Emergence vs. Creation

The Baha'i Faith, along with Christianity, Islam, and other religions, views the world and all in it as created by God.

All praise to the unity of God, and all honor to Him, the sovereign Lord, the incomparable and all-glorious Ruler of the universe, Who, out of utter nothingness, hath created the reality of all things, Who, from naught, hath brought into being the most refined and subtle elements of His creation ... [Bahá'u'lláh, GLEANINGS: XXVII, pp. 64 – 68.]

Praise be to God! the least change produced in the form of the smallest thing proves the existence of a creator: then can this great universe, which is endless, be self-created and come into existence from the action of matter and the elements? How self-evidently wrong is such a supposition! [`Abdu'l-Bahá, SAQ: PROOFS AND EVIDENCES OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD, p. 5]

In apparent opposition, emergence and evolution are usually described as growth processes that occur from the ground up.

Even thinkers at the 53rd Annual Star Island Conference of The Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) seem to view things this way, saying that "emergent properties give rise to yet more emergent properties, generating the vast complexity of our present-day cosmic, biological, ecological, and cultural contexts" according to the conference introductory notes.

Stuart Kauffman, a prominent founding father of modern emergence science views it as a lacking a "directing agency":

It is my further belief that we are coming to see our universe and life as creative, without a directing agency. Meaning emerges with life. If this view becomes widespread, it has the promise to become the sustaining myth we need to sustain in turn an emerging global civilization beset with its concomitant fundamentalist communities.[THE CREATIVITY OF THE BIOSPHERE, Stuart Kauffman, ABSTRACT, Program and Schedule, The Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, 53rd Annual Star Island Conference, July 29 to August 5].

Modern writers on the topic such Michael Shermer think this way too. Shermer, in Why Darwin Matters writes: "If new species are created naturally, what place, then, for God? [page xvi]." This is typical of the idea the many have that a scientific understanding of development of something as a natural process overrules the idea that God is the creator of that process.

Here is another quote from Shermer in the same book in the context of emergence:

Self-organization is itself an emergent property, and emergence is a form of self-organization. The system is self-repeating, and therefore there is no need to invoke an Intelligent Designer.

He seems to be saying that if things are explained by science it rules out their being created by God.

A modern superstition?

Let us examine the assumption that scientific explanation voids divine creation.

The assumption is basically an inverted "Creationism" argument. All arguments about divine creation, the argument goes, are creationist arguments. Therefore, because creationist arguments are obviously wrong, all arguments that posit divine creation are also wrong. [For this argument to be true, one has to prove that all arguments for divine creation are creationist arguments. Given that very few arguments for divine creation are actually creationist arguments, one has to act as if they were, i.e., to ignore what they actually say.]

Often, the rush to deny divine creation is by biologists uncomfortable with the lawlike behavior of natural processes and the constraint that the only things that can happen are those things that are enabled to happen by such lawlike behavior. Lawlike behavior, of course, is equivalent to divine creation.

Physicists think quite differently, holding that what enables things to come into being are the underlying laws that make structure possible. Then, it is only a matter of time before things that are possible potentially become actual physically.

The most obvious counterexamples to the view that natural processes and divine creativity are irremediably in conflict are our everyday experiences of engineering, planning, gardening, child raising, agriculture, writing, and animal husbandry. In all of those fields, the will to make things happen are an essential ingredient to the thing happening. Watches, of course, don't engineer themselves or come to lie on the heath through localized entropy reversal. Rather, someone plans and executes their production. However, every single step in the manufacturing process is "natural" in that it involves natural processes. In goal directed processes, no matter the will and intelligence involved, all the steps are natural.

Growth from a seed:

The analogy for the God's creation that the Baha'i Writings use is growth from a seed, or growth from an embryo. In both cases, something complex and big starts out from something seemingly simple and small. In biology, for example, DNA instructions make possible a growth process that creates structure that is complex and sophisticated.

So with man, the Baha'i Writing say. From the very earliest days, humanity existed in perfection, although not in its present form here on earth. A growth process, a maturation process, had to take place before humanity as potential became humanity as actual. Far from being a random and probabilistic chance process, such a maturation is certain and sure.

Correspondence to emergence:

Clearly, emergence viewed as a random-like growth process with no purpose or direction is not the same as divine creation. Of course, it is not true to say that emergence has no purpose or direction. Emergence is usually considered to be a process that brings about increasing organizational complexity.

But, emergence as a random-like exploration of possibilities that (if you will) stumbles on structures that make other structures possible is entirely - and for some, surprisingly - consistent with the idea of divine creation. Those structures - stars, crystals, cells, DNA, plants, animals, humans - have always been intrinsic to the laws of the universe (if not, they could never happen). Emergence is simply the maturation process by which what is potential becomes actual in a way analogous to the growth of a seed or an embryo.

Randomness, the bugaboo of many a science writer who mistakes it for purposelessness, plays a central and dynamic role in this process. Like heat that hardens iron into steel, randomness drives the multiplicity of explorations that bring new phenomena into reality.