notion of truth as agreement with reality."

The "Continental poststructuralists like Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrilliard, and the late Jacques Derrida," he writes, seem to be echoed by their otherwise natural antagonists in matters philosophical, "the 'brand-name' Anglophone philosophers of the past fifty years — Wittgenstein, W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty": they're all uniformly "anti-truth."

By "anti-truth," Holt means that these guys, whatever their manifold philosophical differences, all "insist that each of us is trapped in his own point of view; we make up stories about the world and, in the exercise of power, try to impose them on others." That makes discovering the actual truth, characterized by a presumed "agreement with reality," a fundamental impossbility.

If there even is a reality beyond what we think we know, we simply each have our own window on it. The window determines what we see and what we don't see.

Which confirms Buber. Objectifying reality — trying to establish what the "truth" of it actually is — is indeed incommensurable (Nancey Murphy's aptly chosen word) with engaging in an I-Thou relationship, either with God or with any of our fellow creatures in this God-made world! Such a relationship goes by the more conventional name of love. Maybe if we could just see that God is love, we'd all stop arguing so much about evolution!

Magazine Watch

Michael Shermer, a.k.a. "Skeptic," writes a monthly column for Scientific American in which he usually takes on all sorts of foes of scientific thought. This month's issue, Sept. 2005, sees him celebrating vigorous debate within the walls of science.

"Rumsfeld's Wisdom," he calls the piece, after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recent pronouncements on the extreme difficulty the intelligence community has in dealing with "unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know." Science somehow learns to ask itself the questions which at first "we don't know we don't know."

One way is by scientists talking with one another. At a recent World Summit on Evolution, reports Shermer, leading scientists let down their hair and talked about many of the things the theory of evolution, as it stands, cannot yet explain.

Some of these things are known unknowns, such as how to account for the origin of life.

Others may verge on the territory of unknown unknowns, such as what new information, yet to come, might enable evolutionists to finally replace Darwin's now-known-to-be-"wrong" theory of sexual selection.

University of Massachussetts Amherst's Lynn Margulis even declared neo-Darwinism "dead." She said that "random changes in DNA alone do not lead to speciation," where so-called neo-Darwinian theory holds that mutations and similar changes in DNA — amplified over time and countless generations, of course, and abetted by natural selection — do fully account for the advent of new species.

Margulis now claims that symbiogenesis plays a major role: "the appearance of new behaviors, tissues, organs, organ systems, physiologies or species as a result of symbiont interaction." This insight, she says, applies to all eukaryotes in general: animals, plants, and fungi.

It's the first I've heard of symbiogenesis ... or symbiont interaction, for that matter. Shermer does not elaborate on their meaning. His point is rather that Margulis' heterodoxy and that of other summit participants is not a threat to all who, like Shermer, favor a theory of evolution without divine help:

During the conference, I had a nightmarish thought: creationists could have a field day yanking quotes out of context while listening to a room full of evolutionary biologists arguing over specific issues. In point of fact, such debates are all within evolutionary theory, not between evolutionary theory and something else. And this boundary between the known and unknown is where science flourishes.


Shermer's "something else" is creationism, which today is for the most part represented by "intelligent design," or ID.

All the noise ID proponents have been making is documented in an article in the Aug. 15, 2005, issue of TIME Magazine. Claudia Wallis' "The Evolution Wars" points out that President Bush has recently signed onto the push being made by ID proponents to "teach the controversy," which means to present the "theory" of intelligent design alongside standard Darwinian theory in high-school classrooms.

ID is basically the claim that much of biology — organs like an eye or a wing, even a single cell — is "irreducibly complex." There is no way to evolve irreducible complexity, say IDers. Evolution is and must be, Darwinists say, a gradual process. But IDers say there is no gradual process, however long in terms of time or generations, that can go from zilch to an eye.

Darwinists beg to differ, saying there are, too, ways to go gradually and step-by-step from zero vision to 20/20 vision.

Then IDers say, where's your evidence? All the posited, interim, incremental steps, if they happened, left no fossil evidence.

Then Darwinists say that is because the posited steps involve soft tissue that doesn't fossilize. But the lack of a smoking gun (see "Darwinians vs. Anti-Darwinians" sidebar in print magazine that is apparently not shown online) "cannot be taken as proof that a designer — intelligent or otherwise — deliberately skipped them."

That might not seem like a convincing victory for Darwinians. But the man who is most associated with advancing ID, Michael Behe, himself undercuts the victory. "Indeed, Behe concedes," writes Wallis, "'You can't prove intelligent design by experiment'." If we assume that "by experiment" means, more generally, "using hard empirical evidence," and if fossil evidence counts as hard empirical evidence, then Darwinists have more — much, much more — evidence to back their claims than IDers do.

Even ID favorers, according to Wallis, admit they prefer to go slow for the time being and just teach the so-called "holes" in standard Darwinian theory. To present ID as "ready for prime time," says oceanographer and ID proponent Edward Peltzer, is "premature for all kinds of reasons. ... The science is there, but the science textbooks are not. The teachers have to be trained. Its time will come. But its time is not now."

As for me, I have yet to see anything which leads me to agree that "the science is there."

Nor do I think it ever will be. ID is basically a negative claim: X did not happen, for it could never have transpired. In this case, the X which is denied as being outright impossible is a gradual, non-God-driven, strictly Darwinian process which ostensibly accounts for all the complexity of the biosphere today.

To prove a negative is a very, very hard thing to do.

Recasting it as a positive — God (or an intelligent designer) stepped in here, and here, and here — makes the problem no less tough. You can't run experiments on divine action.


That being said, I'm no fan of the arrantly atheistic wing of Darwinian science, as represented by Richard Dawkins. His tirade at a recent panel discussion on "Scientific Vantages," held at New York University in October 2004 and sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities, is the centerpiece of "Darwin's Rottweiler," Stephen S. Hall's in-depth article on Dawkins in the Sept. 2005 issue of Discover magazine.

Dawkins excellent books, such as The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, and The Ancestor's Tale, explain Darwin's theory about as well as it has ever been explained for the lay reader. Dawkins has also advanced the adjunct to the standard theory that the gene, not the individual organism as a whole, is the basic unit which natural selection operates on. Other evolutionists are not so sure ... but never mind. It is Dawkins' third major theme that has those of them who believe in God, not to mention most creationists, cringing. In a nutshell:

At the New York symposium, Dawkins insisted that an anti-religious stance is a natural and inevitable outgrowth of evolutionary thought. "It's very clear that much of the opposition to evolution in this country ... is fed by the very suspicion, which I happen to think is justified, that evolution really is antireligious," he said.

Rebuttal for that outlook comes from Francis Collins, Director, National Human Genome Research Institute, in religion reporter David Van Biema's companion piece to the main TIME article, "A TIME Forum: Can You Believe in God and Evolution":

I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature ... The mechanism of creation is left unspecified [by the Bible]. If God, who is all powerful and who is not limited by space and time, chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create you and me, who are we to say that wasn't an absolutely elegant plan? And if God has now given us the intelligence and the opportunity to discover his methods, that is something to celebrate ... For me scientific discovery is also an occasion of worship.

That goes along with the sentiments of Martin Nowak, a Harvard professor of mathematics and evolutionary biology, as reported in the main article:

Nowak, who describes himself as a person of faith, sees no contradiction between Darwin's theory and belief in God. "Science does not produce any evidence against God," he observes. "Science and religion ask different questions."


It seems to me that such questions about how science and religion can coexist, in view of Darwinian evolution theory, have as may answers as there are people of whom they may be asked. The same TIME forum represents Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker as an atheist ally of Dawkins, but one whose primary objection to religion seems to be that it blinds us to the vast impefections in the natural order which God supposedly designed, and also to human evil done in religion's name:

The moral design of nature is as bungled as its engineering design. What twisted sadist would have invented a parasite that blinds millions of people or a gene that covers babies with excruciating blisters? To adapt a Yiddish expression about God: If an intelligent designer lived on Earth, people would break his windows ... In practice, religion has given us stonings, inquisitions and 9/11. Morality comes from a commitment to treat others as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe. Like physical evolution, it does not require a white-coated technician in the sky.

Interesting ... Pinker seems to believe that the best way to teach the golden rule famously advanced in the Bible — do unto others as you would have them do unto you — is to deep-six religion entirely!

Then there's Michael Behe himself. He says, "I think that we are all descended from some single cell in the distant past but that that cell and later parts of life were intentionally produced as the result of intelligent activity. As a Christian, I say that intelligence is very likely to be God." So Darwin was right about the common descent of all life forms from a single, simple ancestor ... but wrong about the process being a wholly naturalistic one.

Finally, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, apparently thinks even Behe much too liberal:

Personally, I am a young-Earth creationist. I believe the Bible is adequately clear about how God created the world, and that its most natural reading points to a six-day creation that included not just the animal and plant species but the earth itself ... I think it's interesting that many of evolution's most ardent academic defenders have moved away from the old claim that evolution is God's means to bring life into being in its various forms. More of them are saying that a truly informed belief in evolution entails a stance that the material world is all there is and that the natural must be explained in purely natural terms. They're saying that anyone who truly feels this way must exclude God from the story. I think their self-analysis is correct. I just couldn't disagree more with their premise.

Can anyone come up with a way to settle such disputes to everyone's satisfaction? I seriously doubt it.

Jesuit Father George V. Coyne on Evolution

In "God's chance creation," an article in a British-based international Catholic journal, The Tablet of August 6, 2005, George V. Coyne, S.J., director of the Vatican Observatory, defends the consistency of Catholic belief with Darwinism, even when seen as "a truly contingent evolutionary process in nature."

This comes in the wake of the highly publicized article by Vienna's Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, "Finding Design in Nature," in The New York Times of July 7, 2005, in which Schönborn seemed to distance Catholicism from Darwinian evolution theory (see my earlier post, Cardinal Schönborn's View of Evolution).

But Coyne says, "Science is completely neutral with respect to philosophical or theological implications that may be drawn from its conclusions." Religion has nothing to fear from the scientific investigation of evolution.

Coyne continues:

In the universe, as known by science, there are essentially three processes at work: chance, necessity and the fertility of the universe. The classical question as to whether the human being came about by chance, and so has no need of God, or by necessity, and so through the action of a designer God, is no longer valid. And so any attempt to answer it is doomed to failure. The fertility of the universe, now well established by science, is an essential ingredient, and the meaning of chance and necessity must be seen in light of that fertility.

Schönborn had seemingly objected to "neo-Darwinism" as claiming that only two of those three processes were at work, chance and necessity. Chance processes are random ones. Processes governed by necessity are those which follow rigid laws of nature. By adding "fertility," Coyne is able to harmonize Catholic belief with Darwinian science, and especially with the chance or contingency which he admits also occurs in the evolution of the cosmos:

Take one simple example: two hydrogen atoms meet in the early universe. By necessity (the laws of chemical combination) they are destined to become a hydrogen molecule. But by chance the temperature and pressure conditions at that moment are not correct for them to combine. And so they wander through the universe until they finally do combine. And there are trillions and trillions of such atoms doing the same thing. Of course, by the interaction of chance and necessity, many hydrogen molecules are formed and eventually many of them combine with oxygen to make water, and so on, until we have very complex molecules and eventually the most complicated organism that science knows: the human brain.

But what is "fertility"? It is equivalent to "vitality":

The universe has a certain vitality of its own like a child does. God is working with the universe. The universe has a certain vitality of its own like a child does. It has the ability to respond to words of endearment and encouragement. You discipline a child but you try to preserve and enrich the individual character of the child and its own passion for life. A parent must allow the child to grow into adulthood, to come to make its own choices, to go on its own way in life. Words that give life are richer than mere commands or information. In such wise ways we might imagine that God deals with the universe.

So God, acting like a good, nurturant parent, does not try to overrule "a certain dynamism" that exists in Nature, but stands aside, to some extent, and lets this cosmic "child" mature and "make its own choices."

Which, of course, implies a "directionality" in the maturation process:

[A] process of continuous evolution, called by scientists chemical complexification, has a certain intrinsic natural directionality in that the more complex an organism becomes the more determined is its future.

I read "the more determined is its future" to mean that the more complex an organism is, the more unique its characteristics become, vis-à-vis other organisms. A human embryo starts out relatively simple and then goes through stages at which it successively resembles the embryos of various other animals. Only at the end, as embryonic complexity increases, does it take on uniquely human characteristics and abandon any chance of being, say, a bird.

The same kind of directionality moves the evolving cosmos from a relatively simple repository of pure vitality, as it was when it first began, such that by means of a dynamical process which includes both chance and necessity, greater and greater complexity is born. That suits God's plan just fine.