The recent twin volumes Knowing Creation and Christ and the Created Order edited by Andrew B. Torrance and Thomas H. McCall bring scholars from biblical studies, theology, philosophy and natural science, together to discuss how investigation into the external world might be considered under the matrix of ‘creation’, over which Jesus Christ is Lord. One argument that emerges as a red thread throughout these volumes, and is representative of a wider trend within contemporary research on the doctrine of creation, is that ‘creation’ should be considered a category that supersedes, or reunites, any nature-vs-culture bifurcation. Creation is made through Christ in whom all things, natural and cultural, hold together (Col 1:15–17). The first section of this paper will unpack how the categories of ‘nature’, ‘culture’ and ‘creation’ are defined within this argument. It is seen that, within a broadly Aristotelian tradition, the paradigm of ‘creation’ presupposes that ‘culture’ is always already located and subsumed within ‘nature’, but not vice versa. The resulting theology of creation requires that the world be interpreted, heard and encountered as pregnant with purpose and meaning. It is not the intention of this paper to critique this argument, but to follow its implications and use philosophy of mind to facilitate a robust articulation of this encultured natural world.
The environmental devastation that the division between nature and culture has wrought demands that theologians seriously consider any tools from other disciplines that help support the identification of the world as creation. One such tool can be found in theories within philosophy of mind that seek to overcome parallel bifurcations between matter and mind, and even between monism and dualism. Although not the only such philosophy considered in these volumes, panpsychism is one such theory. Panpsychism has been undergoing a revival of attention within analytic philosophy of mind in the last few decades and it is the argument of this paper that a theologically rich version of panpsychism provides the best ontological platform for overcoming the nature/culture divide. The second section of this paper summarises what is meant by panpsychism and argues for the possibility of a ‘theological panpsychism’, which is different from its naturalistic, pantheist, panentheistic and process alternatives. The third section then completes the argument by showing how theological panpsychism facilitates a doctrine of creation that holds nature and culture together by undergirding a cultic and perichoretic vision of the psychophysical world. This paper concludes that theologians, such as those within Knowing Creation and Christ and the Created Order, who wish to employ the doctrine of creation as an antidote to the destructive nature/culture bifurcation in western modernity should be open to receiving aid from theological panpsychism.
The encultural nature of creation
One contemporary theologian who has championed the idea that creation unites nature and culture is Simon Oliver, whose opening chapter of Knowing Creation is my launching pad. Oliver articulates creation ex nihilo as a doctrine that is best understood with, if not tied to, an Aristotelian powers ontology. It is only in conjunction with Aristotelian metaphysics, for Oliver, that the full benefit of the concept of ‘creation’ as uniting nature and culture can be seen. According to Aristotle, ‘nature’ refers to those things that have ‘a nature’, that is that have ‘an intrinsic principle of change towards the actualisation of fulfilment of that nature’.Footnote 1 On this view, the definition of ‘nature’ is fundamentally purpose-driven and empowered from within. ‘Culture’, by contrast, is the world of artifice that can only mimic the purposefulness of nature as natural creators, such as human beings, impose purpose and meaning from without. What we have here is a fundamental difference between the types of things God creates, which we call ‘nature’, and the types of things humanity can make, which we call ‘culture’. It is because human-made ‘culture’ is a subset of God-made ‘nature’ that both nature and culture participate in and are subsumed under the more fundamental category of ‘creation’, which Oliver defines as the primordial giftedness of all things.
Oliver, Christoph Schwöbel, Robert C. Koons and William M. R. Simpson all agree that, with the fall of Aristotelian scholasticism and the rise of corpuscular mechanism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, the philosophy underpinning the doctrine of creation was lost. For Oliver, this loss is primarily located in the reversal of the Aristotelian priority of nature over culture, such that Christian theology became unable to bind both within the overarching category of creation. This reversal is captured in the interpretation of nature as a clockwork mechanism, mimicking an artefact of human culture. Schwöbel also decries the metaphor of nature as a clockwork machine that is known through quantitative measurements of noncommunicative forces, because it has displaced the metaphor of ‘the book of nature’ whose ‘natural signs’ (to use C. Stephan Evan's term) requires the book of scripture and the practices of the church as hermeneutical keys.Footnote 2 As James K. A. Smith argues, it is when we falsely identify science with ‘nature’, rather than as a cultural institution or set of cultural practices, that our academies become overrun with the scientism and naturalism that are opposed to theology; and so, again, ‘creation’ is forgotten.Footnote 3
At the heart of the reversal in priority is the split of mind from matter, such that nature becomes the raw material for human culture, empty of purpose and meaning in and of itself, silently waiting to be moulded by some external mind, human or divine. As Norman Wirzba writes, the separation between body and soul ‘extends to a separation between nature and culture, which in turn underwrites a separation between creatures and their places’.Footnote 4 He goes on to argue that this priority of culture in opposition to nature has had the effect in theology of ‘locating and confining Christ's work in the human realm’, thus forgetting Jesus’ role as Creator.Footnote 5
A number of authors point to how this reversal and rupture between nature and culture, as well as the material and the mental, has precipitated humanity's exploitation of the environment. In addition, Oliver points out that this bifurcation persists even in our well-intended responses to lessen the environmental crisis, which vacillate between submitting to romantic notions of ‘pure nature’ and extending our cultural control to save the environment.Footnote 6 The solution, Oliver argues, is to return to the category of ‘creation’, and emphasise the primordial and unilateral gift from the Father. Creation is not a gift given to humanity, as if we stood apart from ‘nature’ receiving a material object to use and play with. Creation is a gift that establishes the being and existence even of the recipient, which includes humanity, in such a way that creatures are able to receive further gifts; creation is ‘a gift of a gift to a gift’.Footnote 7 Creation is a gift that keeps on receiving. Therefore, Oliver goes on to say, for creation to be fundamentally itself, creatures must respond in thanks and praise.Footnote 8 Creation as a unilateral gift, then, opens up the possibility of a reciprocal Creator–creature conversation.
The portrayal of reciprocity between Creator and creature as a form of communication is a major theme for several authors. Christoph Schwöbel's chapter reflects upon the ability of the cultural metaphors we use to characterise ‘nature’ to ‘act on us’ and ‘change the way things are for us and how we are to relate to them’.Footnote 9 From here Schwöbel describes ‘creation’ as God's ‘speech-act’, a metaphor that holds cultural meaning and natural being together, and demands hermeneutical interpretation.Footnote 10 Creation is the ‘address of the Creator’, Schwöbel argues citing Psalm 19:1–4, that simultaneously ‘invests creation with the capacity to respond to God in praise’.Footnote 11 As Susan Grove Eastman writes, this gift ‘proceeds from the desire of the giver, not the capacities of “fittingness” of the receivers’.Footnote 12 The divine presence and speech-act is a gift that creates an I–Thou conversation, such that ‘not only human beings but the whole of creation’ speak God's glory such that, ‘nothing is without language (1 Cor 14:10b)’.Footnote 13 This is revealed, Schwöbel continues, in the very materiality of creation as the Word becomes a material body and binds the Spirit's activity to that material body, ‘negating all dualisms between mind and matter, Spirit and flesh’.Footnote 14
The use of creaturely ‘speech’ to negate the dualisms of culture–nature, mind–matter, human–non-human, is perhaps most fully explored by Mark Harris in his chapter on the ‘woefully-neglected’ scriptural references to the voices of the non-human, even inanimate, features of nature.Footnote 15 Since these references are mostly found in Hebrew poetry, the reader might be tempted to dismiss such passages as ‘poetic fancy’.Footnote 16 Harris, however, warns against this ‘hasty anthropocentrism’, which is underpinned by the ‘massive inconsistency of treating nature naturalistically but not humans’.Footnote 17 This, again, reveals the tendency to bifurcate the natural and the cultural, which is to be resisted. Now, of course, the scriptural passages that attribute speech to the non-human world employ poetic personification and metaphor but, as Schwöbel unpacks, such use of language is not meaningless, without referent or without implications for our knowing and acting in the world. Instead, the use of metaphor may point ‘to a reality embodied in the physical world, one that contemporary Western minds are not usually trained to comprehend’.Footnote 18 Indeed, Harris highlights that the Psalmist articulates this very problem of metaphorical realism in Psalm 19:1–4:
We should neither suppose that the Psalmist, then, was expecting to audibly hear a literal human voice echo throughout the starry sky, nor should we then dismiss these passages as not telling us something important about how the author understands the ontology and purpose of creation.Footnote 19 For despite having neither voice nor words, the author still insists that non-human, inanimate nature praises God.
Theological panpsychism
Thus far, I have reconstructed from across the two volumes of Knowing Creation the argument that the concept of ‘creation’, as primordial gift and a divine speech-act that creates the possibility for reciprocity, holds the categories ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ together, by viewing the natural world as intrinsically encultured. Within these volumes panpsychism receives occasional attention. In addition to Mark Harris’ more explicit consideration of a panpsychist interpretation of scripture, Marilyn McCord Adams notes and welcomes the turn of prominent philosophers away from materialism to panpsychism, and there is some discussion of the neighbouring (but not identical) position of animism in Norman Wirzba's chapter.Footnote 20 But what is panpsychism, and should theologians seriously be considering it as part of the doctrine of creation? This section will define panpsychism, demarcate it from neighbouring positions in philosophy of mind, and (defensively) show its neutrality with regards to philosophy of religion.
‘Panpsychism’ is a compound word that can be translated to mean that everything (pan) is mental (psyche), which is not identical to the claims of animism, vitalism or idealism. A popular definition amongst contemporary panpsychists is that ‘mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world’.Footnote 21 To say that mentality is fundamental is to say that it can neither be explained nor reduced to anything non-mental. It is this fundamentality claim that differentiates panpsychism from physicalism and emergentism, both of which claim that physicality alone is fundamental to reality. One route to panpsychism, common amongst contemporary analytic philosophers, is to become incredulous to the possibility of mentality reducing into or emerging out of that which is entirely non-mental. Instead, it is argued, the potential or ingredients for such emergence or combination must be found within the basic structures of reality.Footnote 22 Thus, most definitions of panpsychism presuppose the existence of the material world and merely add mentality to this physicalist picture; ‘the view that the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties’, or ‘physical nature is composed of individuals, each of which is to some degree sentient … [has] experience, or in a broad sense, consciousness’.Footnote 23
What is often overlooked in contemporary philosophical literature is that, if one were only to define panpsychism as the claim that mentality is fundamental, then panpsychism would not yet been demarcated from traditional substance dualism or hylomorphism, both of which also state that mentality can neither be explained nor reduced to anything non-mental. Both traditional substance dualists and hylomorphists tend to be theists, because the explanation for the mentality of organisms is most often that God directly bestows mentality, as either souls or forms, to the appropriate organism, such that to have this particular type of soul or form is fundamental and essential to the organism in question. As Robert C. Koons writes in Knowing Creation, for a hylomorphist ‘there are metaphysically fundamental entities at multiple levels of scale’.Footnote 24 By contrast, panpsychists typically hold to fundamental monism: the principle that there is only one fundamental level of reality. This precludes explanations which posit that God creates fundamental phenomena, like minds, ex nihilo after the initial ex nihilo act of creation. This is not because God is considered unable to construct the world in this piecemeal fashion, since a panpsychist can hold that God's original and once-and-for-all act of creation was out of nothing and so secure the freedom and omnipotence of God absolutely. Instead, it is the principle of fundamental monism, which is a principle regarding creation and not one that limits God, that precludes multiple origins for fundamental phenomena. Fundamental monism is, when viewed theologically, a way of claiming that when God created the universe, God created all the fundamental features of the universe at once. And thus, if mentality is fundamental for a panpsychist, it is also likely to be ubiquitous. Panpsychism then is best considered a form of neutral monism, or property dualism, or possibly a ‘unified substance dualism’, whereby the material and mental are always found together and cannot be separated.
How can physicality and mentality be so unified? To modern neo-Cartesian definitions of ‘mental’ and ‘physical’, panpsychism seems counterintuitive, perhaps even contradictory. Yet, as Galen Strawson points out, ‘we have no good reason to think that we know anything about the physical that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that mental phenomena are physical phenomena’.Footnote 25 This is not because the mind can be reduced to the functional interaction of physical parts, but because even the physical – properly understood – cannot be exhaustively described by physics.Footnote 26 This is something theologians have been arguing for a long time, and is a core part of the central argument discussed in this paper, that nature is encultured, filled with meaning and purpose, and, therefore, best known when it is known as creation.
Within this broad definition of panpsychism there are many specific versions. Panpsychist theories can be found throughout Western philosophy since the pre-Hellenistic period as well as in the lively debate currently going on within analytic philosophy of mind.Footnote 27 The differences between the specific versions of panpsychism currently debated can be distilled into three pivotal questions. All panpsychists must choose an answer to each question, and the combination of answers one elects determines the variety of panpsychism that a philosopher can be said to hold. These questions are:
(1) What sort of mentality is it that is posited as fundamental?
(2) Where is the fundamental level of reality?
(3) What type of relation holds between fundamental mentality and the type of mentality enjoyed by humanity?
This paper does not have the space to explore the resulting variations of panpsychism but will discuss the first two of these pivotal questions in order to outline important features of what I call theological panpsychism.Footnote 28
In answer to the first question it is important to note that no contemporary panpsychist (and a very few historical panpsychists) posit self-consciousness, rationality, emotion, free will or other complex mentality functions that humans enjoy as fundamental. Instead, responses to this question can be placed in three categories: subject panpsychists, panexperientialists and panprotopsychists. Subject panpsychism holds that there are basic subjects with raw experiences at the fundamental level; that is a first-person perspective such that there is something it is like to be an electron (or some other fundamental entity). Panexperientialists are typically process philosophers who also posit the same qualitative raw experiefcnce, sometimes with additional capacities such as spontaneity, but without a subject to enjoy these experiences. Lastly, panprotopsychists argue that there are no phenomenal properties (subjects or experiences), but only that which is necessary for phenomenal properties to later emerge, perhaps qualities or intentional states.Footnote 29
Since I am unsure what it means for experiences to exist without subjects, and since proto-phenomenal properties are a fairly mysterious category that is not clearly any more fit as a substrate of consciousness than the typical emergentist's physical substrate, subject panpsychists appear to me to be in the least worst position. Although this subjectivity is more basic than can really be imagined or articulated, what subject panpsychism additionally offers is a basic interiority to all things. The Interiority Argument for panpsychism is one of the oldest, and it states that mentality is part of the indwelling powers that form the quiddity of things and structure causation throughout the universe. That is, panpsychism is tied to an Aristotelian powers view of causation.
Due to the commitment of fundamental monism, the second question can only have two answers. The fundamental level of reality is either at the micro- or the macro-level; that is, either the basic building-blocks of reality are fundamental and all is built from them, or the universe as a whole should be taken as fundamental and all else is an aspect or part of it. The latter view, known as cosmopsychism, is a position with an increasing number of adherents, and yet it is still safe to say that the majority of panpsychists assume the former, that the basic building-blocks of reality are what should be thought of as fundamental. This presupposition arises out of, as David Chalmers writes, a desire not only to ‘take consciousness seriously’, but also to ‘take science seriously’.Footnote 30 Thomas Nagel's panpsychism may also be characterised as resulting from a commitment to both mental realism and scientific credibility, particularly a desire to find an explanation of consciousness that fits within a general – but not materialist neo-Darwinian – theory of evolution.Footnote 31 As Rowan Williams writes, ‘human intelligence itself is grounded in the long continuities of animate life and its evolution, not something parachuted in to the created order’.Footnote 32 Chalmers’ argument runs that if consciousness is ‘a scientific subject matter’, then although it ‘is not open to investigation by the usual methods’, it can still be explained by the usual scientific structure; namely, ‘a few fundamental entities connected by fundamental laws’.Footnote 33 As such, there need be ‘nothing particularly spiritual or mystical’ about fundamental phenomenal entities and psychophysical laws.Footnote 34 In keeping with this concern about creeping spirituality, Chalmers used to refer to his position as ‘naturalistic dualism’.Footnote 35
Far from threatening Christian theology, I suggest that Chalmers’ naturalisation of panpsychism, as a kind of ‘dualism all the way down’, is an important step in constructing theological panpsychism. This is because Chalmers’ description of consciousness as a purely natural, or created, phenomenon provides an important buffer against mischaracterisations of the soul as ‘divine’, a little piece of God, or autonomously immortal.Footnote 36 If consciousness were a divinely transcendent phenomenon or slice of uncreated light, then any realist philosophy of mind would slide towards emergent theism, panentheism, pantheism or polytheism. Consciousness, in Christian theology, must remain a created phenomenon of creaturely minds that, in keeping with the principle of creatio ex nihilo, neither emanates from God nor collectively constitutes a divine mind or world-soul. By arguing for fundamental consciousness as ‘just another natural phenomenon’, Chalmers points the way forward for a Christian panpsychism to posit creaturely or created finite minds throughout the universe as fundamental and possibly ubiquitous, without implying that these minds are identical to God or in any way constitutive of divinity.
This is not to say that panpsychism should be combined with metaphysical or methodological naturalism. As a position that is realist about mentality, I am not sure that ‘naturalistic panpsychism’ is, in fact, a tenable position; at least not on any defensible definition of naturalism I am yet to come across. Yet, Chalmers’ argument illustrates that panpsychism does not entail any specific doctrine of God. This is particularly important for this paper, since panpsychism has historical associations with pantheism, panentheism and process theism.Footnote 37 Yet, as should be clear by now and contrary to these three historical associations, it is perfectly possible for a panpsychist to hold to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and posit an absolute divide between Creator and uncreated, whilst holding that no such strict divide exists between the material and the mental aspects of creation. Theological panpsychism, then, imagines a creation not only as gift, but as a gift filled with mentality, and so with meaning, value and purpose down to its most basic fundamental structures; creation as a gift that can keep on receiving the presence of God.
Towards a panpsychist creation
So far, I have introduced panpsychism, and argued for its compatibility with the traditional monotheisms of the Abrahamic faiths and the ex nihilo doctrine. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo is essential for a view of creation that overcomes the bifurcation between nature and culture, but it leaves unanswered the question as to what type of creation God has, in fact, created out of nothing. By uniting mind and matter, panpsychism goes a long way towards providing an ontological underpinning to ‘creation’ as a matrix that unifies nature and culture. This section develops this theological panpsychism by exploring a more explicitly trinitarian doctrine of creation. In so doing, it completes the argument of this paper that panpsychism should be an ontology that contemporary theologians see as a potential ally.
Above, Simon Oliver's chapter in Knowing Creation was used to explain how the category of creation might nullify the modern bifurcation between nature and culture. Oliver's argument relied on an Aristotelian powers ontology, whereby God creates ex nihilo creatures who have a nature such that the world is full of intrinsic powers, including the power for humans to construct a variety of amazing cultures and cultural artefacts. God creates being in general as well as the intrinsic powers with which particular beings practise meaning-making activities. In this doctrine of creation, culture is located within the natural, such that nature always already contains elements of culture. This power-based ontology is found not only in hylomorphism, but also in panpsychism where psyche forms the basis for interiority and powers, not only for humanity but for all creatures. Not only is panpsychism equally accommodating to a powers ontology as hylomorphism, but it has the additional benefit of locating intrinsic powers alongside a fundamental receptivity. This is not only the reception of being, but the reception of God's presence as an experiential phenomenon, and with this divine address and divine presence, the reception of meaning. Such an ontology provides a strong basis for concepts such as a God who ‘nudges’ creation in certain evolutionary directions and a view of divine action that ‘cannot help being personal because God essentially acts through intellect and will’.Footnote 38
When Schwöbel writes that God invests ‘not only humans beings but the whole of creation’ with the capacity to experience the divine presence and respond to God in praise, this can be taken with the same metaphorical realism that the Hebrew poets employed throughout the Psalms and the prophets, and which can be found in Luke 19:40 and Romans 8:19-22.Footnote 39 Whilst non-human creatures may not speak audibly or in sentences, they may still praise and proclaim, lament and groan, and respond to the command and call to worship. Modern western sensibilities will likely find this too far-fetched, but as Eastman warned in the case of human beings, the fittingness of the receivers is conditioned by nothing but the desire of God for relationship with creatures, and I am arguing this applies to all creation.
Not only does panpsychism facilitate purpose within creation, as the intrinsic teleology within all things that Oliver speaks off, but it may aid theologians in articulating a Christian vision of the purpose of creation in toto; to receive the divine presence. This is something discussed in both John H. Walton's chapter on Genesis and Marilyn McCord Adams’ two chapters on God's sanctification and solidarity with creation. Walton argues that to an ancient audience, Genesis 1 would have had nothing to do with material origins, but would have been read as God's ‘mission statement for the cosmos … that it would become sacred space by virtue of his presence here dwelling in relationship to his people’.Footnote 40 The creation is not by itself sacred, but God's ‘presence creates sacred space’.Footnote 41 As priests in this temple, and with Jesus as the great high priest of all creation, humanity's role is to call all creatures to praise God.Footnote 42
As McCord Adams notes, these cultic categories with which Genesis describes creation ‘presuppose personal agency and purposive action’.Footnote 43 Whilst she speaks of God's sanctifying presence as part of God's omnipresent concurrence, she also speaks of this sanctification and solidarity with material creation as to do with the perichoretic structure of persons, both in the Trinity and in creation.Footnote 44 ‘God's overarching purpose’, she writes, ‘is to sanctify matter, to make it holy first and foremost by indwelling material persons.’Footnote 45 Persons, Adams suggests, are created not only for intersubjective relationship with each other and with God, but for a more radically perichoretic overlapping at their functional core. The very serious possibility that panpsychism raises is that the psycho-materiality that undergirds this personhood is not an all-or-nothing category that humanity alone has access to but comes in degrees and is found throughout creation. Perhaps the interconnected psycho-materiality of our bodies, of all the organisms that live in and through our bodies, and the chemical composition that holds traces of galactic magnitude, all speak to this perichoretic notion of personhood. On panpsychism, God's sanctifying omnipresence might manifest not only in causal concurrence, but dwell experientially in all corners of the universe. It is through such relationships, where God is closer to all things than they are to themselves (since most do not have self-awareness or self-consciousness), that we can then speak of the Spirit's sanctifying omnipresence in every subject that fills the cosmos. This is not to point to a discrete place where God can be found, nor is it to posit consciousness as a necessary mediating substance between Creator and creation; the doctrine of creation ex nihilo affirmed in this paper precludes either of these ideas. Instead, theological panpsychism offers a way to articulate how God may be ‘in and beyond’ the whole of creation, immaterial and material, cultural and natural.Footnote 46
Conclusion
This paper has considered a common argument in the contemporary doctrine of creation, represented throughout the two volumes Knowing Creation and Christ and the Created Order; namely, the argument that the doctrine of creation, unites the (modern and devastating) bifurcation between ‘nature’ – by which I mean the material world available for investigation by the natural sciences – and ‘culture’ – by which I mean the meaning-making acts and artefacts investigated by the human and social sciences or the arts. The doctrine of creation, it is argued, concerns the actualisation of a world that is made with intrinsic powers for continuing reception and response, such that this world has a nature that is always and already encultured. This paper extended this vision of creation by adding to it an ontology called ‘theological panpsychism’, that argues that God included mentality in the fundamental features of the cosmos in the first act of creation. The mentality within fundamental entities is a kind of interior power and receptivity, which this paper argued provides an ontological underpinning for God not only to empower as a primary cause, but for Jesus to enter into a better-or-worse relationship with, and for the Spirit to be present within, all of creation. Theological panpsychism does not entail this trinitarian doctrine of creation, but it provides invaluable metaphysical resources for theologians to articulate this vision of the created order and contribute to reconciliation between humanity and the non-human world.
