A Grander Evolution for a Grander Spiritual Bargain: A naturalistic theologian responds to Robert Wright

Katherine T. Peil

EFS International; 12626 NE 114th Place, Kirkland, WA 98033

Harvard Divinity School

(425) 444-8827

ktpeil@comccast.net; ktpeil@post.harvard.edu

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Abstract

Robert Wright proposes reuniting scientists and theologians on the common ground of evolutionary theory, hoping for agreement that humans are hardwired with innate moral sensibilities. His naturalistic proposal is discussed, enhanced by offerings from complexity science, and significantly extended via self-regulatory dynamics that are perceivable through the human emotional system.

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A Grander Evolution for a Grander Spiritual Bargain: A naturalistic theologian responds to Robert Wright

As the new decade dawns, a cursory reflection of the last reveals a lot of God talk. Particularly portentous along these lines is Robert Wright’s Evolution of God, the latest iteration of his long-running theme – the message that humans are hardwired to be moral creatures. In the New York Times editorial: A Grand Bargain over Evolution, he condensed his moral message and threw down a gauntlet of sorts. In this piece he brings good news – offering evolutionary theory as neutral intellectual territory for mediating the longstanding “war” between science and religion. He speaks of an “unseen order” that exists “out there,” that if decoded holds the key to life’s deepest secrets – whether they be laws of nature or God’s supernatural design plan. Wright’s hope in brokering peace turns on his conviction that this hidden order – no matter who is right about its source – includes an ethical design that yields our innate “moral sense.”

Wright suggests that a deeper appreciation for the logic and explanatory power of natural selection can inspire concessions that will bridge the gulf. He argues that its evident success affords atheistic scientists the admission that some “higher purposes” exist within nature’s creative processes and that reverence of the divine logos invites theologians to posit a more realistically constrained role for God.

Joining the conversation as theologian and scientist, my purpose is to accept Wright’s tacit call to challenge, and I bring good news as well. Very good news actually, concerning the particulars of our moral sense, and how it use it. But I also have bad news. While Wright’s gesture toward non-zero cooperation is in the right direction, he points straight past the elephant in the room – the elephant that deserves the credit for moral sensibilities. I will introduce this familiar yet profoundly misunderstood elephant and show how recognizing it can meet and exceed Wright’s goals – perhaps beyond his wildest dreams.

Bad News

But first, the bad news about Wright’s proposal: For starters, it’s just not gonna happen. Wright’s concessions require a move from Theism to Deism, the idea that once God “unleashed the algorithm of natural selection,” his job was done and he stepped out of worldly affairs. But this misses the whole point, for as vocal atheists also deny, spirituality is first and foremost an experience – a full on bone-tingling, awe-inspiring, goose-flesh-thrilling, mystical engagement with the divine. It is a meaning-rich relational connection to an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and/or omni-benevolent presence. The faithful won’t buy it any more than an idolatrous switcheroo of the Baby Jesus for a Cabbage Patch Kid, nor should they. It’s also a Faustian proposal, as it will cost them their immortal soul. Fortunately the concession of an active God is not necessary, for evolution itself is an active creative process. What Wright really wants is a move from a supernatural to a natural conception of God, which is a move to Pantheism rather than Deism. Like Galileo, Wright seeks to honor the “Book of Nature” as a source of revelation. However, this ship has already sailed with Pope himself on board; who recently suggested that nature is “legible” via an “inbuilt mathematics.” So there is already tacit agreement on both sides that nature’s hidden order can be discovered through mathematics. More on this in a moment.

Second, Wright’s conception of religion is too simplistic, acknowledging little more than “McChristian” perceptions despite a tremendous amount of sophisticated theology. For instance, Harvard theologian Gordon Kaufman acknowledged decades ago that our symbol of God is an imaginative human construction, even setting forth methodological guidelines for its refinement

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– guidelines that situate human experience center-stage. In his own seminal work, In Face of Mystery, Kaufman deliberately scraps the anthropomorphic image of a fatherly creator person, in favor of the creative process itself, drawing upon the best available science, and defining God as the “serendipitous creativity of the universe.” He also recognizes the limited, yet co-creative role of the conscious human being in the process, acknowledges the chaotic and destructive facets of nature’s creativity, all while preserving the Christian ethos of love, charity, and cooperative compassion. Tragically, however, such scholarly riches rarely find their way to the pulpits or Red State Sunday schools.

Fortunately, Wright is right. The more Pantheistic God-as-natural-process approach is elegantly compatible with the science of evolution. Indeed, it has recently lured renowned scientist – and self-proclaimed atheist – Stuart Kauffman into the theological discourse. In his latest work, Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman arrives at nearly the same conclusion as theologian Gordon Kaufman. He sets forth a fully natural conception of God as the “ceaseless creativity of the universe” – an image that can be shared and applied toward a global ethic of cooperative, sustainable, stewardship of the planet in lieu of dominion and environmental destruction. In fact, in a seemingly prescient answer to Wright’s present challenge, scientist Stuart Kauffman recently joined forces with theologian Gordon Kaufman to help launch a fledgling science and religion initiative at the Harvard Divinity School. So Wright can rest assured that visionaries already inhabit the hallowed bio-theological horizon and groundbreaking is well underway.

Natural Selection is not Enough

This brings us to another major problem with Wright’s proposed bargain: The purely Darwinian model of evolution by natural selection is insufficient. The notion that all of life’s intricate order could emerge from random genetic mutations does not answer enough cause and effect questions to retire the traditionally onmnipotent controller God, and leaves a crude and undignified picture of human life, devoid of higher meaning or purpose.

Indeed, the reason Kauffman and Kaufman so readily found common ground is that both had long since embraced the new Chaos and Complexity sciences, with their central concept of self-organization1—a bottom-up evolutionary counterpart to the top-down effects of natural selection. Self-organization has long been an unsung hero in the evolutionary story, a source of hidden developmental order and creative diversity courtesy of the ongoing, here and now, behavior of matter in motion – lawful, mathematically precise, behaviors. In fact, Kauffman is considered to be one of the founders of the field, whose revolutionary tome The Origins of Order demonstrated emergent “order for free”. This bottom-up evolutionary process has its own inherent algorithmic principles, simple computational rules, synchronizing mechanisms, feedback dynamics, optimizing and information processing functions, and – as I will argue – encodes a primal “self-regulatory” logos. Indeed, early on in our evolutionary history living systems harnessed the biophysical “noise” of these self-organizing mechanisms and pressed them into service as self-relevant informational signals – allowing them to play a direct role in evolution. In fact, without nature’s active bottom-up self-organizing dimension, the passive top-down selection process would be dead in the water.

In a theological sense, these mathematically precise bottom-up mechanisms offer scientific descriptions of the very sort of “animating forces” and “vital principles” that traditional wisdom ascribes to an active supernatural creator God, and the same vital forces comprise the “spirit” within life forms or the “soul” within the human – spiritual identity components that serve as the connective tether to the Creator. So adding the algorithm of self-organization to the

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Darwinian evolutionary model is not only required for traction from Wright’s proposal, but it might also provide a naturalistic way to salvage the soul.

But is Wright’s Bargain a Trojan Horse?

While acceptance of a richer version of evolution might be palatable step toward consensus on our innate moral sense, there are other more serious problems. Wright’s proposal is a bit of a Trojan Horse, requiring two more yet unstated concessions, one from each side – deep-cut concessions that most may be loathe to make. The first is that by positing “higher purposes” and the innate ability to know right from wrong, he is asking the scientific community to jettison the time-honored naturalistic fallacy. This is the idea that values cannot be found by observing natural cause and effect processes (or as Hume put it “you can’t get an ought from an is”), and on par with Ockham’s Razor, avoidance of this fearsome fallacy is held as a hallmark of sound science.

The second is that with the move to a Pantheistic conception of God, Wright is actually asking Western religion to subordinate the “Book of Scripture” – as an anthropological artifact of human culture – to the Book of Nature, to be honored now as the creator’s purest Word. This is a step well beyond the Papal position, and it requires abandoning assumptions regarding malevolent supernatural forces, as well as the notion of The Fall. This is, of course, the idea that Adam and Eve’s early disobedience had unleashed a maelstrom of punitive suffering and that human nature was forever stained with “sin.” In the most general sense, Wright is asking the faithful to remove the evil from their view of nature, and the scientists to put the goodness back in. Indeed, common sense might suggest good riddance to both since evil remains the most intractable problem for religion, and having no biological tether for the core evaluative categories of right and wrong has kept scientists from recognizing the true moral elephant. Still, relinquishing such cherished beliefs is a lot to ask without offering more solid reasons or alternatives.

Kauffman’s Pantheistic Reinvention: How Behavioral Agency Leads to Value

Fortunately, yet again, Wright is right – on both counts, due to the bilateral agreement that the mysterious “hidden order” is written in the language of mathematics. Upon careful analysis of the Book of Nature, one finds little if any convincing evidence for either assumption.

In fact, in his Pantheistic reinvention of the sacred, Stuart Kauffman openly challenged the naturalistic fallacy, arguing forcefully and persuasively that with life and “agency” (the ability of an organism to act on its own behalf) comes value. He specifically noted the ability of a bacterium to approach food and avoid poison with perhaps some crude experience of “yum” and “yuk” – the hedonic pattern of behavior toward that which is beneficial and away from the harmful. By focusing upon behavioral agency, in one-fell-swoop Kauffman allows us to reframe the question of value in nature, to directly address the notion of free will in a clockwork universe, to examine information mechanisms and control structures in nature, to rethink the pejorative tone of “hedonism,” and to objectively reexamine through the lens of self-organization what we mean by “the self.” As we will see, all of these naturalistic revelations will lead directly to the logos of purpose in evolution – the missing half of what Wright calls “the algorithm of natural selection.”

Naturalistic Omnibenevolance: All is “Right” with the Universe & Life is “Good”

First, the simple universal value suggested within nature’s creativity is that of life itself. The hallmark of livings systems is the ability to gather the light, heat, and stardust of the Big

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Bang ̶ to harness, metabolize, and circulate the energy and matter of the universe ̶ and “work” with it to self-organize and creatively evolve. However, none of this creative work would be possible without nature’s hidden mathematical logos, her ordering, balancing, and computational principles ̶ her fundamental laws, universal forces, and finely-tuned axiomatic constants, her cyclic tempos, harmonic resonances and stochastic surprises; her orderly electromagnetic spectrum, her chiral symmetry, thermodynamically favorable chemical reactions, equilibrium states, and her self-replicating molecules with their ingenious triplet code. Due to these inherent mathematic regularities, relationships, and operations all is objectively right in the universe. Thus, in that same objective sense, that which is beneficial to the optimal functioning of living systems is good and that which is harmful is bad. Likewise, conscious volitional behaviors that honor nature’s regulatory processes are right, and those that disrupt them are wrong. They are wrong to the degree that they destructively interfere with the life process itself – and particularly so if they negate its inherent logos.

Naturalistic Omnipotence: Constrained yet Evolving Free Will

Next, an obvious revelation from the Book of Nature is that a healthy portion of omnipotent creative control has been delegated to the creature: we are self-regulating creatures in a self-organizing universe. Yet, due to the deterministic nature of physics, it has become fashionable even in the social sciences to suggest that free will is an illusion. Fortunately, Kauffman’s discussion of agency sheds new light on the tension between free will and determinism, with his poignant contrast between the lawful “happenings” of matter in motion with the partially lawless “doings” of living agents. In the old evolutionary model, there was no functional reason for “doing behavior” beyond reproduction, let alone consciousness, or free will, and little if any explanation for the deeper roots of “instinct,” sentience, or hardwired stimulus-response behavior. However, Kauffman’s work in Boolean nets demonstrates how random connections in self-organizing networks give rise to systems poised at the “edge-of-chaos,” delicately balanced between too much stability and runaway chaotic change. This results in a nonrandom, mathematically precise, pattern of “choice-making” behavior that is partly deterministic and partially free (stochastic), and a pattern that complexity scientist Chris Langton suggests undergirds simple-rule “computation”– information processing in nature. He roots this fundamental computation in biophysical “phase transitions” that while rooted in simple natural processes offer both digital and analog forms of information. But all of these choice-making phenomena occur spontaneously. They happen, as the combined manifestations of the deterministic and probabilistic logos of the universe – with no choice-maker required. However, the biophysical “noise” of these choice-making happenings has been harnessed by living systems and pressed into service as signals to guide “doing” behavior. Of course, to the theologian, these behaviors and their underlying oscillations and informational computations come courtesy of the omnipotence and omniscience of the Creator.

The Magical Feedback Loop

We now come to perhaps the most fundamental and significant player within nature’s hidden order: the feedback loop. The feedback loop is a virtually magical multi-functional mechanism through which the divine creativity of the universe manifests all four of the Big O’s associated with God - omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolance. Once we recognize and understand the magic of feedback, we take one giant step closer to realizing Wright’s intuitions about our innate moral logos.

Feedback is essentially a cyclic loop of information that provides both communication and control functions in self-organizing systems. Although feedback is largely an unsung hero in

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Darwinian evolution, as mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated, the feedback loop with its recursive, self-reflexive, nature is interwoven throughout the mathematical logos of universe. I have argued elsewhere that the choice-making pattern within edge-of-chaos criticality is born of a coupling of feedback loops – that feedback is the mechanism that allows living systems to harness the biophysical noise and put it to service as self-regulatory signals. Respectively, this coupling of positive and negative feedback embodies both analog (graded) and digital (O/1) types of information inherent in Langton’s phase transitions – a natural logos also embodied in both “fuzzy” and Aristotelian (binary) logic. This amazing feedback coupling regulates the creature in its environment; much like the simple thermostat regulates the temperature in one’s home in a three-step cycle. First, it constantly compares one’s present status to optimal states, signals imbalances when they occur, and triggers self-correcting changes that maintain “right” states of balance. While this elegant mechanism is apparent within the synchronizing temporal comparisons, environmental assessments, and hedonic behaviors of single celled bacteria without any “brains”, developmental scientist Marc Lewis has correlate this process with the theta rhythm in the human brain and identified three complex feedback circuits2 in that serve the same three original functions.

The implication of course is that this feedback coupling delivers the first forms of stimulus response behavior, serving as an elegant choice-making switch, one that undergirds the simple logos within our moral sense. In fact, if the feedback loop is the ground zero for consciousness, then the binary signals they encode might well be the long sought source of “qualia,” the raw “feels” of experience itself – the solution to what philosopher David Chalmers deems “the hard problem”. Indeed, feedback is natural magic at its best, delivering both objective information processing and the capacity for subjective sentience of living systems (the ability to perceive, store, process, and respond to qualitative stimulus signals), as well as internalized behavioral control. In fact, through the ubiquity and magic of self-regulatory feedback, we find the Godlike qualities of Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence and we come full circle to Omni-benevolence.

The Evaluative Self-regulatory Code

For best of all, this feedback coupling comes with its own evaluation. Commensurate with the divine decree that all is right in the universe, it automatically prefers the “right” state. This is rooted in Langston’s edge-of-chaos phase transition, wherein a constructive chaotic change is preferred, one that yields global coherence and added complexity – optimal alterations or increases in network connections that create new wholes greater than the sum of their component parts. Likewise, a destructive perturbation is one in which the global whole is less than the sum of its parts. Constructive change is clearly preferred and conserved by natural selection, hence the bottom-up push that fosters evolutionary complexity. Constructive change also yields evermore complex order, symbiosis, and multi-cellular cooperation. Indeed, in his previous offering Nonzero, Robert Wright himself detailed an historical trajectory of ever-increasing non-sum-zero cooperation and unification within human evolution, a trend that defies the less dignified Darwinian logic of amoral competition and fragmentation.

While the elegant biophysical minutiae of this self-regulatory feedback mechanism are beyond the scope of this article, the moral angel is indeed in the details of the positive feedback signal itself. It has a dual nature which when coupled with the negative feedback control loop yields a simple tit-for-tat self-regulatory rule that underlies the subjective “good” or “bad” flipside of the objective right and wrong states of balance. The damping (downward, negative going) positive feedback signal concerns the destructive type of chaotic perturbation and prompts an avoidant response (a movement away from the stimulus source); while the positive amplifying

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feedback signal reflects the “good” kind of constructive chaos identified by Langton, yielding an approach behavior (movement toward the beneficial stimulus source). In short, the right – life giving– sorts of biochemical happenings have been identified and incorporated as ‘good for me’ or ‘bad for me’ signals that guide the doing behaviors of living critters. This will become crystal clear momentarily, but suffice it to say that the natural gift of self-regulatory feedback we have innate mechanisms that control and inform us from within, offering both the animation and guidance one might expect from any imminent Creator.

Hedonism & the Self

This brings us to the concept of hedonism, which in the context of religion has long been associated with the notion of original sin. Indeed, in both Eastern and Western tradition, selfish hedonism is associated with immorality, the wrong sorts of behavior – the desires of the flesh, the wicked temptations to power, greed, self-aggrandizement, and so forth. But when we strip the pejorative freight from the word, we are left with the motivational doctrine of the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain – the approach avoid pattern of doing behavior just discussed. This is an objectively ubiquitous pattern of behavior, observable across the entire evolutionary scheme from the complex human being to the single-celled ameba. Furthermore, upon stripping away the anthropomorphic colorings – self-awareness and feelings of pleasure or pain – we are left with the structure and behavior of networks and their generic, feedback driven, self-regulatory logos.

There are several key implications here. The first is that in an objective sense, “the self” has a dualistic structure, both as an individual node (self as an autonomous whole) and as a collective entity via the ebb and flow of its network connections (self as part within a greater whole). This cuts to the core of tensions between sociopolitical structures, often creating imbalances by favoring either autonomy or community rather than accommodating both. The second implication is that two distinct functions follow this dualistic form: the increased complexity of cooperative wholes, together with the prevention of destruction of the component parts. These functions are reflected in dual behavioral regimes of approach and avoidance behavior – adaption via merely changing the location, boundaries, or fortunes of the self, rather than destroying the “other”. Thirdly, and perhaps most important to our moral discussion, when we shift back to the subjective notion of self, together these dual forms and functions serve two biological imperatives – universal evolutionary purposes if you will – those of self-preservation and self-development. Together, they seek to preserve the integrity of the autonomous self-as-whole; while developing the cooperative, symbiotic self-as-part. Even without the above discussion, these self-regulatory purposes can be conceived as the behavioral reflection of the top-down evaluative criteria within natural selection: survival and adaptation. The crucial point, however, is that both self-regulatory purposes are right and good.

Nature’s Dual Evolutionary Purposes Versus Traditional Moral Wisdom

Herein lies the wisdom in Wright’s tacit Trojan Horse request. Both the naturalistic fallacy and the doctrine of The Fall have left us with misassumptions that have muddied our natural moral waters. A value free evolutionary model tacitly validates the religious assumption that human nature is fallen, sullied, or bedeviled by evil temptations, and that free will is a dangerous commodity to be squelched by authoritative force. In the limited Darwinian model of evolution, doing behavior – and indeed human life – is meaningless, serving as little more than a carrier of virulently “selfish” genes. Through this lens, the only goal in life was genetic self-replication (reproduction), and the pessimism that all life forms are doomed to a ruthless, bloody competition for survival. Poets declared that “nature was red in tooth and claw,” and

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philosophers affirmed that life in the state of nature was “nasty, brutish and short.” Our Western religious traditions called for obedience to external, higher, or supernatural authorities who defined standards of virtuously “selfless” behavior along with punitive forms of enforcement. Our Eastern traditions call for the surrender, transcendence, overcoming, or otherwise obliteration of the self – the source of hedonic craving, aversion, and all human suffering.

But when we recognize the dual evolutionary purposes, it becomes clear that neither selfishness nor selflessness are optimal behaviors – both are unbalanced disregulated states, wherein one purpose – indeed one aspect of self – is sacrificed for the other. In fact, this error of omission is a key divisive factor between science and religion and the root of many other polarized ideologies (e.g. individualist versus collectivist cultures, liberal versus conservative politics, capitalist versus communist economics, justice versus care ethics, etc.) Indeed, as theologian Martin Buber suggested, the fundamental essence and experience of God is rooted in the relationship – between the eternal “Thou” and the “I”3 – a relationship ultimately rooted in the self-reflexive feedback loop where object and subject meld as one, in sacred unity of identity at their fundamental core. The transcendence is more expansive and transpersonal however, wherein the Golden Ethos of treating everyman as oneself flows from within, after successful empathic expansion of oneself into the shoes of the “other”.

In sum, hedonic behavior is hardly proof of an evil nature, but is actually evidence of our innate divinity. While perhaps a heretical assertion to some religious adherents, one might counter that the doctrine of original sin – or the notion that the natural creation is corrupt is any way – is an arrogant and blasphemous aspersion to cast upon any actual Creator. This was the message from Western theologians such as Maimonides and St. Thomas Aquinas, who reverently reasoned that God’s faith in the human moral conscience was likely because He knew what the heck He was doing.

In fact, a Pantheistic process model of God suggests an alternative interpretation of story of The Fall in Genesis. It was not disobedience of God’s rules that wrought the suffering upon humanity, but the eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil – the self-destructive invention of human judgments about good and evil, those that severed our innate spiritual connection to the Creator’s evaluations of right and wrong states of vibrant holistic health. The assumption of evil was a tragic mistake, as our innate self-regulatory mechanisms serve two right and good purposes, mediating the optimal life-giving balance between them as every moment unfolds. Indeed, they are ever-present, animating and guiding – vital processes inherent in the serendipitous creativity of the universe, if not a gift an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent Creator.

The Self-Regulatory Sense & the Moral Elephant in the Room

Now, we can move on to the most intriguing part of our discussion – and to the very good news. Cracking the simple self-regulatory code allows the human species to embark upon The Rise, the recovery from our judgmental stumble and reorientation to our innate moral compass. Indeed, human beings are still privy to this ancient moral logos, through what I call our self-regulatory sense.4 This is an inner sensibility, perhaps the very first form of “sentience” to have emerged in living systems, one that yields the first raw feels of self in time and space. Yet its simple binary evaluative coloring is still inherent in all other human senses. Indeed, the identification of this ancient sense suggests an alternative Cartesian Cogito: Sentio ergo sum…I feel therefore I am.

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This primal inner sense still faithfully delivers it simple, digital, self-correcting signals that inform us of any “self-relevant” changes in either our internal or external environment. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio puts this core sensibility provides living systems with a “proto-self” awareness of “the feeling of what happens.”5 As such this ancient sense is intimately connected with the human immune system,6 its structural “self” versus “not-self” distinction,7 and its prevention of potentially self-destructive invasions and imbalances in our body.8 And as we have just seen, the painful and pleasurable categories are not about sin or virtue; they concern self-preservation and self-development, respectively – two right and good Darwinian purposes. Yet the ancient signals have evolved along with the increasing complexity of the human brain and now deliver complex self-regulatory perceptions that encode three levels of self-regulatory meaning – one for each of its triune layers,9 protecting the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of our identity from invasions and imbalances of every kind, and keeping the self integrated across time and space.

Herein lies the very good news. Here is the elephant in the room that Wright – and all of evolutionary biology – has pointed past while limited by the purely Darwinian model of evolution: The moral elephant is the human emotional system. All humans experience the time-honored self-regulatory feedback via our emotional feelings. Like sounds, colors, scents and tastes, common feelings such as joy and sadness, gratitude and anger, pride and shame, admiration and disgust, trust and fear, love and hate deliver a spectrum of meaningful information offering universal yet highly personalized moral guidance. They are messages from The Self (the embodied soul), to the self (the mind), about the self in all of its holistic elegance. They are nothing less than God’s gift to the human being.

But the story of the scientific investigation of emotion reads a lot like the Sufi tale of the Blind Men and the Elephant, each theorist having hold of a significant portion yet lacking the vision to see the greater functional whole. In fact, since the scientific revolution, “enlightened” minds were those that rejected emotion entirely as the antithesis of reason, treating it with the contempt of a vestigial organ – an embarrassing reminder of our lowly animalistic nature. But upon identification of the self-regulatory function, the scattered pieces fall elegantly into place with the elephant looming so large that it seems incredible we did not see it before. Indeed, blind obedience to the naturalistic fallacy has kept science from seeing nature’s simple and obvious value system: Pain feels bad because it is a signal that something is wrong. As Hans Selye put it, unpleasant feelings are signals of “distress.”10 They serve the primary purpose of self-preservation. They are innately and automatically aversive so we will learn to avoid, reduce, or otherwise eliminate the conditions that elicit them in order to postpone our inevitable self-destruction. In sum, the emotional sense offers an unfailing intrapersonal language, delivering crucial self-regulatory messages that unite all physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of the individual into a coherent integrated whole. This internal language then gives rise to external interpersonal feedback dynamics between individuals uniting us in coherent integrated social wholes. This simple moral logos yields a divine emotional integration of living systems at every level honoring both the unity and diversity of all God’s creatures.

Missing the Message, Blaming the Messenger

Tragically however, the religious dogma of original sin has blamed the messenger and missed the self-regulatory message – condemning the emotions and advocating their suppression. In fact, five out of the Seven Deadly Sins11 are emotions themselves (greed, envy, wrath, pride, lust) and all concern the control of “selfish” hedonic behavior. Darwin’s revelations may have inadvertently leant scientific credence to this prejudice, but the error was perhaps most compounded by the father of psychiatry himself Sigmund Freud. While he rightly noted how

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emotions perform their motivational duties automatically and from primary “unconscious”12 organic processes, he spoke of them as bubbling up from the dangerously dark, and dirty depths of our libidinous and aggressive animalistic core, and hijacking the rational mind. Likewise, science has historically missed the boat on the True North of our moral compass being rooted in the positive self-developmental emotional dimension – often chalking up all varieties of complex pleasure to feeding or reproductive urges.

In the mean time – and to their credit – nearly all our religious traditions have also pointed to the goodness and moral rightness associated with the positive emotional dimension. In Christianity, for example, Galatians 6:22 lists the “fruits of spirit” as faith, love, joy, peace, and gentleness, and the Seven Divine Virtues includes love, humility, faith, kindness, zeal, generosity and temperance – all of which are either the positive emotions or their associated cooperative “approach” behaviors. To their detriment, however, like blaming the messenger, religious dogma has often credited our the innate rewards of our positive emotional gifts to a supernatural Creator, using them as evidence of omnibenevolance, divine grace, or the promise of heavenly reward for obedience to doctrine. Nonetheless, through the recent “emotional revolution,”13 there is now consensus from both camps that the simple and complex pleasures connote that something has gone right. Scientific investigators have learned that positive emotions concern tending, mending and befriending,14 bonding, broadening and building,15 inspiring and rewiring,16 discovery, creativity, and cultural invention,17 and that they even reflect enhanced immune functioning18 – all in the service of the adaptive self-developmental imperative. They are Selye’s “eustress” signals, innately rewarding so that we will learn to enhance, reproduce and create the conditions that elicit them. These good feelings concern optimal need fulfillment, growth and development, empathic expansion of the identity boundary, and the unfolding of all hidden “soul” potentials.

In fact, Ivan Pavlov intuitively understood the role of pleasure and pain in the earliest forms of learning, as the “unconditioned”19 – natural– stimulus that yielded the uniform reinforcement or punishment that shapes behavior. Pioneering spiritual scientist William James20 noted the bottom-up bodily feedback, the proprioceptive sensory inputs that give rise to emotional feelings. Leon Festinger noted the error signaling function of feedback in his theory of cognitive dissonance,21 although “affective” or emotional dissonance would be more accurate, and Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert captures the self-corrective rebalancing component in his concept of the “psychological immune system.”22 Humanist Abraham Maslow noted a hierarchy of universal human needs23 still reflected in the appraisal themes of our emotional messages – needs for safety, power, freedom, connection, esteem, creativity and meaning – all of which maintain the optimal balance between the dual evolutionary purposes. Likewise, psychologist Eric Erickson24 saw the successful trajectory of child development marked by milestones of evermore complex positive emotions, one that parallels the optimal trajectory of moral development set forth by Lawrence Kohlberg.25 Indeed, along this optimal developmental path we forge empathic connections to others through our mirror neuron systems26 and other neural circuitry, those that allow us to emotionally resonate with the basic pains and complex joys of others. The ubiquitous role of positive emotions in maintaining physical, mental, and spiritual health has recently prompted Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant to cast them center stage in the context of “spiritual evolution.”27 Indeed, as theologian Gordon Kaufman suggested, it is such resplendent spiritual experiences that ground the theological enterprise. And we humans – from all walks of life – feel it in our bones that something is very right about every joyous experience in the positive emotional spectrum.

Reciprocity & the Simple Tit-for-tat Code

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Robert Wright demonstrates an intuitive sense of these cyclic dynamics in his discussions of the emergence of cooperation in our evolutionary history – something the purely Darwinian model of selfish gene competition cannot adequately explain. He draws upon game theory, which models the interactions of two players working toward some common goal, one that neither could attain alone. The paradigm example is two lions conspiring to take down a juicy gazelle, and the subsequent temptation of either party to cheat, to turn teeth on his comrade and hog the spoils. Evolutionary biologists look for optimal strategies, calculating the long-term returns for either the zero-sum competitive (I win – you lose) versus non-zero-sum cooperative (we each win some) behavioral regimes. While the selfish winner-take-all strategy has a bigger short-term payoff, over time and with multiple interactions the cooperative strategy turns out to be much more viable. But what happens is that an interim retaliative “tit-for-tat”28 strategy (do unto others what they have previously done unto you) is optimal until all parties are consistently cooperating. The underlying moral principle is that of reciprocity, where cooperators are rewarded by subsequent opportunities to interact and cheaters are punished by being shunned. As Robert Wright suggests, this dynamic can help explain how selfless even altruistic behaviors can emerge. Indeed, with the self-perpetuating nature of feedback, reciprocally positive exchanges can drive an upward spiral to where cooperation becomes the evolutionarily stable strategy, much like how a recessive, underdog gene can gain phenotypic dominance.

While Wright was right to root the moral logos in interpersonal reciprocity, he was wrong to point to reciprocal altruism without honoring the intrapersonal emotional dynamics that drive them. Indeed, reciprocal altruism is not “driven by natural selection” it is driven by emotion – the animating, vitalizing and guiding self-regulatory force! In humans, the simple “tit-for-tat” solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma that yields Wright’s “Nonzero” cooperation, is motivated by feelings of mutual respect, reciprocal trust and gratitude and in time admiration and devotion. Likewise, no one likes to be cheated or deceived. The feelings of sadness over the loss and anger or disgust over the betrayal drive subsequent avoidant responses to the arrogance, greed and contempt displayed by the cheater. While in lions these may be marked by simpler feelings of a pleasantly full belly, hunger pangs or painful battle wounds, or in a bacterium what Kauffman calls some crude sense of “yum” or “yuk”, they are all simply the more complex manifestations of the ancient feedback signals and their universal tit-for-tat self-regulatory rule! (Upward amplifying feedback triggering a positive, reinforcing, approach response, and downward damping yielding a negative, avoidant reversal. This simple edict has also been called the “win-stay lose-shift” strategy by evolutionary psychologist Martin Nowak.29) This is the simple tit-for-tat ethic born of the feedback coupling, that which mediates the dual purposes of self-preservation and self-development through hardwired hedonic behavior. So yes, when we participate in reciprocal cycles we reap the natural emotional consequences. When we do the right thing, we experience such personal rewards as joy and pride, as well as the social benefits of gratitude, admiration, and respect and loyalty directed back upon us.

But the news gets worse before it gets better. For Wright – along with many evolutionary biologists – have also failed to note how cyclic reciprocity also leads to the worst of human behavior: Self-perpetuating cycles of retaliatory vengeance – fueled by punitive exchanges of negative emotion can lead to a self-destructive downward spiral. Breaches of faith and trust prompt sadness, disgust, fear, and anger the latter of which is an approach response the “fight” side of fight and flight avoidant behavior – thwarting the emergent cooperation. Hence, the flip side of “one hand washing the other” is that of one hand slapping, punching, shooting, or severing another. It leads to Hatfields and McCoys, to divorces, to World Wars, and to the oxymoronic “Holy War” – and to the illusion of an intractable evil in human nature. This is perhaps why “wrath” is considered to be a deadly sin for humans, yet an appropriate quality for a

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deity who inspires God-fearing obedience. Indeed, the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) describes a wrathful, jealous, vengeful, and punitive God that a human must obey to remain moral. We have just learned, however, that living systems come equipped with an elegant internal self-control system. Anger seeks to preserve the self when one’s social environment is harmful, unsafe, unjust, exploitative, abusive, or toxic. Indeed, anger is the safeguard of the self-regulatory imperative itself, and its passionate force will ensure that external forms of manipulation, coercion, and forced obedience will never succeed. Nor should they. For by natural decree, we are internally motivated self-regulating creatures. We do not need external bribes, threats, or artificial rewards or punishments – which Kohlberg suggests to be the lowest forms of moral reasoning.

Third Party Morality Breeds Kantian Deception and Machiavellian Intelligence

There is still more bad news. For in our failure to understand our elegant self-regulatory sense, we have not only engaged in reciprocal cycles of blame and retaliation, we have violated its simple ethical code. In fact, instead of taking personal accountably and correctively reducing pain in accordance with our universal moral ethos and in the privacy of our personal space, we routinely express certain kinds of negative emotions publically to instill painful feelings in one another in order to enforce our own particular moral norms. Indeed, psychological anthropologist Richard Shweder30 noted this trend, and follow-up work by moral psychologist Paul Rozin demonstrated how facial and behavioral expressions of contempt (hate) are used to enforce ethics of community (local, consensual rules and moral codes), those of disgust to advocate ethics of divinity (religious beliefs about good, evil and moral righteousness), and those of anger to enforce ethics of autonomy (human rights, individual dignity)31. In terms of self-regulation, interpersonal exchanges of these particular emotions in turn elicit feelings of embarrassment, guilt, or shame which then gain submission by harnessing the aggressive “flight” avoidant behaviors. But this tactic is doomed to failure, for it might also prompt reciprocated expressions of anger, contempt, or disgust to the degree that the other seeks to preserve their ethical systems, inviting the “fight” response instead. In other words, instead of honoring nature’s simple rule about reducing the “wrong” environmental conditions, we have increased our distress signals many times over. We have inadvertently created an entire sphere of artificial man-made distress which we have pressed into service in a warped third-party version of social self-regulation. But this error has doomed us to self-destruction, for it negates - indeed reverses – nature’s moral simple code and predicts the self-perpetuating downward spiral that leads to Hatfields, McCoys, Mexican standoffs, and Holy Wars. Although he had it backwards, this error is the type of “radical evil” that Emmanuel Kant warned humanity against in his later years – an inversion of the true moral principles of reason with the selfish hedonics of the emotions (the “secret impulse of self-love falsely appearing as the idea of duty.”32) Friedrich Schleiermacher, on the other hand, had it right with his “affekt” theology,33 noting the deeper role of emotion in both self-consciousness and inducement to action.)

One Cardinal Sin: Emotional Self-Deception

In fact, according to the natural evaluative logos, while there is no real evil, there is one legitimate cardinal sin. This singular sin is that of self-deception, born of supressively denying our emotional sensory information. While the creator has delegated us tremendous creative freedom, this does not extend to the denial of the painful realities that result. For as, primatologist Frans DeWaal suggests, both personal and empathic pain are central to our “reality instinct.”34 The suppressive strategy that denies pain (or masks it beneath momentary, often addictive, pleasures) sets in motion the man-made pattern of “suffering” that has been offered up as evidence for the traditional notion of evil. It this singular sin that underlies all high level

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varieties of deception – ranging from Kantian half-truths and politically polite little white lies designed to spare people’s feelings, to the complex sorts of “Machiavellian intelligence”35 that justifies the manipulation of the masses by trusted leaders. It is this singular sin that thwarts communication, silences the inner moral voice and allows the rationalization of groupthink, duplicitous gossip, power abuses, boundary violations upon vulnerable others, and even self-abuse through inbred shame or guilt.

Every act of deception erodes human dignity and integrity. It prevents the dynamic cyclic flow of self-regulatory feedback and wreaks top-down havoc on the very biochemical signaling cascades that keep the body healthy, integrated and whole. In fact, in the deepest sense, all complex negative emotions are artifacts of these faulty cultural ideologies and external control strategies, they are as one anthropologist put it “unnatural emotions.” In short, the coherence of the self begins disintegrating as soon the strategy of self-deception is embraced, and the regularity and intensity of such complex pains as mistrust, shame, contempt, envy, greed, and hate shout to us that we are hurdling down the wrong track – in a hand-basket. But there is no original sin at their root, there is no Satanic serpent, or demonic devil leading us astray. There is not one whit of evidence to validate the assumption of evil. It was, and remains, an erroneous, judgmental, undignified, and blasphemous conjecture. Our suffering is due to our ignorance – often willful ignorance – and institutionalized misuse of our elegant moral compass. But with the multitude of global crises – from environmental destruction to fundamentalist Holy wars – we can no longer afford to blame outside forces or one another for our suffering, or deny accountability for our God-given creativity as self-regulating creatures in a self-organizing universe. For as Pogo put it: “We have met the enemy and it is us.”36

The Antidote: Positive Theology & Emotional Wisdom

The good news embedded in Pogo’s portentous proclamation is that the savior is also us. Redemptive self-salvation provides the core theme of this new positive theology, one that is no longer mired in the assumption of evil, one that reflects our innate divinity, honors the full breadth of our creative capacity, and is faithful to the wisdom of our God-given moral compass.

Indeed, as both Greg Epstein and Karen Armstrong suggest, it begins with Hillel’s simple Golden Rule from our Western Judeo-Christian roots: “What is hateful to you do not do to your fellow: this is the whole of the law.”37 This ethos is also implicit within Islam, and voiced explicitly in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Confucianism. It has been widely acknowledged because it taps the universal moral logos hardwired within our nature, and echoes the wisdom encoded within the negative emotional dimension – that of self-preservation, the most urgent of our dual evolutionary purposes. It honors the ultimate interconnected unity of all living selves. It highlights how it is only through a lack of empathic development that we believe there to be a division between self and the “other” at any level of self-organization - between my body and my mind, between the autonomous me and you, and between collective us and them. For via the magical and ubiquitous self-reflexive feedback loop, as theologian Martin Buber suggested, we manifest the fundamental “I-Thou” relationship, where at our innermost identity core we are at once both part and whole. To follow this singular directive is to abandon the self-destructive habits of win-lose competition, of blaming rather than accountable problem solving, of external authoritative force and punitive retributive justice – a throwback to the outdated primate dominance hierarchy – rather than genuine internal empowerment and compassionate, cooperative, reparative justice.

As for the positive particulars of self-development, they are captured by Joseph Campbell’s edict: “Follow your bliss”38 and the self-evident truths embodied in the American

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Declaration of Independence that all men are endowed by their creator with the unalienable rights for life, liberty and the “the pursuit of happiness.” For the subjective joys of self-discovery, self-development, and self-actualization largely take care of themselves when we are truly free, cooperatively self-empowered, and living with emotional integrity. Together these simple moral edicts keep us moving forward in positive, cooperative, approach mode – the right track for evolution for individuals as well as the species. Indeed, this elegant moral system requires only the five basic emotions, those which appear within the first six months of life, those that are observable across all human cultures in facial expressions, and those that speak our core moral language. As life progresses through its endless iterative feedback cycles, joy rewards all adaptive successes and naturally builds evermore complex feelings such as trust, curiosity, courage, gratitude, admiration, love, zeal, devotion, and faith. The vitalizing complex joys then feed-forward, informing and empowering optimal beliefs motives and action strategies that allow our creative freedom to evolve. Good feelings both push and pull us along, building upon themselves in a self-perpetuating positive feedback loop and delivering the upward spiral that characterizes the optimal destiny path. The four basic pains are our ever-protective sentries, calling immediate attention to self-relevant divergences and nudging us back on track. But we are hardwired to experience far more positive emotion than negative, which is why nature gives us four times more information about how to reduce and eliminate the harmful conditions that trigger our basic pains.

Indeed, emotion theorists Losada and Fredrickson have identified a minimal three-to-one ratio39 of positive to negative emotional experiences below which we cannot dip without languishing – experiencing the downward self-destructive negative spiral. Optimal responses foster human flourishing, naturally increasing the positive numerator such that we have at least eight times as many positive emotional experiences as negative. . In short, suffering is neither desirable nor good for the soul, nor is blame and punishment of self or other. Suffering concerns adopting beliefs and social practices that legitimize the “normalcy” of the complex negative emotions, and our misguided abuse of them in manipulation and control of one another.

Active Compassion

Instead, as Karen Armstrong suggests, we need a global ethos of compassion.40 Bolstered by the new science, this includes species-wide acknowledgment of the self-regulatory imperative and a full understanding of the emotional sensory system – the simple universal evaluative logos it offers, the needs and purposes it serves, the biases and autopilot behaviors it predicts, its optimal and deficit developmental trajectories, and the trial and error nature of the human experience. Genuine compassion embraces the value, ultimate connectedness, and mutual interdependence of all livings systems, denying any real boundary between parts and their greater wholes. Genuine compassion embraces the fact that learning error is inevitable, conflicts of interest and that power differentials are unavoidable due the natural developmental arc of life, as well as the faulty socio-cultural structures we have yet to dismantle. Genuine compassion embodies humility, embracing the mystery and the divine irony that we cannot fully understand the nuanced web-work of cause and effect, make accurate predictions or ever fully understand what is happening, let alone how it happens or why. But genuine compassion honors the dignity, integrity and divine potentials and the inner impetus to actualize them. It takes accountability for whatever painful challenges and delightful surprises arrive at one’s doorstep and mines the deep personal meaning within each experience. It demands honesty, open communication, direct interpersonal feedback, correlation between one’s words and actions, and integrity of identity across time and space rather than denial, duplicity, deception, fragmentation, groupthink, and/or situational ethics.

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But genuine compassion also honors the spirit of anger, it demands social accountability for perceived violations of individual liberty, privacy, and dignity without excessive blame or donning rigid mantles of victim and perpetrator – for we will all play both roles inadvertently. As such, compassion offers a blanket of mutual grace and preemptive forgiveness for the accidental and incidental harms we cause through genuine learning error, and it offers a natural structure for repairing compromised or broken social bonds. Indeed, genuine compassion honors the spirit of “Teshuva”41 from the Jewish tradition. This is an active approach to forgiveness, involving a two-way solicitation and offering of apologies and active restitution for violations in ways that restore integrity to both parties, rebuild the compromised bond, and achieve redemptive closure.

Genuine compassion also honors the deeper rhythms, grander cycles and balancing mechanisms of nature and the multiple levels of meaning they bear. Compassion is an active allowing, a mindful Zen-like surrender to the greater ebb and flow of providence should even the most honorable creative efforts fail to manifest desirable outcomes in a timely manner. Indeed, theologian Gordon Kaufman’s construction of God as the “serendipitous” creativity of the universe, acknowledges such divine mysteries as causality, time, Jungian synchronicity, and outrageous fortune - those natural harmonic coincidences that often give rise to unfounded superstition. But through this alternative lens, the faithful can follow the serendipitous trail of bread-crumbs in daily affairs, creatively extracting and infusing multiple levels of contextual meaning across time, space, and self; and in doing so can directly experience the deliberate hand of God.

Conclusion

So there you have it. In answer to Wright’s call to challenge, we have travelled to the hallowed territory where Science and Religion can peacefully coexist – that of evolutionary theory. But upon arrival at the unifying biofrontier we are greeted by pioneering theologian Gordon Kaufman and scientist Stuart Kauffman who together offer a more elegant picture of evolution, one that includes the entire bottom-up dimension of self-organization, and leads us to the fundamental and majestic feedback loop.

With their fusion, we have unleashed the mushroom cloud power of the algorithm of natural selection, discovering untold “evelations” encoded within the Book of Nature. These revelations allow the faithful – as well as the skeptical - to not only find meaning and purpose in nature’s creative evolutionary process, but also to ground both the flesh-thrilling and bone-chilling dimensions of human experience in spiritual truths about our divine nature and our sacred destiny path. But they do not require the strictly constrained role of God set forth in Wright’s Deistic vision, nor do they remove God from the causal loop or from the ongoing relational presence in our day-to-day lives. In fact, they suggest that God has graciously - and perhaps perniciously - shared his creative omnipotence with us, breathing the spiritually animating and guiding self-regulatory forces directly into our material being. As a generous maternal God of Mercy “He” has honored us with creative consciousness and self-developmental freedom, and as paternal God of Justice He has challenged us to use our gifts wisely, with dignity, egalitarian respect, and accountability – to preserve, replenish, and sustain ourselves and the diverse-yet-unified living bounty of the Creation – or else. We must indeed be obedient to His divine ethical logos, lest we reap the self-destructive consequences we choose to sew. The task now at hand is to cough up the judgments of good and evil upon which we have been choking, and inspire reattunement to His divine evaluations of right and wrong states of balanced being.

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Indeed, we have allowed Wright’s Trojan Horse to enter the gate and pour forth with the demise of both the naturalistic fallacy and the notion of evil. In doing so, we find we have lost nothing of value, and can bid a long overdue good riddance to the “red in tooth and claw” blasphemy. For when the dust clears, we now find nature to be green with grace and embrace, and the real moral elephant looms large into view – the elegant self-regulatory sense we experience as human emotion. In its ancient evaluative code, its motivational drivers, and sensory perceptions, we find nature’s vitalizing, animating and guiding forces, those traditionally associated spirit or soul, our umbilical tether to a supernatural creator. At nature’s innermost physical core we find her hidden order, the mathematical logos which both science and religion have embraced as the Holy Grail for claims of Truth. And herein we find in the simple iterative, self-reflexive feedback loop – the ground zero source of nature’s omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolance.

Wright has indeed pointed the way to an elegant Pantheistic worldview with a full and complete moral system readily observable within the Book of Nature. But the Pantheistic door also remains open for those theologians who prefer a more transcendent supernatural approach to the divine mysteries of consciousness and information. They are free to build an entire Panentheistic dome to surround this naturalistic edifice by opting for Panpsychism.42 This is the doctrine wherein Leibniz, Whitehead, and others have suggested, consciousness goes all the way down – inherent in the smallest bits of matter and the very energetic fabric of the universe. They can happily locate God as the Universal Self, the Divine Conscious Mind of Eastern tradition, the informing intelligence driving the mathematical order, precision, and creativity of the universe. Indeed, the Vedic metaphor of Indra’s Net offers an elegant depiction of nature’s intricate interactive self-organizing web-work. And through its ingenious self-reflexive feedback loop we find manifest the relational communicative link through which all God’s creatures can actively and uniquely participate in the ongoing process of serendipitous co-creation. Those more scientifically inclined, can locate a more supernatural God in the non-local quantum unity, in the wave aspect of all particles, and the informational substrate of all possible dimensions and worlds, multiple universes, or probable realities of a potentially infinite multi-verse – with the fundamental feedback loop mediating phase transitions between quantum probabilities and actualized realities. Such a view would offer mechanistic explanations for inter-cessionary prayer, anomalous, asynchronous, and revelatory experience, and locate the juncture of divine providence and personal creativity.

But most importantly, in terms of morality it matters not where theologians choose to draw the line. For, Wright was right all along. As has been suggested time and again throughout human history, humans are naturally imbued with a divine and unerring moral sense. And while the top-down process of natural selection may not have a “purpose”, the bottom-up adaptive behaviors of living agents – from the single celled ameba to the complex human – most certainly do. When we follow the journey initiated by Wright’s challenge to its logical conclusion, we do indeed find a hidden order and moral logos with an elegance and magnitude beyond his wildest dreams. For when we follow our Creator’s guidance, we are on track to become all that He is, we are co-creating ourselves in His image. And whether or not God exists in the past or the present, when we bear True North in “authentic happiness,” as positive psychologist Martin Seligman put it: “Perhaps, just perhaps, God comes at the end.”43

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