AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion

Participatory Evolution: The Drive of Creation
CHARLES BIRCH

REPUBLISHED WITH KIND PERMISSION OF THE JOURNAL OF THE AMERCAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION AND DR. CHARLES BIRCH: BIRCH, C., "PARTICIPATORY EVOLUTION: THE DRIVE OF CREATION," JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION, VOL. 40 (JUNE 1972), PP. 147-163.

My theme is that the universe, and the evolution of all that is in it, are to be conceived not primarily as contrivances but as processes that are influenced from what has gone on before and that anticipate in some sense the potentialities of the future. The image, be it of electrons, or plants, or animals, or man, is not that of a pack of cards being shuffled. In thinking that way, we too readily "thingify" the universe. There are no things in the old Newtonian sense, only processes. To annihilate things we would have to stop the universe and all the happenings in it. This is the Whiteheadean view (1929a) - that reality is process. What we call things participate in a totality we appropriately name the universe. Its history we call evolution. The application of the process way of thinking to the evolutionary process is what I am calling participatory evolution. My reasons for this will become clear.

The future of mankind is dependent in part on our conception of our place and role in evolution. To conceive of ourselves as cards that are shuffled in the pack by outside forces is to devalue everything and to demoralize everyone. Men yearn for some warrant for their lives. As one eco-activist in California said to me, the critical question we must answer is, what are people for? Our answer depends upon what we think people are. And what we think people are depends in part upon what we think things are. For people are made of things, or rather, they are made of the processes we call things, and they have evolved from things. However, I have become concerned that the conceptual framework of presuppositions with which we biologists tend to think about evolution is too simplistic and restrictive to hold an adequate view of man, his evolution from the past and into the future (e.g. Monod 1970). I shall argue that the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, which I accept, brings us to the threshold of a view of man and the universe which could be exciting and liberating to the human spirit. But we tend to stand back because it is a threshold into that no man's land where science, philosophy, and religion intertwine, and which we may be unwilling to recognize just because of our limited view. Science is partly to blame. A world-wide disaffection with science by the young is associated with the failure of science to move beyond its mechanical models to a more humanistic vision which can embrace values, consciousness, compassion, and all that youth now passionately longs for. Any adequate view of man must involve some understanding of meaningful relationships to the total environment, including not only other people, plants, animals, and landscapes, but also the cosmos. Yet we find ourselves in a modern world alienated in some way from all of these things. Such images or models as we have seem no longer to be appropriate. Gilkey (1970) has diagnosed causal factors in this development of the alienation of modern man from his cosmos as

the demise of all the gods of nature through the Biblical, Christian tradition; the radical continuation of this process in science since Galileo through the rigorous eradication of all teleology, valuation and "meaning" from the processes of nature; the spiritual or existential separation of man from both the beauty and the awe of surrounding nature which technology and urbanization have gradually effected; and, finally the gradual loss, culminating in the twentieth century, of a sense of an ultimate order or directedness in the process of things.

This is not to imply that humanistic models of man and his evolution and cosmos have not been envisaged by men with a scientific background especially by A.N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne (see references) and other process thinkers. However, the relevance of these models, particularly to evolutionary thinking, has been little appreciated by biologists, with some notable exceptions such as Wright (1964) and Waddington ( 1968, 1969). The time is opportune for another look.

Man has been singularly successful in this last century in writing the story of the evolution of life--and to some extent also the evolution of the universe, although there the agreement seems to be less than in biology. There may even come a time when all that can be said about the scientific story of evolution will have been said, although I doubt it. But even if that day is reached, all that can be said will not have been said, for there is a second chapter to be written. Aristotle followed his first volume on physics with a second which he first called philosophy and which later became known as metaphysics--literally beyond physics and symbolic of generalization to the fullest possible extent. So too there is a second volume to be written about evolution. Less than a decade ago it would have been tantamount to letting down the scientific side to make such a proposal. For many that is still the case. Men argued that the only statements which can have meaning are those which are in principle falsifiable, a principle which is sometimes known as the verification principle and which itself is a metaphysical proposition. Yet this principle was supposed to be the sword that slayed the metaphysical dragon. The sword proved to be defective.

No one has been able to offer a satisfactory formulation of the principle, let alone prove it (e.g., Goudge, 1961; Hempel, 1951; Waddington, 1960). Moreover, there remain plenty of questions for which there may be no empirical answers, although we do tend to answer them in one way or another. The doctrine of materialism is a metaphysic; it is certainly neither verifiable nor falsifiable, any more than are non-materialistic views. Indeed, it seems likely that we all have some sort of metaphysics in the sense of the basic assumptions we make about the order and structure of existence. This colors our thinking in quite subtle ways. Boehm (1969), a physicist, has argued that metaphysics is fundamental to every branch of science and that we should be more aware of our metaphysical assumptions than we tend to be. Waddington (1969), a biologist, has given an account of the practical consequences of a Whiteheadean metaphysical belief in his own scientific work. The philosophical framework within which we think and experiment affects what we study and how we study it. One who is wedded to the verification principle exclusively as a guide to what is worth studying will exclude some questions which others regard as of great significance. For example, for some of us, evolution raises the question, what is it about the nature of the universe that had the consequence that it evolved instead of staying put where it was in the primeval past? Or as Bergson (1919) asked: Porquoi a-t-elle marché? The universe having marched and produced life and mind and consciousness, does it not require a different sort of explanation from what would be required of a universe in which these could not in principle happen? It is conceivable, for example, that evolution could not have proceeded at all. Or having proceeded, it is conceivable that it could have done so without consciousness (as distinct from mere responsiveness) appearing at any stage, and without self-consciousness having appeared in man. I am using self-consciousness in the sense defined by Dobzhansky (1967) as the awareness of self that goes along with the awareness that one day that self will die. Organisms might have been non-conscious robots that made all the appropriate responses to predators and the like without any conscious awareness at all. No one had found any survival value for consciousness nor for self-consciousness that could not in principle have been achieved without them. Are they just epiphenomena like the buzz of the machinery, or do they point to a basic reality of existence?

By raising these sorts of questions I am not harking back to the old vitalist-mechanist controversy of the earlier part of the century nor to Bergson's elan vital. Biology shows quite clearly that when atoms and molecules are organized into living cells nothing is added to these atoms and molecules to give that cell characteristics of life. No vital principles are added then, nor were they in the past when life arose. Nor am I alluding to the complaints of some contemporary mathematicians that life and its evolution involve such improbable arrangements of atoms and molecules that the configuration requires some higher coordination than is provided by the laws of physics. Bronowski (1970) has shown how that complaint is based on a misunderstanding of the way natural. selection of random variations works. Nor am I alluding to the notion that the creation and evolution of the cosmos and life looks so much like a building based on some preordained blueprint that it requires a supernatural architect-engineer to see through. An understanding of modern biology makes all these notions unnecessary, for the facts of biology do not make the process of creation look like that at all. However, I am not convinced that we have a complete explanation of the evolution of tile cosmos and of life in terms of the mechanistic analogy of contrivance or bunch of contrivances, despite the extraordinary success of mechanism as a working methodology. We have to distinguish between the weight to be given to scientific opinion in the selection of its methods, and its trustworthiness in formulating judgements of understanding (Whitehead 1929b). The metaphysical framework within which most evolutionists think is mechanistic, period! A modern exception has been Teilhard de Chardin and his followers. But system. at least in the way he formulated it has, for most biologists, scarcely survived Medawar's (1967) parody of it as "tipsy euphoric prose-poetry." Dobzhansky's (1967) interesting book "The Biology of Ultimate Concern" is highly sympathetic to Teilhard de Chardin, and one might almost number Dobzhansky as a follower. But it is the poetry and mysticism that evidently appeal to Dobzhansky and not Teilhard's metaphysic of a "within of things" nor the role Teilhard gives to final causes in evolution.

There is both a widespread suspicion of theories that attempt to embrace too much and a general feeling among biologists that we ought to get on with the job of digging for the facts and to let the metaphysical framework look abet itself. This is often another way of saying that we do not believe that we ever find a framework to hold the picture of the world as seen by science all the rest of culture. There is the apocryphal story of the mother who was selecting a toy for her small child. To the sympathetic shop assistant she said "But isn't this toy rather complicated for a small child?" "It is an educational toy, madam," replied the shop assistant. "It is designed to adjust the child to live in the world of today. No matter how he puts it together it is wrong." Perhaps that will be true of all our metaphysical theories. But some will be more wrong than others and, since none of us escapes from implicit if not explicit metaphysical ideas, it behooves us to question what we have accepted; and to consider alternatives. Lynn White (1968) has argued that "our thinking has got spread over so vast a range of things that it is suffering excess intellectual entropy." We are in need of what he calls a "move toward the center" which is a move for intellectual generality. Twenty years ago I was discussing the state of ecology with then most prominent thinker, Charles Elton of Oxford. I remember him saying to me that what ecology needed then was to discover the coal seam as opposed to just bits of coal scattered here and there.

Biology found a coal seam in the doctrine of organic evolution and its neo-Darwinian interpretation. If we were to take the philosophical implications this doctrine with complete seriousness I believe we would be on a route that would help to make sense of a much vaster range of facts than is presented by biology alone.

The Darwinian principle of natural selection of random variation ties all living organisms together in common descent. Its interpretation in terms of molecular biology makes all life a set of variations on one theme--the DNA molecule--moreover providing a credible view of the continuity of the living with the non-living or inorganic. Furthermore, at the other end of the evolutionary continuum in human societies, biological evolution has provided the means of another sort of evolution called cultural evolution in which man is a conscious participant of a transforming process. The edifice of thought is impressive, yet I shall argue that it cries aloud for a philosophical framework very different from the one we are used to getting along with. The framework I see emerging provides a window through which to look at the world, that is an exciting way of looking at where we have come from and where we could be going.

A.N. Whitehead (1926, p. 157) wrote in Science and the Modern World,

... a thoroughgoing evolutionary philosophy is inconsistent with materialism. The aboriginal stuff, or material, from Which a materialistic philosophy starts is incapable of evolution. This material is in itself the ultimate substance. Evolution, on the materialistic theory, is reduced to the role of being another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive .... The doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature. It also requires an underlying activity--a substantial activity--expressing itself in individual embodiments, and evolving in achievements of organism.

On the one hand is the view that change in evolution is analogous to the change in order of a set of shuffled cards in a pack; no one set of cards is any more "ordered" than any others, except in so far as we have a preconception as to what we are going to call an ordered arrangement (Lewontin, 1969). On the other hand is the view that evolving entities are not analogous to cards at all, but are characterized by an underlying activity and that this activity enables them to be involved actively in the process of evolutionary change.

But what could be the nature of such underlying activity? Since Descartes it has been clear that any effort to understand the world must begin somewhere within human experience, because that is all we have to go on. But just which aspects of human experience should serve as the key? The clue I am proposing is to be found in that part of evolution in which we are conscious participants, namely, cultural evolution.

The difference between stone-age man and us is not primarily one of genes of culture. The way in which the human race has acquired those characteristics which we now regard as the most valuable in human life is cultural evolution. Stone-age man had genes that enabled his descendents to make wheels, aircraft, art galleries, and universities. Man's capacity to make discoveries, then to communicate and to learn, was a new sort of inheritance which made a new sort of evolution possible. To the extent that man can choose goals and discover the means to achieve them, he is in charge of his evolutionary future. That is what cultural evolution implies. Instead of being molded by the forces of the external world we mold the world to suit our purposes. Genetic evolution becomes superseded by cultural evolution (Dobzhansky, 1962; Lerner, 1968). This concept had its origin in embryonic form with the early post-Darwinian anthropologists who were evolutionists. But as Waddington (1960) has pointed out, by the end of the nineteenth century the enthusiasm of anthropologists for such ideas had faded. It was kept alive by a few biologists scattered around the world, including the first Professor of Natural History in the University of California, Joseph Le Conte, A revival of interest on a large scale was initiated by Julian Huxley as early as 1929 and by Waddington in the 1940s (Waddington, 1960). Huxley summarized his view in his introduction to Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man thus: "We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future" (Teilhard de Chardin, 1959). Some strongly deny that man is, in any sense at all, in charge of his future. The astronomer Fred Hoyle (1964) claims that man is not in charge of his future, that he never has been, and that the neo-Darwinian biologists who have insisted that he is have been misleading the public. Hoyle sees us as being swept along by the tide of events like a canoe on the rapids with no real power to direct the forces that are moving us--be they a nuclear holocaust, the deterioration and pollution of the environment or uncontrolled population growth (the three threats that Stuart Chase (1968) has called "bombs, bulldozers and babies"). A year later Hoyle (1965) wrote another book in which he spelt out in some detail how he thinks natural selection will deal with man in the decades ahead. Perhaps our fate is sealed this way and man will be as unable as any other creature has been to have himself. The facts may indeed be on the side of the pessimists. As yet mankind has been swept along by circumstances rather than directing events to a chosen goal. "Après nous le deluge" is the common cry of prophets. It is possible that the epitaph of the world has already been written in a most remarkable anonymous poem found by Lord Macleod among papers in a Synagogue, I know not where. It is entitled "Creation in Reverse.'' (3)

In the end, man destroyed the heaven that had been called earth. For the earth had been beautiful and happy until the destructive spirit of man moved upon it. This was the seventh day before the end.

For man said, 'Let me have power in the earth,' and he saw that power seemed good, and he called those who sought power 'great leaders', and those who sought only to serve others and bring reconciliation 'weaklings,' 'compromisers,' 'appeasers.' And this was the sixth day before the end.

And man said, 'Let there be a division among all people, and divide the nations which are for me from the nations which are against me.' And this was the fifth day before the end.

And man said, 'Let us gather our resources in one place and create more instruments of power to defend ourselves; the radio to control men's minds, the draft to control men's bodies; uniforms and symbols of power to win men's souls.' And this was the fourth day before the end.

And man said, 'Let there be censorship to divide the propaganda from the truth.' And he made two great censorship bureaux to control the thoughts of man; one to tell only the truth he wishes known abroad and one to tell only the truth he wishes known at home. And this was the third day before the end.

And man said, 'Let us create weapons which can kill vast numbers, even millions and hundreds of millions, at a distance.' And so he perfected germ warfare and deadly underwater arsenals, guided missiles, great fleets of war planes and destructive power to the extent of tens of thousands of millions of tons of T.N.T. And it was the second day before the end.

And man said, 'Let us make God in our own image. Let us say God does as we do, thinks as we think, wills as we will, and kills as we kill.' So man found ways to kill with atomic power and dust even those as yet unborn. And he said, 'This is necessary. There is no alternative. This is God's will.'

And on the last day, there was a great noise upon the face of the earth, and man and all his doings were no more, and the ravished earth rested on the seventh day .... "

There are plenty of reasons for being pessimistic about the future evolution of man. The facts may favor the pessimists, yet at the same time it is possible to have hope for the future. Hoyle may deny the probability of man ever gaining the upper hand over his fate. But this is not a denial of the possibility of man doing so. Hoyle (1964) himself says that "the most important factor in our environment is the state of our own minds." The most important state of mind to have for the future is one of hope. Who has not experienced, in longing for something better, a release of human energies that can transform gloom into light? Because I believe in the transforming power of hope I also believe that our destiny is in our hands and that our participation in the future of man can be influential and perhaps decisive.

What men achieve will be a consequence of their remaining anxious, passionate, discontented, but hopeful human beings, struggling to achieve more than has so far been achieved. To attempt to raise men above that level is to court disaster. ---there is no level above that. As Passmore (1971) has said

There is only a level below it. "To be man," Sartre has written, "means to reach toward being God." That is why he also describes man as a useless passion. For certainly man is a "useless passion" if his passion is to be God. But his passions are not useless, if they help him to become a little more humane, and a little more civilized.

That is conscious participatory evolution.

The ingredients of conscious participatory evolution are awareness of possibilities not yet realized, a reaching forward with passionate concern to these possibilities and the discovery of ways of making the possible real. The, as yet, unrealized values of the future are a real cause in changing the present. Purposes determine history. "The conduct of human affairs," wrote Whitehead (1929b), "is entirely dominated by our recognition of foresight determining purpose, and purpose issuing in conduct." Purpose or final causation is an essential ingredient of the conduct of human affairs.

But how to make our chosen purposes concrete realities? To this I would reply: It is a faith rather than a fact that the path of creative cultural evolution is one of persuasion and participation rather than of coercion. This is to say, it is a democratic, as opposed to a dictatorial, process. It will not be done by an elite group deciding what is best for the world and imposing this on the world.

The best laid plans of mice and men will always go astray, and we can only advance uncertainly from point to point, critically examining each new order by testing it against the liveliness of our experience. Everything depends on the appeal to experience, and in a century of frantic change, we struggle to admit to consciousness those aspects of our experience which in the long run exalt society instead of debasing it. (Overman, 1967).

That is the task of cultural evolution ahead.

The frightening aspect of our present predicament is that we have no agreement on the goals of mankind, on what people are for, while at the same time science and technology are piling up means that could be used to almost any imaginable end. But it is another story as to how we might ever bring these two concerns together in some creative partnership.

In participatory evolution at this conscious level I find a clue to thinking about evolution all down the line within a framework that, for me, is the frame of a window that gives a new view of cosmic, organic and cultural evolution. Perhaps ten thousand million years ago there was primeval chaos and now here we are, creatures who can consciously determine our own future. A universe which produces life and mind and consciousness requires a different sort of explanation than would be required for a universe which could not do so. The perspective I want to suggest is that we look at the process not from the elm up, but from man down, that we study it as a river not from the source only but from the estuary where the river reaches its fulness as it becomes part of the ocean.

One of the first persons to define clearly a set of questions of cosmic, organic, and cultural evolution from this perspective was Joseph Le Conte, the foundation professor of Natural History in the University of California. Joseph Le Conte came west from the East Coast to teach in the University of California when it opened its doors to its first 40 freshmen in the year 1869 just ten years after Darwin had published The Origin of Species. On his death in 1901, Dean Hilgard wrote, "It was Le Conte through whom the University of California first became known to the outside world as a school and center of science on the western border of the continent." It was Le Conte who brought the teachings d Charles Darwin to the west coast, while Harvard from whence he immediately came was in battle against Darwinism with its distinguished zoologist Louis Agassiz the chief antagonist.

Le Conte (1888) proposed three so-called "Laws of Organic Evolution": (1) Evolution progresses upwards from successive regions of molluscs, fish, reptiles and mammals; (2) The continuity of the process which results in the emergence of each level from the previous one is solely by means of natural causes; (3) At the human level he recognized the role of human purposiveness in cultural evolution. "Organic evolution," he said, "is by a pushing upward and onward from below and behind, human progress by a drawing upward and onward from above and in front by the attractive force of ideals." Le Conte was convinced that the evolution of human society was a participatory evolution which was determined by the conscious purposes of man. Prior to this the process was a mechanical one "not drawn from before but pushed from behind." Le Conte viewed human purposiveness as emergent from the natural process, though he defined the natural process in strictly mechanical terms. By natural process he refers to the physical and chemical entities and their organization into living beings. So he saw purposiveness as emergent from the natural process, though he defined the natural when man appeared, not before. The fact that these qualities emerge in man was for him all that mattered, for the motivation of much of his writing was to show that evolution was not anti-materialistic as so many religionists claimed. Le Conte was the first American scientist to use the idea of emergence in evolutionary thought. It seemed to him to save evolution from being a materialistic doctrine. Man's consciousness is a by-product of a material process.

No one could have expressed more clearly than Le Conte did 100 years ago what was to become of the orthodox' doctrine of participatory conscious evolution arising out of a mechanical non-participatory process. The argument was important to him as part of his objective to show that the processes of evolution are "natural" and not "supernatural," and that evolution leads to the creature man who is spirit bent. Le Conte was not involved in the contortions of the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, a contemporary of Agassiz, who at about the same time was trying to persuade Darwin to replace the idea of chance variation with some sort of directed change, the direction of the change being always beneficient and of a supernatural nature. Every step in Asa Gray's argument led backwards into the muddle of the watch-watchmaker analogy of the design of nature and its designer God.

Although Le Conte wrote of evolution up to man as a mechanical process, he was perplexed about the origin of what he called "the spirit of man" by which he meant the mental and spiritual aspects of conscious life. Furthermore as a theist he looked for some role for God in the evolutionary process. He obviously rejected the simplistic approach of Asa Gray and wrote of God as "resident in nature at all times and in all places during every event and determining every phenomenon." His writing leaves one in no doubt that he did not mean this to be taken literally which would make of God a maneuverer. He meant it symbolically of God as sustainer of what exists. And man's spirit, he says, developed out of the anima of animals which he says resembles the spirit of man but is not self-conscious except in man. Moreover anima in animals derives from something analogous in atoms and molecules. All of which is a bit of a contradiction to his other image of the creation up to man as contrivance, period! Le Conte called his view pantheism, but today I believe we would classify him as a panentheist, at least in some of his writing. It is interesting to see the struggle Le Conte has to reconcile two ideas, the mechanical deterministic aspects of evolution and the flowering of evolution into a conscious creature, man, who can in principle determine his own evolutionary future. The failure of biologists to face up adequately to this issue has been recently pointed out by the theologian Langdon Gilkey (1969, 1970) who quite correctly accuses biologists of speaking with two voices; one is a voice which speaks a continuous message about man as a determined creature through and through with no room for freedom, the other is a voice which urges man to choose the right goals to mould his own evolutionary future It is precisely these sorts of issues that make the doctrine of evolution cry aloud for some concept of organism all down the line, some concept of inner activity analogous perhaps to mind and consciousness. But what could such activity be?

The most profound resolution of this problem is that due to A.N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, which I interpret in terms of participatory evolution follows. The concept of man's participation in cultural evolution at the conscious level is a relevant concept analogically in the rest of creation. Or as Hartshorne (1953) has said "the insentient, dead, and mechanical is secondary to, or even a mere appearance or special case of, the sentient, living or social .... Every individual thing above the electronic level is really a society of things, or a society of societies, etc." There are "high grade" societies like human groups. AM there are "low grade" societies which may present the outward appearance of dead machines or inert masses. What we need, says Hartshorne ( 1963 ) is an interpretation of "experience" that will apply all up and down the line. Whitehead and Hartshorne have attempted such an interpretation. An appeal of their philosophy is the basic assumption that the drive of creation is the combined outcome effects having their origin in the past and anticipations directed toward future possibilities. Entities of creation are subject not simply to mechanical thrusts from below but respond to attraction from before. The language of freedom, anticipation, response, and feeling is appropriate to the inner constitution of all entities. The whole of creation from electron type entity to man is in process and always has been.

The outcome of the processes at successive levels of organization along this line is a progressive integration which we might visualize as follows. Human life displays one kind of association which is integrated through common consciousness of objectives in which men cooperate. But here frustration is widespread and integration inadequately achieved. Indeed, so precariously is it maintained it could fall back into chaos at any time. Nowhere else in the universe do find so much danger of disintegration.

By contrast, the association of electrons and the like in atoms has achieved a marvelous stability of organization, yet this was probably not always so. Throughout the universe that we know, at least in this epoch of its existence, this stability is maintained against shocks and changes of time. That more complex and subtle association of molecules in cells in living organisms is not so fully established as that of atoms and molecules. But the mutual support and mutual development of living cells in living organisms far exceeds that of the association of conscious individuals in human society. Here is where achieved integration is most incomplete and inadequate. It is as though human society is the frontier of integration at this stage of cosmic history. Human society is the cradle for the creation of the richest possible integration of the cosmos as far as we know. Here is the great upreach towards values that have not yet visited our earth. Here the existing is groping out into the vast realm of possibility where undreamed values lie. "Here," as Wieman (1929) perceptively wrote, "the cosmic venture is under way... here is where heaven and hell shimmer in a mirage of possibility."

In a time long past the integration of electrons into atoms may have been a frontier of integration in the universe. There was a time later on when the integration of atoms and molecules into living cells and later still of living cells into multicellular organisms was the outpost of organization. These frontiers are now long past. The cosmic storm now rages about the kind of association called human society. "Religion of the noblest kind," said Wieman (1929) "is man's recognition of this creative cosmic struggle and his personal allegiance to the process of progressive integration." Man becomes by his free choice a conscious part of the process of creative integration in the universe. Cosmic evolution looks like a struggle in which societies of different sorts have been achieved and that society at the human level is conscious about the possibilities and means of integration.

Why postulate anything analogous to participatory evolution in non-human evolution? A universe that has produced life and consciousness and freedom, and man, requires a different kind of explanation from what would be demanded of a universe that did not do so and could not do so. Hefner (1967) has said that if matter at a certain level of complexity is life including mental phenomena, then we cannot fully understand matter at any level unless we understand its relationship to the structure of matter we call living and mental. What we say about man must have a consistency with what we say about atoms. Whatever is "more" about man is nevertheless fully embedded in materiality.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the stuff of the universe is ordered and has the potentiality of being further reorganized and that the ordering principle is an aspect of mind. Matter is, in modern jargon, "programmed." Materialism takes neither of these two aspects of "programming" seriously. It accepts the order of the electrons and atoms but does not explain it. Alternatively, I may look within nature through vaults of the imagination to find some clue to order and ordering in nature. What appears to be ordered things may be ordered happenings.

"Matter," says Hartshorne (1967), "is just a label for orderly processes nature, it is not a positive principle to explain their possibility ... the mere existence of atoms with definite character, maintaining themselves through time and relative to one another is a tremendous order. Materialism in principle refuses to take order as a problem." The existence of an ordered physical universe of electrons and protons and the like is one problem. The sequence of evolution of different levels of order from that is another though related problem and on which science has thrown much light. The principle of natural selection chance variation explains a lot of the order of the plant and animal world. These principles are not explanations of order per se. Natural selection works with ordered systems which have the potentiality of being further ordered. The Darwinian explanation is an account of the outer aspect of things visible to the scientific observer. It leaves open the question as to whether there is an inner aspect of things less amenable to scientific analysis but also relevant in seeking to interpret biological order. It does not leave as open questions certain metaphysical theories of order such as the analogy of the universe as a watch which was made by a watchmaker and which has discredited so much of the simplistic theology of nature.

The existence of an ordered universe implies an ordering principle. There are two sorts of ordering principle; one dictatorial, the other democratic. Dictatorship is order by fiat. The democratic principle is order by persuasion of subjects with degrees of freedom of those subjects. The possibility of anarchy exists in a democracy. It is prevented, not by coercion, but by persuasion. I recall Professor Charles Hartshorne making this point to an audience of students by telling them that the possibilities of disorder and anarchy in that lecture theatre were considerable. Such order as existed was not a result of coercion but of self-persuaded discipline. "Order" he said "is anarchy tamed," tamed by the persuasive lure of possibilities. Unrealized values are real lures and real causes. The realm of possibilities which informs us is an ordered realm which persuades us from before and we feel free to choose this or that value within certain limits.

The proposition of process philosophy is that this type of model applies all the way down the line from conscious human beings to the ultimate building blocks of the universe. The only alternative explanation is order by fiat and the universe does not look like that. Reality is process and the process involves something analogous to feeling. This is the inner aspect of things which know in our experience but which we can only speculate about in other entities.

We tend to take for granted the possibilities or potentialities that must have been inherent in the cosmos from its foundations and without which the emergence of life and consciousness would not have been possible. Possibilities are unseen realities. So far as our human lives are concerned they are potent causes that guide and transform our lives. In process thinking, particularly as developed by A.N. Whitehead and his students, the raw materials from which we start do science are "occasions of experience." Everything in the universe is an occasion of experience. Every occasion of experience is bipolar. It is mental experience integrated with physical experience: Each occasion of experience is in touch with possibilities from which it selects a goal (which is its fredom) regarding its "self-fulfilment." Occasions of experience then can be analysed into experiencing subject and experienced object. The happenings are not happenings to concrete things but are themselves the concrete things. "Apart from the experience of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness" (Whitehead, 1929a). Each occasion of experience is partly self-determining and is partly determined by the possibilities that confront it. This is the private inwardness of entities or in Teilhard de Chardin's language the "within of things." The possibilities or potentialities of the universe to which entities are drawn are an aspect of the unitary actuality (the ordering principle) which Whitehead calls the primordial nature of God.

It is not surprising that scientists who find such a view to make sense of existence say, as the physicist David Boehm does, that "nature is more like an artist than an engineer." We move away from the all pervasive analogy of contrivance to one that has to do with concepts of anticipation, fulfilment, even tenderness.

The universe has always been and is in process of being made. It is incomplete and is lured to further completion. The order of the universe is well established at the level of electrons and atoms, less so at the level of living cells and organisms, least so at the level of human societies. This level is where man's conscious groping may meet the persuasive lure of unrealized possibilities that could make a more complete world and more ordered lives. Here is where mankind is challenged to consciously participate in the ongoing creative process. This is a doctrine (panentheism) that recognizes the operation of "efficient causation" or mechanical causes and "final causation" or the effective causation of potentialities, goals and purposes. Attempts to work out these ideas in detail have been made by Whitehead, Hartshorne, Ogden, Cobb, Peters (see references) and other process thinkers. Their particular application to biological evolution has been developed by a number of authors such, for example, as Agar (1943), Wright ( 1964 ), Overman ( 1967 ), Birch ( 1965 ), Burgers ( 1965 ), and Hartshorne ( 1962, 1970).

If a more consistent and satisfying picture of the universe and its evolution can be gained from the assumption that the primary particles are, like ourselves, sentient in some sense, then physics can have nothing to say against it. There is a place in physics for the construction of imaginative models that may be able to cope with interpreting a wider range of our experiential world that seems possible with the models of a more classical physics. Mind and consciousness grow out of what we call matter. If the classical concept of matter can throw no light on how this can be then it is our conception of matter which may need revision. The scientific venture at its best is a reaching outwards to embrace the wholeness of things. Analysis is pointless unless wholeness is its objective.

'There are plenty of pitfalls in seeking wholeness. We may be guided by Whitehead's (1933) proposition that cosmologies are never merely true or false; they are more or less adequate to the full variety of experienced facts. That is the only reasonable attitude to adopt to theories that attempt to be comprehensive. The so-called verification principle is quite inappropriate to them; simple hypotheses may be subject to it; but broad theories are not verified, they are "weighed" (Ferré, 1968). They are weighed in accordance with the principle of harmony. We think best of the scientist, not as one concerned with the search for true theories--which has the doubtful implication that scientific investigation can arrive at some ultimate truth--but rather as one who searches for harmony, for an ordered picture to fit the facts together as in a jigsaw puzzle (Rogers, 1965 ). The revolution of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a revolution of reason based on faith in the orderliness of nature, that there was a scheme to fit facts into, a jigsaw puzzle to be solved, that it was a real jigsaw puzzle and not just a game of ideas. The faith of this new science was that all things great and small could in principle be put into an order of nature. In Kuhn's ( 1962 ) term the renaissance of science was an example of "revolutionary science." It involved a change in categories of thought with the resulting veritable overthrow of one scheme of harmony by another more inclusive one. In the revolution of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries men came to hold certain things to be true without empirical evidence for them. The Copernican theory seemed blatantly contrary to empirical fact. Obviously the earth does not move and no one had any evidence that it did. Galileo wrote that "all experiments practicable upon earth are insufficient measures for proving its mobility since they are indifferently adaptable to an earth in motion or at rest." And Kepler knew of no empirical proof or verification yet he followed the Copernican system. "I perceived how clumsy in many respects is the hitherto customary notion of the structure of the universe. Hence I was so delighted by Copernicus ... that I ... repeatedly advocated his views in the disputations of the candidates." (cf. Rogers, 1965). He accepted the Copernican theory because it presented a more harmonious and less clumsy picture of the world than the Ptolemaic system.

I have argued that the entities of the universe have their relationship to an ordering principle which is all inclusive. Without overall coordination there would be chaos in the universe. It would not be a universe. I have also argued that the ordering principle is democratic in the sense that it is not rule by but by individual "decisions" of responsive entities. I find it logical to take the next step with A.N. Whitehead and others and to name the unitary actuality the universe to which entities respond with the name God. One reason is that the three great religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, agree with the conception of an inclusive wholeness in the universe to which persons respond and which is named God. Whitehead (1930) has said that it is the peculiar character of religion "to bring into consciousness that personal side of the universe which we can care for." The high meaning of worship in these three great religions is response with all one's heart and mind and strength to that which is all inclusive and worthy of our total devotion.

But there is a second aspect which is at least implicit in these three religions, that the personal side of the universe which we can care for is itself responsive to that caring or love. If this were not so, how could these religions justifiably refer to God as loving, for love is that which not only gives but responds. In this view God is love that gives and love that responds to the creation. The image is persuasive love transforming the creation and in process itself being transformed or enriched by the creation. If this is a valid image, who is to say where response ends or where it begins along the evolutionary line? In Whitehead's phrase, "not even the merest puff of existence" is without its significance to God. Our experience leaves out most of what is happening in the universe and we ask --is there one who responds to all that exists, who feels the movement of creative evolution and who saves this experience forever as a sort of memory? In some form or other this concept has appeared in the higher religions. Why? It is a judgment of value about what seems to make sense when we take value experiences seriously. We ask whether the contribution each may make is in any way lasting? To some extent our influence may live beyond the grave in the memory of others. That contribution fades and is very incomplete. So far as our planet and all its works are concerned its day will end, either in a freeze-up or in a fiery inferno. All will be frozen cold or reduced to ashes.

What then of man and all his works? Has he ultimately no significance in the vastness of the universe? Traditional theology has sought for survival of man beyond the grave. Immortality has meant post mortem rewards and punishments. That has led to the unethical notion that we do good for the sake of some future benefit for us (Hartshorne, 1967 ). But there is only one valid reason for doing good and that is that it is good, period. The pearl of great price is sought for its value now. But is that which has been achieved of value saved in any way in the ongoing sage of the universe? It could be if the unitary actuality, God, that includes all responds to all. Created' value would then be saved in his experience.

The eventual worth of life is in the contribution it makes to something more enduring than itself. That the world experiences God and that God also experiences the world, and is enriched by it, is a familiar image to students of A.N. Whitehead. Participatory evolution in this view is the participation of the creation in the being of God and the participation of God in the life of creation. This is not a verified nor a verifiable concept. But it is one that makes sense of existence in accordance with the principle of harmony.

NOTES

1 A. N. Whitehead. Science in the Modern World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926, p. 265.

2 Throughout this article references will be made through parentheses in the text rather than in footnotes. Refer to the list of references at the end of the article.

3 Copyright untraceable.

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