The Law of Complexity-Consciousness

January 25, 2008 By Tom

There’s a great interview on Salon.com with the brilliant evolutionary theologian John F. Haught — who was featured in WIE Issue 35 — on his new book, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. I haven’t seen the book yet, but the publisher has assured us a review copy is in the mail. And given Haught’s previous work, I already know it’s going to be good. Wikipedia describes Haught as a “theistic evolutionist,” but he’s really more of a Teilhardian evolutionist (or “conscious evolutionist” as we categorized the Teilhard meme in Issue 35’s comprehensive spectrum of evolutionary ideologies). The difference is that whereas theistic evolutionists think there’s no fundamental opposition between belief in God and belief in evolution, conscious evolutionists go one huge step further, saying that God is the process of evolution. Some conscious evolutionists are materialist pantheists but most, such as Haught, are spiritual panentheists to the core.

Anyway, there’s a line in the intro to the Salon piece that reveals a common misunderstanding of the distinction between pantheism and panentheism…

The line in question is in bold:

How can a person of faith reconcile the apparently random, meaningless process of evolution with belief in God? . . .

That’s the question John Haught has set out to answer by proposing a “theology of evolution.” Haught is a Roman Catholic theologian at Georgetown University and a prolific author. His books include “God After Darwin,” “Is Nature Enough?” and the forthcoming “God and the New Atheism.” He’s steeped in evolutionary theory as well as Christian theology. Haught believes Darwin is “a gift to theology.” He says evolutionary biology has forced modern theologians to clarify their thinking by rejecting outdated arguments about God as an intrusive designer. Haught reclaims the theology of his intellectual hero, Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died more than half a century ago. Teilhard believed that we live in a universe evolving toward ever greater complexity and, ultimately, to consciousness.

Actually, Teilhard believed in what he called the “Law of Complexity-Consciousness.” He didn’t believe that complexity led, ultimately, to the emergence of consciousness. In true panentheistic fashion, he believed that consciousness was present from the start, as the interior correlate of all exterior matter. As explained in his book The Future of Man:

“The more complex a being is, so our Scale of Complexity tells us, the more it is centered upon itself and therefore the more aware does it become. In other words, the higher the degree of complexity in a living creature, the higher its consciousness; and vice versa. The two properties vary in parallel and simultaneously. If we depict them in diagrammatic form, they are equivalent and interchangeable.” (p.111)

And:

“For its reflective and inventive forward spring it is in some sort necessary that Life, duplicating its evolutionary motive center, should henceforth be sustained by two centers of action, separate and conjoined, one of consciousness and the other of complexity…. In hominised evolution the Physical and the Psychic, the Without and the Within, Matter and Consciousness, are all found to be functionally linked in one tangible process.” (p.209)

We at WIE are very sympathetic with Teilhard’s view, and our new issue’s cover story is all about how his ideas are continuing to influence the leading edge of consciousness and culture today (along with the ideas of Carl Jung). Consciousness and matter, the interior and the exterior, are the two co-evolving faces of the manifest Kosmic coin. And if you insist on calling heads instead of tails, or tails instead of heads, you’ll never be a truly integral player in the game.


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Louis Savary on January 31, 2008 1:27 pm

    Tom
    Thanks for running the piece on John Haught. His books are great. I’m trying to translate Teilhard into practical forms of spiritual practice, so his beautiful “conscious evolutionist” ideas can be lived out in everyday life. Teilhard’s book of spirituality, The Divine Milieu, is often hard to understand, and in it he doesn’t really tell us how to practice his spirituality. I have been trying to do just that for over 40 years. I was a Jesuit for 30 years.

    My new book “Teilhard de Chardin’s The Divine Milieu Explained” is an attempt to spell out some easy spiritual practices anyone can do that bring his spiritulaity into everyday life. Check it out on Amazon.com and read an excerpt on my website.

    Thanks for all the good stuff on your website.

    By the way, I am a personal friend of Deno Kazanis, also mentioned in this issue.

    Keep up the good work.
    LOU

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