Can a scientific worldview of the emergence of psyche and mind from matter be reconciled with that of Biblical creation? Scientists have discovered how matter originated from a cosmic Big Bang and are searching for natural processes that gave rise to psyche. For anthropologist Terrence Deacon, life emerged in three stages: thermodynamic (chaos), morphodynamic (form), and teleodnamic (telos=purpose) (1). The emergent teleological properties of the first living cell can be more or less than the sum of its interacting parts. Deacon thereby formulates a scientific worldview: consciousness and psyche emerge from the firing of our neurons but cannot be reduced to them. The emergent evolutionary process created homo sapiens who perceive the created natural world as beautiful (2). Thus, consciousness emerged from cosmos. As the prophet Isaiah 52:7 wrote, How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings. Jesus brought us this good news. “The world was made by him”(John 1: 10) because he was with the creating “Spirit of God” (Gen 1:1) in the beginning. Cosmos thus emerged from the “Word (logos) of God (John 1:1)” and Divine consciousness. I will show how both theistic evolution (BioLogos) and the complementary beauty of science and spirit (2) can reconcile Trinitarian Biblical creation with science. References: (1) Terrence W. Deacon. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. (W. W. Norton & Co 2011) (2) Paul H. Carr. Beauty in Science and Spirit. (Beech River Books 2006)

1. Did Consciousness
Emerge from Cosmos
or Visa-Versa?
Paul H. Carr
AF Research Laboratory Emeritus
www.MirrorOfNature.org
1

2. II. RELIGION: Cosmos Emerged From Divine Consciousness
“Word (Logos) was God,” John 1:1
“Spirit of God,” Gen 1:2
I. SCIENCE: Human Consciousness Emerged from the Cosmos
Cosmos emerged from a hot Big Bang 13.8 Billion years ago.
First Homo Sapiens in Africa, 200,000 years ago.
Searching for natural processes & laws that gave rise to psyche.
III. RECONCILIATION of SCIENCE & RELIGION:
-Biologos: theistic evolution and emergence
-Emergence of homo sapiens’ sense of Divine beauty.
-Complementary beauty of science’s how & spirit’s why.
Did Consciousness Emerge from Cosmos or
Visa-Versa?
2

3. “SCIENCE takes things apart and then puts them back
together to understand HOW.
RELIGION puts them back to together to understand
WHY.” (Alister McGrath)
EMERGENCE : Putting things back together.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
“More is Different” according Nobel-laureate
physicist Philip Anderson’s highly-cited article
on emergence (Science 1972). He emphasized
the limitations of reductionism and the
existence of hierarchical levels of science, each
of which requires its own fundamental
principles for advancement. 3

4. EXAMPLES OF EMERGENCE:
The microscopic interactions of carbon atoms,
within their environmental constraints, leads to
different macroscopic properties.
1. When the carbon atoms self-organize to
form a face-centered cubic microscopic structure,
a macroscopic diamond emerges.
2. When carbon atoms interact to form
microscopic hexagonal sheets, a soft graphite
lubricant emerges. 4

5. Emergence of “Cool” Cosmos from “Hot”
13.8 Billion years ago.
Earth
5

6. Paul Davies, winner of the 1995 Templeton Prize:
"I do not cling to the notion of God as a miracle-
working cosmic magician, who makes a big bang and
then intervenes as a cosmic repairman. A God who can
create a self-creating universe with laws (logos) is much
more majestic.
As an emergentist, I believe in a hierarchy of
principles, with the laws of physics at the bottom level
and emergent laws operating at higher levels. Thus, we
have laws of complexity, such as self-organizing
chemical cycles. There are Mendel's laws of genetics
when life appears. The high-level laws do not violate
the lower level laws, nor are they reducible to them.
They supervene on them." 6

7. Figure from “Cosmic Dawn” by Eric Chaisson
EMERGENCE OF LIFE ON EARTH
Carbon Dioxide, CO2
Prokaryote Cells Eukaryote Cells
7

8. 542 Myr Beginning of Multicellular Life.
“The Fossil Record of the Cambrian Explosion”
Keith Miller, PSCF, June 2014
8

9. THREE STAGES OF LIFE’S EMERGENCE
From biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon ‘s(2011), Incomplete Nature: How
Mind Emerged from Matter.
1.THERMODYNAMICS, CHAOS: atoms and molecules of water, methane, ammonia,
carbon dioxide, etc. moving randomly from thermal fluctuations in a primordial soup.
2. MORPHODYNAMICS or FORM (morphology = structure). Self-organizing order for
free, and the absence of dynamical variety: amino acids and proteins. Stable
autocatalytic chemical processes in which the output feeds back into the input: self
reproducing molecules.
Example: Miller (1953) and Urey subjected a mixture of water, hydrogen, methane,
carbon dioxide, and ammonia that were present shortly after the earth was formed,
to an electrical spark, which simulated lightning. They observed amino acids, the
building blocks of life-forming proteins.
3. TELEODYNAMICS: (telos = purpose, goal) Self-replicating cells emerged under the
right conditions from amino acids and proteins.
The vital purpose (telos) of a cell is to eat and to avoid its absence (of being eaten).
9

10. I
DEACON’S EMERGENT STAGE III:
TELEODYNAMICS & CONSCIOUSNESS
Incomplete Nature:
How Mind Emerged from Matter (2011)
Cells and brainless plants have sentience, response
to their environment, but not consciousness.
• “Consciousness is the final quasi-regular network-level
dynamic like melody played by a million-instrument
orchestra, this is the medium of mental information.”
(Consciousness Chapter).
• Deacon thereby formulates a naturalistic scientific
worldview: consciousness and psyche emerge from
the firing of our neurons but cannot be reduced to
them. 10

11. 11
Philosopher David Chalmers’ PANPSYCHISM
Director of the Center For Consciousness at Australian National U, &
Co-Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York U
Thesis: MATERIALISM Everything is Matter (and Energy)
Antithesis: DUALISM: Matter and mind are separate.
Synthesis: PANPSYCHISM: Everything has a degree of mind
or consciousness.
Our macro-consciousness emerges from the
micro-consciousness (or sentience) of
neurons.

12. Consciousness Beyond Life:
The Science of the Near-Death Experience (2011)
By Cardiologist Pim van Lommel, MD
Cardiologist Pim van Lommel, MD for decades
studied near death experiences in 100s of patients,
which he published in the refereed medical journal
Lancet.
He concludes that the current views on the
relationship between the brain and consciousness held
by most physicians, philosophers, and psychologists are
too narrow for a proper understanding of the
phenomenon.
He shows that our consciousness does not always
coincide with brain functions and that consciousness can
even be experienced separate from the body.
12

13. I. SCIENCE: Human Consciousness Emerged from the Cosmic
Big Bang, 13.8 B years ago.
- How mind emerged from the matter,
-Research on a naturalist worldview of human consciousness
& psyche is continuing.
II. RELIGION: Cosmos Emerged From Divine Consciousness.
Word (Logos) of God, John 1:1
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that
bringeth good tidings. Isaiah 52:7
Jesus brought us this good news. “The world was made by
him”(John 1: 10) because he was with the creating “Spirit of God”
in the beginning (Gen 1:2).
In Hinduism, consciousness has its independent existence in the
Divine Brahmin. Human consciousness is a small fragment of the
Divine Consciousness. (Christian Trinitarian “Spirit of God” within.)13

14. Consciousness Explained Better:
Towards an Integral
Understanding of the
Multifaceted Nature of
Consciousness (2009)
By neuralpsychologist Allan Combs,
President of the Society for
Consciousness Studies
• Consciousness is not relativistic and culturally defined. There are
universal states and streams in the evolution of consciousness.
• Consciousness is not merely viewed as epiphenomena, emerging
from the material stuff of brains. Rather it is an integral part of
cosmos itself.
14

15. III. RECONCILIATION OF SCIENCE & RELIGION
• BIOLOGOS: THEISTIC EVOLUTION
• The EMERGENCE of homo sapiens with a sense of
beauty pointing to the Divine.
• COMPLEMENTARY BEAUTY OF SCIENCE & SPIRIT
Science’s “How” beautifully complements Religion’s
“Why”
15

16. Dr. Francis Collins, founder BioLogos.
“I find those rare dramatic moments of scientific
discovery in my own experience to be moments of
worship also, where a revelation about some intricacy
of God’s creation is appreciated for the first time.”
16

17. "BioLogos" is a new term for theistic evolution.
http://biologos.org/
• Bios is the Greek word for "life".
• Logos is Greek for "word," with a broader meaning in
Philosophy and Stoicism—namely the rational principle
ordering the universe.
• In Christian theology, "word" includes the Hebrew
idea of a creative agent for all that exists, in addition to
being an ordering principle.
• "BioLogos" expresses the belief that God is the source
of all life and that life expresses the will of God.
• BioLogos represents the view that evolutionary science
and religious faith co-exist in harmony.
17

18. Complementary Beauty of Science & Spirit
• The emergent evolutionary
process produced homo
sapiens, who see beauty in
the natural world.
• I experience beauty
in both science and
religion.
• “If nature were not
beautiful, it would not
be worth knowing.”
Henri Poincare
18

19. “This is salvation
When we marvel
At the beauty
Of created things
And praise
The beautiful providence
Of their Creator.”
- Meister Eckart ( 1260 – 1327),
“The thirst for beauty that permeates our lives is
an opening for transcendence…” Theologian Philip Hefner.
Foreword, Beauty in Science and Spirit.”
“Beauty’s self and beauty’s giver…” Gerald Manley Hopkins 19

20. "Here is beauty
– whatever those who have never looked at butterfly may say-
Beauty that rejoices and humbles,…
beauty remote from all that is meant by words like random or
purposeless, utilitarian or materialistic,
beauty in its impact is akin to the authentic encounter with God.“
Naturalist priest Charles Raven
20

21. BEAUTY OF THE UNIVERSE
From cooler temperatures 0.3 M yrs after the “Beginning,”
to Galaxies, 2 B years later.
Hubble Optical Deep Field
Image of Galaxies 12 Billion
Light Years away, about
2 Billion years after “the
beginning.” (1996)
Image of the universe 0.3 Million
years after “the beginning.” This
image of temperature fluctuations
was measured by the Wilkinson
Microwave Anisotropy Probe. The
cooler regions “seeded” the stars
and the galaxies. 21

22. From Cosmos to Psyche
John Wheeler’s Participatory Universe
Human consciousness & eyes have emerged from the
beginning of the Universe (U) to look back 13.8 B years & ask,
“How did we get here and why?” 22

23. II. RELIGION: Cosmos Emerged From Divine Consciousness
(Word Logos of God, John 1:1)
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth
good tidings. Isaiah 52:7
Jesus brought us this good news. “The world was made by him”(John
1: 10) because he was with the creating “Spirit of God” in the
beginning (Gen 1:2).
-INCOMPLETE: Doesn’t show how the cosmos emerged.
I. SCIENCE: Human Consciousness Emerged from the Cosmos
How mind emerged from the matter of the big bang.
The cosmos and humans are continuing to emerge & evolve.
INCOMPLETE: Doesn’t answer why there is a cosmos.
III. RECONCILIATION of SCIENCE & RELIGION:
-Biologos: God & Christ create via evolution and emergence.
-Emergence of our sense of beauty as an encounter with the Divine.
- COMPLETENESS:
-Complementary beauty of science’s “how” & spirit’s “why.” 23