Thomas Jay Oord, "Self-organizing evolutionary theology. Biological evolution both enriches and challenges theology according to theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen" (2005)

Philadelphia — Biological evolution both enriches and challenges theology. But staying abreast of developments in both fields means adventuring often into uncharted terrains.

Niels Henrik Gregersen, theologian at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, said that fellow theologians working in dialogue with the sciences should be committed to the highest possible degree of contact. “The theologian’s work,” said Gregersen, “will be both constrained and facilitated by the data, theories and thought models emerging from the intellectual developments within the sciences.”

Recent evolutionary theory suggests that organisms possess a measure of self-organization. That organisms possess this self-organizing mechanism presents opportunities for theologians who construct multifaceted theological views of evolution. After all, most theologians want to understand — and make understandable — how God may be actively present in and for living all beings.

As a whole, evolution offers many reasons for speaking about an over-all progress of complexity, he said. Gregersen added that this trend toward greater complexity may well be the product of internal physico-chemical drives — including self-organization — as well as external adaptations to shifting environmental conditions.

Many examples of net-effect progress can be mentioned. Gregersen noted that over time the maximum size of organisms has increased considerably. Sequoia trees did not exist 100 million years ago, nor did whales.

Even more important, said Gregersen, are the trends towards major brain size. We see this increase in the history of apes and hominids, especially when we compare brain sizes with the total weight of animals.

Gregersen noted that it is difficult to measure  exactly which mechanisms cause advances in biological complexity. It is particularly difficult to measure the force of self-organization, because self-organization typically involves mobility, sentience and communication. And yet, Gregersen said, there seems to be an overall trend towards the emergence of general properties such as feeling and consciousness.

The richness of life flows out of the interplay between general trends and specific circumstance, said Gregersen, and this is “of paramount importance to a theological view of evolution.”

“The most interesting theological view of evolution will build on a combined approach in which historical contingencies and biological selection pressures are seen as processes that are always teamed within a wider framework of nature capable of self-organization,” he said.

Gregersen said that self-organization drives evolution via the inevitable production of instructional information through energy processes. Natural selection then selects from this rich but constrained space of developmental possibilities. This means, Gregersen said, that “life is not an accident. It is written into the set-up of the material universe.”

As Gregersen noted, evolutionary theory that emphasizes self-organization allows theologians faithfully to describe God as one who divests divine power in the capacity of fruitful, albeit risky, self-developments. Such a view avoids the claim that God is a remote, a-cosmic designer, Gregersen said. Rather than seeing God as self-limited to allow space and power to creatures, this hypothesis claims that God ever-actively empowers creatures.

Gregersen went on to say that a naturalistic orientation of theology is given by the intrinsic commitment of Christian faith. This commitment, Gregersen said, argues for only one source of being and life: God. “And God is actively present in and for every natural event. God is the Divine Pattern that is the well-spring of any concrete pattern-formation in evolution.” 

But to say that God is actively present in and for all creatures does require one to also say that the heart or will of God is also manifest or revealed in every event. “But it does imply that from the moment of creation, God cannot be subtracted from the world of nature,” said Gregersen. Such a notion fits well with the panentheism Gregersen and others believe best describes the God-universe relationship.

An evolutionary theology that emphasizes both self-organization and divine, said Gregersen, allows one to find “the splendor of God exhibited in the self-productive powers of creation.”

Thomas Jay Oord is a contributing editor at Science & Theology News and a professor of philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University.