A philosophical worldview or belief system grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe. It is intended to be the 21st century successor to the ancient worldviews of Materialism and Idealism. An Update from Bronze Age to Information Age. It's also a Theory – of – Everything that covers, not just matter & energy, but also Life & Mind & Love.
Post 141.February 5, 2025
Evolutionary Process and Cosmic Reality
Teleology and Destiny
Since Whitehead’s philosophical worldview included a law-maker God, he went on to create a complementary Process Theology. On the surface, it seems to be a version of ancient Pantheism. But his disciple, Charles Hartshorne, labeled this god-model as PanEnDeism⁷. The first, all-is-god, identifies the deity with the material universe itself, hence the space-time deity would have a hot big-bang birth and a cold big-sigh death. But the latter, all-in-god, places the law-maker outside the law-abiding creation. In this case, the deity is eternal, and the creation is temporary. That would explain how the Big Bang was limited & guided by Natural Laws existing prior to the emergence of space-time. In either case, it’s not amenable to Judeo-Christian theology. Except that the inherent regularities (laws) serve as algorithms guiding the program of Nature toward some pre-defined state, as in Teleological Evolution⁸.
Among those natural laws that govern evolution are the tendency to produce variations on a theme (mutations) and to filter-out those forms that are less fit for the current environ-ment (selection). Ironically, the notion of “Natural Selection” is a play on words pointing to Artifical Selection by human farmers. The obvious implication of end-directed choices raised the question of God’s role in Darwin’s theory. 18th century astronomer Simon LaPlace, said he had “no need of that hypothesis”. Likewise, Darwin apparently intended to model a godless mechanism⁸. But the source of those all-important natural laws — inheritance, variation, selection — remains unexplained to this day. So, Whitehead also defined his natural + super-natural lawmaker-deity in terms that are more scientific and philosophical than religious⁷. For example : “non-temporal” = eternal ; “primordial - consequent” = both creator & creation ; “potential” = pre-big-bang world-creating power ; “anti-entropic” = what I call Enformy⁹.
The core concepts of Process and Reality are a> Creativity (evolution) and b> Causation (generative). Both features are inherent in the future-oriented Potential that triggered the Big Bang to begin the uphill climb from formlessness (Chaos) toward some unspecified ultimate goal that Plato called the “Cosmos”¹⁰ : an integrated living organism. Law-guided evo-lution implies Teleology, but like Teilhard deChardin, Whitehead was rather vague & arbitrary about the ultimate “Omega Point”¹¹ of evolution. One thinker described Whitehead’s Tele-ological program as “relational, atomic, and evolutionary”. It’s relative in the sense that one race of sentient creatures has gained some voluntary control over nature. It’s “atomic” in that those independent minds disagree over the best way to go. And it’s evolutionary in that the progressive path (Tao) of natural change trends toward complexity & consciousness, and is now dependent on negotiation between sentient entities, to produce artificial evolution via technology.
7. PanEnDeism : Whitehead’s God — 1. is a nontemporal entity that is both physical and mental. 2. has two natures, the primordial nature and the consequent nature. 3. is the source of potentiality, novelty, and wisdom. God also gives structure and order to the universe 4. is an anti-entropic force that helps to maintain balance and intensity in the world https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=whitehead+concept+of+god
8. Teleological Evolution : “Darwin was originally a far more teleological thinker, but over time, "learned to avoid teleology." Heads cites a letter Darwin wrote in 1872, in which he down-played the role of natural selection as a causal force on its own in explaining biological adaptation, and instead gave more weight to "laws of growth," that operate [without the aid of natural selection]”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology_in_biology
Final Cause is the Purpose of the Process
End of Blog Post 140
9. Enformy (negentropy): In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypo-thetical, holistic, meta-physical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress. https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
10. Chaos vs Cosmos : Plato's views on chaos and cosmos are that the cosmos is a living organism that is a combination of reason and necessity, while chaos is the primordial state of emptiness.
”The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."
MILESTONES IN HUMAN CULTURE 1. Bi-pedalism, use of hands 2. Enlarged brain 3. Spoken language 4. Written language 5. Printed language 6. Electronic communication 7. World-wide communication . . . . and so forth & so on
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