Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action (review)

Philip Clayton, Ingraham Professor of Theology at Claremont School of Theology, is widely recognized both as a major contributor to contemporary discussions of the relations between science and religion and as a philosopher-theologian of great originality. Although Clayton invariably couches his arguments and conclusions in fallibilist terms, this is, by any measure, an ambitious book. It is the closest thing yet to his magnum opus. Included are revisions of fifteen previously published articles that appeared between 1997 and 2008 and revisions of two lectures delivered at Claremont in 2004.

Following the editor's introduction, the book is divided into five parts. Part 1 could be read as a commentary on Whitehead's statement in Science and the Modern World that "Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science." The rise in the prestige of science since the seventeenth century and the whittling away of the metaphysical certainties of religion have jeopardized the very possibility of theology. Richard Dawkins, as is well known, claims that theology has no more content than the study of leprechauns. Clayton banks that Dawkins is wrong. He advocates a method for theology that "builds the controversial nature of religious belief into theology itself" (26). This is implicit in his concept of the "secular believer," one who participates in the life of a religious community while entertaining doubts about its truth claims (47, 58). Clayton refuses to insulate theology from scientific or philosophic critique. This is not to say that he opts for treating the activity of God as a scientific hypothesis, after the manner of the new atheists and the intelligent design creationists. Rather, Clayton seeks what he calls maximum traction (54f) between science and theology. He argues that when the rubber hits the road, so to speak, the frontiers of science point beyond themselves to theological questions and that theology, attentive to science, can be enriched by its discoveries.

Clayton's rapprochement between science and theology begins in earnest in part 2, on emergence. Philosophers have long recognized that proponents of reducing mental processes to brain processes can offer only promissory notes, but the so-called "hard problems" of consciousness remain—first person ascriptions, intentionality, and qualia. Clayton notes that the reductionist program is not only in trouble at the level of mind but also at every intersection where one scientific inquiry meets another. Following Harold Morowitz, Clayton thinks there may be as many as twenty-eight distinct levels of emergence (68, 191). Emergence theory does not posit properties that can exist independently of a physical substrate and the laws that govern it, as in Descartes' res cogitans ; rather, emergent properties exhibit dynamics that go beyond the substrate and its laws without contradicting them. For example, cells, unlike the atoms of which they are composed, reproduce themselves, and there is a science of how this is done that introduces ideas (like information) that are not part of atomic theory. Clayton's subtle but rich suggestion, inspired by Kant, is that preconscious biological systems exhibit "purposiveness without purpose" (79). The "strong emergence" that Clayton defends holds that emergent qualities bring with them emergent causal powers. At the highest levels available to our inspection, the emergent qualities are mental and perhaps even spiritual—although Clayton never says precisely what he means by spiritual qualities and powers (cf. 95).

The book's third and fourth parts leave empirical science and ascend into more rarified speculation. The trajectory of emergentism, if it leads to spiritual properties, suggests that a divine being, if such exists, is the end product of the evolutionary ladder of complexification. This was Samuel Alexander's view. Clayton accepts that it is best to conceive the deity as in some respects dependent on creatures, even as the one "in whom we live, move, and have our being," but he denies that God is a product of the universe's processes. This puts him in the...