Philip Clayton is an advocate for a view of the universe that is dynamic and always evolving. In a word, he is an emergentist. Since graduating from Yale University in 1986 with a joint doctoral degree in philosophy and religious studies, Clayton has devoted his academic career to a bringing the worlds of science and religion closer together. His interest in emergence dates back to the mid-1990s when he began to think about how God relates to the world, and his research culminated in the book Mind and Emergence (2004). Clayton is Ingraham Professor of Theology at Claremont School of Theology and a professor of philosophy and of religion at Claremont Graduate University, both in California. During the 2006-07 academic year, he will be a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School. Science & Theology News acquisitions editor Matt Donnelly asked Clayton about why the emergence of new entities in the universe is important, how he responds to skeptics of emergence research, and what emergence theorists should do to earn a place at the table with the mainstream scientific community. Q: What is emergence, and why is it important? A: Emergence represents a unique philosophical paradigm with roots going back well into Western history. It assumes, first, the primacy of process: Reality is not static but in continual change or development. Its second assumption is ontological novelty ongoing evolution produces genuinely new things. Finally, it assumes that distinct levels of reality emerge. Reality doesnt consist merely of fundamental particles and forces. In it we can distinguish distinct levels that, though codependent, each of which manifests its own patterns and distinct forms of causation. Q: What accounts for the growing popularity of emergence? A: There are two reasons for the explosion of the interest in emergence and for the growth of this new field called emergence studies. With the advent of the New Synthesis in biology in the 1930s and 40s, and the discovery of the structure of DNA in the 50s, reductionism seemed to have won the day. But subsequent decades brought home the limitations to the reductionist model, as I tried to show in Mind and Emergence. The second reason concerns recent developments in biological research. The formation of high-level centers for systems biology, at Harvard and elsewhere, has produced accounts of cell functioning previously unavailable. Scientists are now tracing the complex interplay of genetic and environmental causes. Theyre identifying the effects of feedback mechanisms within the cell, the epigenetic triggering mechanisms for gene expression. Were learning that the entire natural world works by similar processes of interaction, for which emergence is a shorthand description. And you can recognize analogous but not identical patterns in the emergence of classical physics from quantum physics, in the phenomenon of superconductivity in solid-state physics, and elsewhere. Q: How did you become interested in emergence?
A: Through the divine action debate. As early as 1977 I had started to work on religion and science questions. In the early 90s I began to get involved with the [Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences] programs. [CTNS founder and director] Bob Russells interest has always been to see whether a place can be found for divine action in the context of mainline science. The concept of emergence was just beginning to get significant attention in the early 90s. At that time philosophers were mostly siding with weak emergence, using the concept of supervenience. By the time the biology and evolution volume in the Vatican/CTNS series was published [in 1998], I began to recognize that there was a problem and where the solution might lie. The problem was the attempt to locate divine action primarily in the context of physics as if the standard ways of conceiving the world in physical theory could provide the framework necessary for speaking of divine action. The entire approach began to seem increasingly problematic. Q: Astrobiologist Paul Davies has said that emergent properties are scientifically useless unless they do something. Do you agree with him? A: Pauls program represents the crucial first step in what for the science-and-religion debate must in the end be four different research programs. Step one is to identify specific instances of emergent phenomena in the natural world and to test the claims about them scientifically. Step two is to extend that same logic beyond the point at which Paul Davies sorts of tests are applicable, that is, to look for analogous forms of emergence in areas of the natural world where emergent laws are harder to identify. The third step is to work out a rigorous philosophical theory of emergence across the various levels of reality. Only then can we use the results to relate the various religious traditions to the natural world in a new way using this concept. Q: Whats the relationship between emergence and evolution? A: Im very uncomfortable with attempts to divorce emergence theory from biology. And the only scientific biology available today stems from the work of Darwin, though Darwins insights have obviously been modified in many respects. I would like to suggest that emergence first be understood as a way of understanding biological evolution more deeply and not as a competitor to it. This approach makes emergence a theory of how, over the course of natural history, more complex entities and systems evolved from simpler ones. As a research program its to be sharply distinguished from the programs of Richard Dawkins and other genetic reductionists. Our claim is that it offers the empirically more adequate account of how natural selection has actually proceeded. Developments within the biological sciences over the last several decades provide strong evidence, I think, that a one-sidedly genetic account of evolution is mistaken. Q: Emergence has a few rivals, such as biologist Stuart Kauffmans self-organization theory on the one side and intelligent design on the other, which are competing ways to explain the world that dont necessarily use the term emergence. How do you evaluate these competitors? A: There were several clear competitors that didnt in the end produce sufficient empirical results. One thinks of early systems theory, information theory and some of the bolder self-organization theories. Stuart Kauffman, however, is not a rival but an ally. For example, last year he and I co-wrote an article for Biology and Philosophy in which we endorse an emergentist model of the first self-reproducing cell. Intelligent design represents an interesting question. It is not necessarily a rival with regard to the science itself. Rather its a rival in claiming that a certain metaphysics, in this case the existence of an intelligent designer, is somehow built into the scientific results. By contrast, emergentists maintain that only after one has studied the phenomena of emergence in natural history scientifically can one then move on to the metaphysical question, So, how is all this best explained in metaphysical terms? One may or may not then hold that theism offers the best final overall explanation. Q: What is the best way to explain emergence from within a religious context? A: There are at least four possibilities: religious naturalism, radically emergentist theism, process theology and some form of classical theism such as Trinitarian theology. Q: Does emergence make one of those possibilities more likely? A: Its unfortunate that many people writing on emergence are reticent even to explore the metaphysical or theological implications of the scientific data. I see two opposite mistakes. Some view metaphysics in Kantian fashion, as lying beyond the pale of human reason, and they dismiss it with a sneer on their lips. Others brashly jump to God from certain scientific results, as if science wore its metaphysics on its sleeve. In between those who dismiss all speculations about the implications of emergence as unfounded and those who try to derive a metaphysic directly from the data of emergent complexity are those scholars who are ready to explore the subtleties of the middle positions. What we need are sophisticated studies that explore the interplay between theological hypothesizing and scientific hypothesizing, between grand metaphysical theories and the best scientific explanations we have. Q: You recently wrote, Science in the age of emergence is beginning to remove the blinders that once made it antagonistic to spiritual realities. Does this reflect a new openness between science and religion? A: Yes. During much of its modern history, science has been dominated by the paradigm of reduction. Emergence represents an important modification though I wont say the elimination of that paradigm. If reductionism were true, theism could be at best a leap of faith, one that would always stand in tension with the best scientific accounts of the world. If emergence theories are right, then at least that one stumbling block for theism has been removed. Emergence will not prove the existence of a god of any kind, but it does make believing in God, and relating that belief to science, a more viable and, I believe, a more attractive endeavor. |
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