God's Ecstasy The Creation of a Self-Creating World

Rarely have I read so captivating a dicussion of the evolution of life, indeed of the universe, in terms of self organization. Bruteau shows that the natural selection of random mutations by themselves cannot explain evolution; the improbabillities are too high. But an inherent capacity for self organization gets around the improbabillities. Self organization is apparent from the Big Bang on, from the first particles combining into atoms all the way up to humans combining into cultures and societies. Her discussion of the Big Bang in terms of Guth's inflation theory is the clearest I have yet read. She well explains how, as new levels of complexity evolve, so also do new emergent properties that are not inherent in the component parts. She makes an excellent case for the argument that reality arises from the relationship between things and not in the things as such independent of other connections. She also makes a good case for the existence of mind and consciousness as a ground of being, and not an epiphenomenon of the material brain although our brain clearly governs how we experience that consciousness. In this discussion I wish she had drawn more from quantum physics and the nature of the wave/particle duality of the sub-atomic physical particles that make up matter to reinforce her point. (Unobserved, a sub-atomic particle behaves like a wave distributed in space and lacking either matter or energy. It is merely a set of probabilities. But once the wave is subjected to observation, it collapses into a definite particle of matter containing both matter and energy in a specific location. Conclusion: it takes a pre-existing observer-mind or consciousness to collapse the wave function. Thus one can argue that matter arises from mind and not the other way around and thus support the belief in some kind of cosmic consciousness in which we all share.

An extremely interesting book which gives an original view of the world, as a dynamic symbiosis reproducing the pattern of the Trinity at every scale of the cosmos. It starts with an original insight on Trinity itself, based on the conclusion that if God is to be personalized, the minimum required is to do so in three divine persons. Most civilizations have recognized that plural begins at three and not two, which is only a dual, sometimes with a special vocabulary attached to it. This minimum requirement of a plurality of persons is in turn due to the fact that there is no such thing as one person. Persons exist only in terms of relationship to one another. To exist is dynamic, not static. Persons are subjects, not objects, they are differentiated not by their descriptions but by their acts. The book offers a lot of scientific material on how the universe developed, including the inflation scenario, and subsequent evolution up to chemistry and biology. The evolution of life is seen as the natural result of replication of living creatures, plus variations due to random errors in the replication process and selection of the fittest among these variations. One amazing conclusion of this process is that all these marvelous things that we can admire in nature are not there by chance, but simply because being possible, they were necessarily bound to come into being one day or the other. The presence of God is felt everywhere in the world, but not by means of interference, because only finite beings can be agents in finite interactions. The infinite cannot take one point of view rather than another. Many details support the theory, but can be skipped without major damage by the readers who do not feel at ease in such technical considerations. The book is full of valuable material for helping understand the intricate relationship of everything in this world. It is also interesting on the practical level as it leads towards a consistent harmony between religious and secular life, between the concern for God and the concern for the world including ourselves.

This is one of the most beautiful, short, multidisciplined, easy to be engaged with but not simple books I've read on reframing the relationship of science and christianity. She sees them as complementary. Beatrice addresses many of the questions I had that unanswered, moved me away from Christianity. She also reinterprets key Christion concepts that made little sense to me in the past. Now I am reconsidering. Beatrice sees the process known as complexity at the heart of this self creating world, God as person-community, the Trinity as balancing unity and diversity and its value in the refusal to let the tension collapse either in favor of unity or diversity. She sees us as pregnant with emerging Divinity, but knows our pregnancy may go undetected- we may not interpret our life in such terms. She sees the real basis for sin in the failure to find the Absolute in oneself and therefore not in others, in being love deficient, and the whole program of sin 'as founded on falsehood and ignorance.' She challenges us to live consciously in this self-creating world, finding our meaningful contribution in the general improvisation. Can the Creator create a universe that will more and more particiapte in its own conscious creation? How are we engaging in this co-creation?