Those who have read my blogs over the past few years know that during the latter half of the seventh decade of my life, I’ve been looking for my own “theory of everything.” How can science and theology be reconciled with philosophy and psychology under one theoretical umbrella? How can the past be reconciled with the present and the future, and life with death, or the normal with the paranormal? My quest arises from my steadfast belief in Christianity. So, please be patient and let me walk you to the point I am at today.
In this post, I propose that the presence of God is actually everywhere in creation, from the microscopic world to the macro. From our planet to the furthest reaches of the universe, this idea parallels a philosophical argument called panpsychism. Panpsychism suggests that there is a universal consciousness or mind that unites everything from atoms and amino acids to rocks and trees, and to people and pulsars. It posits that even nonliving “objects,” such as rocks, “experience” different states and have some sort of rudimentary and thus limited awareness that we cannot observe or record. There is much more here than meets the eye, as we’ll shortly see.
Scripture relates that God’s presence is in everything, everywhere, all at once. His grace, providence, guidance, mercy, and power percolate throughout His creation, but God is not the same as His creation. If He were, we might find ourselves worshiping groves of sacred oaks or mineral springs. We must be careful to worship God and not His creation (Romans 1:25), even if creation convinces us that there must be a creator—an intelligent designer, if you wish. When I write that God’s mercy or grace is present, I refer to His care even before we come to faith. St. Augustine (354 AD–430 AD) wrote, “You were with me when I was not with You” (Confessions 11.2). Martin Luther (1483 AD–1546 AD) was walking with a friend in a thunderstorm in the year 1505 when he was young, and his friend was struck by lightning and died. Luther was spared, even though he was not a Christian at the time.
Christianity teaches that God is omnipresent. Proverbs 15:3 says, “The eyes of the LORD are everywhere, keeping watch on the wicked and the good.” Does “everywhere” mean only everywhere on planet Earth? What about on Kepler-452b, 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus? Is God also there? King David writes, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in hell, you are there. Is God simultaneously in two places at once, or does He have an itinerary where He makes rounds?
Then, there are passages in the Bible that speak to rocks and trees, heaven and earth. For example:
“The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19) . . .
“Let everything that has breath praise the LORD” (Ps 150) . . .
“Praise him, sun and moon… mountains and all hills” (Ps 148) . . .
“The trees of the field will clap their hands” (Isa 55:12) . . .
“The stones will cry out” (Lk 19:40; cf. Hab 2:11) . . .
“The sea looked and fled” (Ps 114:3) . . .
“Creation groans” awaiting renewal (Rom 8:19–23) . . .
Crying stones, declarations from the stars, trees clapping their hands, a sea that watches in horror—rationalists and nonbelievers will dismiss these references as personifications or anthropomorphisms. We know these terms; we likely learned them in fifth grade. Others will say these are just literary devices. Certainly, a stone cannot cry. But why then does Jesus open the door a crack? Is this hyperbole? Or is it something more?
Let’s look at rocks a bit more closely
It’s one thing to say that people have much in common with the animal kingdom. We all move, breathe, digest, and have a beginning and an ending. We are also similar in at least one fundamental way to plants and trees because flora and fauna both have DNA with chromosomes and genes. The same four nucleotide bases are shared between them and us in our DNA: guanine (G), cytosine (C), adenine (A), and thymine (T). But rocks and mountains?! You might have heard the term that someone is “as dumb as a rock.” We know rocks are hard. If we are flying in an airplane and the passenger next to us says that he speaks to rocks and they speak back, we hope that the stewardess will allow us to move to another seat. But there is much more to the story. Let’s take a closer look.
A rock is much more than, well, a rock. For the purposes of explanation, let’s imagine a large boulder somewhat larger than an SUV. We have thousands of boulders–and quite a few SUV’s–in New England. These boulders were carried south by glaciers from the area of Hudson Bay during the last ice age. There are millions of particles in motion in a rock. A rock is not just a hard lump of matter. There are quarks, electrons, and neutrinos, as well as photons in every sort of rock, and these particles are all in constant motion. When you have matter, you also have energy, or at the very least, the potential for energy. For example, there are rocks with uranium that emit heat and radioactive particles. Because sound waves pass through rocks via phonons, there are multiple types of often repeating patterns of sonic vibrations as the phonons pass through a rock. So even though the appearance of a large boulder may not change from century to century, except for some weathering on the surface, a rock is home to a bustling community within. This community may provide additional activities within the rock. Rocks are made up of sodium, potassium, calcium, oxygen, water and other elements in varying degrees even as humans are. Certain rocks also contain gasses such as hydrogen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane.
Can rocks feel?
If rocks are part of a greater consciousness in our universe, does that mean a rock can feel pain? Certainly not in the way we understand it, but perhaps in a way we are not aware of. The reason we feel pain is that we have a nervous system to relay signals to our brain. If you get pricked on your finger by a thorn, the stimulus must travel to your brain, where it is processed. Is this a pleasant sensation? Is this an unpleasant sensation? Your brain decides. If this person has an accident to his or her spine and afterwards suffers from quadriplegia, meaning they cannot feel their hands, what then? If you prick their finger with a thorn, they don’t perceive the pain. But does that mean the pain isn’t real? What if this person’s hand was burned by a hot pan or iron coming into contact with his skin? Again, there is no sensation of pain, but the hand will develop an injury. Skin may blister, tissues become inflamed, and so on. Likewise, you can damage the exterior of a rock and it would not feel anything either.
And before we dismiss a rock because it does not appear to perceive pain, we should realize that our brain, itself, does not perceive pain either. This is because our brains lack nociceptors. However, our brain can generate pain from injury or tissue damage elsewhere in our body.
Memory
We can remember things that happen to us, and our bodies sometimes store a visible record of an event. For example, we may have seen burn scars on someone; if severe enough, they persist. Trees carry burn scars as well as you can see on the diagram, and their growth rings can indicate the year an event occurred, such as when the tree suffered from a drought or other traumatic events. Not only that, our cells, the cells of the animal kingdom in general, and the cells of plants and trees all have a memory. For example:
Plants . . . continuously receive and integrate environmental information and adjust their growth and development to favour fitness and survival. When this integration of information affects subsequent life stages or the development of subsequent generations, it can be considered an environmental memory. Thus, plant memory is a relevant mechanism by which plants respond adaptively to different environments. If the cost of maintaining the response is offset by its benefits, it may influence evolutionary trajectories. As such, plant memory has a sophisticated underlying molecular mechanism with multiple components and layers.
panpsychism is the philosophical position that consciousness, mind, or experience is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of all matter. This means that, in some sense, all matter—including rocks—has some form of mind-like quality or proto-consciousness, though not in the way minds or brains do
The “memory” of rocks is obviously not a matter consciousness life we have, but rather have experienced events (such as the ice age perhaps, or being submerged for eons at the bottom of the ocean).
Rocks can change over the years (over the thousands or millions of years). Some types of rocks add to their size through volcanism. Some rocks change shape. Tectonic processes again can cause this. So can frost or freezing as it enters the cracks in a rock, splitting off pieces over time. And most types of rocks can change shape and decrease in size from weathering.
An error in panpsychism is to make trees and rocks into what Lewis or Tolkien would in their stories of Narnia and Middle Earth. To ascribe higher levels of consciousness to them or some magical properties is push the door of animism open. Christians in some cultures do allow for some form of animism (e.g., tree spirits) as long as it is understood that these are created, fallen beings as we are and are not to be worshipped. Closer to the core of traditional Christianity and as practices by St. Francis of Assisi is the notion that we can “commune” with nature, enjoy a fellowship of sorts. In some places today Catholic priests have a certain calendar day where they encourage their parishoners to being their pets to church for a blessing. I personally share God’s love with our golden retriever Molly, and speak to the birds and trees of our creator. And speaking of trees, it is also a demonstrable fact that having trees on your property can have a beneficial effect on your blood pressure vis-à-vis not having any trees.
“. . . if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.” Psalm 139:8
Wolf 359 Credit: Lukasz Pawel Szczepanski (Shutterstock)
Stranger things
There are two other passages in Scripture that I believe support panpsychism to some degree. At the very least, these verses are striking and convey a powerful message in a subtextual way. The first case was when the disciple Peter’s mother-in-law was taken ill with a fever of unknown etiology. The term “unknown etiology” is used today when we do not know the cause of an affliction. People back then would get fevers if they had been out in the heat and sun for too long, or if they had an infection or an earache. We have probably all experienced a fever at some time or another that came suddenly and left us just as quickly. Five or six hours later, back to normal—no accompanying sore throat, stomach pains, or headache. Just a fever. This particular fever that afflicted Peter’s mother-in-law was serious enough that her family asked Jesus for his help; she was burning up. We take this account from Luke (4:39), who was a physician and well-acquainted with fevers himself. Jesus came, of course. By then in his ministry, Jesus had healed countless numbers of people with many different ailments. Whenever Jesus healed or restored someone, certain Greek verbs were used by the Gospel writers, including Dr. Luke himself. However, Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic, so the authors of the four Gospels had to know as much Greek as Aramaic to find the perfect match to communicate what Jesus was saying as they wrote their accounts in Greek. Possibly the most common word used when Jesus healed people is ἰάσατο (“healed”). This word also means “cured” or “restored.” In other cases, θεράπευσεν, meaning “attend to,” or “care for,” was used. There are other words that I need not mention, which speak of being “cleansed” or “made whole.” In this case, Jesus’ healing is described by the word “rebuke” (ἐπετίμησεν). This is the simple past tense of the verb. The word “rebuke” back then means the same as it does today. If you come to work twenty minutes late, your supervisor rebukes you for being late; in other words, he or she “scolds,” “censures,” “corrects,” or “chews you out.”
To the point: you can heal a tree. You can restore a home that you just purchased. You can care for your car. But how do you scold (rebuke) a potted plant? How do you chew out (rebuke) a broken dish? Jesus and Luke chose a word that implied this was no ordinary fever that required a conventional cure (such as aspirin and bed rest). He spoke to the fever in a way that suggested it knew what he was demanding of it. There was a confrontation between the fever and Jesus, and Jesus won. The fever left. The implication is that there was some sort of “spirit” of the fever or a fever-causing entity that was making Peter’s mother-in-law ill. Jesus knew this, which is why he didn’t try to heal her the same way he healed people with cancer or blindness. But to Peter, his wife, and the other family members, they thought it was just a fever.
I’ve personally tangled with this spirit or one like it when I was younger, and that is a story for another day. Nor should we think that any or every fever is a spiritual issue; but this one was. The best approach is to think “horses, not zebras,” when you hear hoofbeats. In other words, look for simple, obvious, natural causes before considering complicated, insidious, and supernatural ones. As Sigmund Freud once said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
The word “rebuke,” most often used by Jesus in casting out demons, is also used when Jesus was in a boat with his disciples (Matthew 8:26) and a fierce squall arose. Now, taken in full context, Jesus was on his way to Gadara, where he would deliver two people who were demon-possessed. It is entirely possible that this squall was an assassination attempt by Satan to keep Jesus from reaching the far shore and casting out the demons. Again, Jesus did not pray for the storm to stop, or for the boat not to sink. He didn’t pray that they would reach the far shore safely. Instead, he addressed the roaring tempest as if it were a sentient being and demanded that it stop—immediately! And it did. Jesus and his disciples reached Gadara without further incident; the two demoniacs showed up, Jesus cast out the demons, and the rest is history.
So, it seems that there are times—perhaps very rare and highly unusual times—when trees, mountains, fevers, storms, and even donkeys (Numbers 21:22ff) are capable of much more than we give them credit for. Perhaps some sort of threshold or tipping point must be reached for that to happen, but if the Bible is any indication, strange things can and do happen.
Recent discoveries from the JWST telescope and other instruments suggest that our universe is laid out like the neural networks in our brains. Galaxies and nebulae are connected by strands of cosmic gas, not all of which are readily observable. These strands are billions and billions of miles long. If the working hypothesis is correct, information could be quickly passed from one node (galaxy) to another. This makes one think of what is called “quantum entanglement.” Photons, electrons, and even atoms can become “entangled” or joined together in some yet-unknown manner, such that what happens to one of the two particles occurs simultaneously in the other particle, even though they are light-years apart from each other.
It is explained as follows:
Like our nervous system, the Universe has a highly interconnected, hierarchical organization. The estimated 200 billion detectable galaxies aren’t distributed randomly, but lumped together by gravity into clusters that form even larger clusters, which are connected to one another by “galactic filaments,” or long thin threads of galaxies. When one zooms out to envision the cosmos as a whole, the “cosmic web” formed by these clusters and filaments looks strikingly similar to the “connectome,” a term that refers to the complete wiring diagram of the brain, which is formed by neurons and their synaptic connections. Neurons in the brain also form clusters, which are grouped into larger clusters, and are connected by filaments called axons, which transmit electrical signals across the cognitive system.
There are things I wanted to know. For example, some autistic children have astonishing talents for breaking encryption. From where do they get these abilities, or the skill to play Schubert on the piano after hearing a piece of his music only once? Then, there are curiosities throughout history. These anomalies, whether near-death experiences or other strange-but-true accounts, are entirely out of place in our reality and are just loose threads. More concerning, and—according to Congress—a matter of national security, are the strange aircraft being encountered by U.S. Navy pilots in specific restricted airspaces off the U.S. coast or in proximity to highly sensitive military reservations. These are not machines as we understand them. They don’t appear to have engines. They can hover without twitching in a gale. They fly up to 15,000 miles per hour, which is much faster than any aircraft designed by humans, and then they stop on a dime, defying the laws of physics. They are being detected at great depths by U.S. submarines as well as by government airborne surveillance craft and drones, such as Reapers, occasionally at great altitudes. We can write them off as misrepresentations of common objects, optical illusions, inebriated witnesses, pranks and hoaxes, hysteria, and so on, leaving only three percent unexplained after a thorough investigation. But the sheer number of reports means that for every one thousand reports, more than two dozen are complete mysteries. And that’s just from sightings that people took the time and trouble to report and be interviewed. String theory, an offshoot of quantum physics, tells us that there might be other worlds, other dimensions, and so forth.
Cosmic “hiccups” might allow people or animals to occasionally find themselves somewhere other than Kansas. Gamma-ray bursts, cosmic strings, and high-energy particle collisions created by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). With a tunnel several hundred feet deep near Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC could theoretically create a temporary rift, enough for mice and men to pass through. Whether they could survive or return is a different matter.
If panpsychism were true
I’ve never been completely satisfied with the way evangelicalism is taught and practiced. I think we could learn a lot from Catholicism in some areas. I see humans as created in the image of God, and I regard man (and woman) as the crowning achievement in creation (at least as far as our planet is concerned). There may be life elsewhere in the universe, but there is not a shred of evidence to date that this is or ever was the case. I talk about the possibility of life elsewhere here.
I also see a stronger connection between people, other forms of life on our planet (including what we might not specifically consider life), and the greater cosmos. This concept is known as panpsychism. Witness this AI image of St. Francis preaching to the birds. To him they were life family.
We can observe the consequences of this disconnect through the positions that evangelical “leaders” have taken in their haste to rid our country of undocumented immigrants. Scripture makes no distinction between documented and undocumented individuals; it says we should love them as we love ourselves (Leviticus 19:34). Clearly, many of us do not.
Credit: An AI image of a famous drawing.
I’ve also been frustrated by the tortured explanations offered to clarify difficult passages in the Bible. While all Scripture is “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16-17), meaning it is equally inspired, many of us today are swayed more by the epistles of Paul than by the Gospels of Jesus. Perhaps this is because Jesus was a revolutionary in contrast to Paul, and following Paul’s teachings represents the path of least resistance.
As evangelicals, we tend not to contemplate what we believe. We assert that Jesus was “100% man and 100% God,” but what does that really mean? Was there an empty form of a fetus that Jesus entered in utero, or was there a fetus that contained the genes of Jesus’ ancestors? In that case, from whence did the human mind of Jesus come? We know from the Gospels that Jesus did not possess full knowledge as God did. For instance, when the man brought his epileptic son to Jesus, He asked him how long the boy had struggled with epilepsy because Jesus didn’t know. Nor did Jesus know the identity of the woman who touched His robe, nor did He know the day or hour of His return.
This connection might include those who died in Christ. On the one hand, we are forbidden to try to communicate with the dead, and rightly so; otherwise, we would be led astray by those impersonating the dead. On the other hand, there is that “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) that encourages us by their examples, going back to Abraham or perhaps even further.
We have a responsibility to care for our planet, including other life forms that we largely ignore or arrogantly abuse. This responsibility extends to others, which we often only pay lip service to. I understand that God has provided plants and animals for our consumption, and I personally partake in both, but that places a significant responsibility on me toward the environment. When we harvest timber for homes or other uses, we should replace the trees in slightly greater numbers to compensate for disease or other natural disasters. We should also refrain from hunting species to the brink of extinction (whales, for instance).
The Problem of Consciousness
There is a fundamental problem that panpsychism could go a long way toward solving. This problem deals with how matter—in this case, neurons and the gray and white matter of our brains—can give rise to the emergent property of consciousness, which intuitively and absolutely is not perceived as matter by the average philosopher or theologian.
Because panpsychism suggests that there is a minuscule degree of consciousness at the cellular level of living organisms—keeping it simple—an organ such as the brain, with an estimated 86 billion neurons, becomes something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts as the billions of bits of consciousness merge. The individual neurons, in some yet unknown fashion, assemble themselves together to develop a more sophisticated form of consciousness.
Current research suggests that various organs in the body, such as the heart and intestines, may also contribute to consciousness. Consider the phenomenon whereby someone who receives a kidney transplant, liver transplant, or another organ from a deceased person suddenly behaves in ways reminiscent of the donor, adopting certain likes or dislikes and displaying behaviors similar to those of the donor.
Often in scientific research, if we cannot know what something is or what causes a certain behavior, we can at least say what it is not. Not so with consciousness. This is why unusual and, frankly, wacky theories keep popping up; one is as likely to be true as another (at least for now).
When elms and pines come under attack by leaf-eating caterpillars, they detect the caterpillar's saliva and release pheromones that attract parasitic wasps. The wasps then lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, and the wasp larvae eat the caterpillars from the inside out.
This is perfectly normal behavior in a panpsychistic world.
Moral Behavior in the Animal Kingdom
Panpsychism can explain why dolphins exhibit teamwork as they hunt and why they assist one another when one is sick or injured. They also help during the birth of a calf, nudging the newborn dolphin to the surface of the ocean for its first breath. Primates share many of the same behaviors and emotions that humans do. Many pet dogs sense when a person in their household is sick, injured, or grieving, and they seek to comfort or otherwise assist their human caregivers. Elephants mourn the death of a member of their herd and have been observed breaking off the tusks of a dead elephant and burying them, as if to deny poachers of ill-gotten gains.
Summary
There are many other mysteries that panpsychism addresses in the areas of physics and cosmology, specifically quantum wave collapse, quantum entanglement, the fine-tuning problem, the arrow of time, cosmic inflation, complexity, dark matter, and so on. I won’t go into these areas because I’d have to spend a good amount of time on background and context, but suffice it to say that you can conduct Boolean searches on your own using the keyword “panpsychism.”
We know that God has established a natural order, forces, and timelines in our universe that typically run like clockwork. We can see from the life of Jesus and elsewhere in the Old Testament and the book of Revelation that God is not necessarily confined to these mechanisms when He deals with us. For example, it takes wine anywhere from several days to several months to ferment. Yet, at the wedding in Cana, Jesus turned water into wine in a matter of minutes. If left to nature, the guests would have left the celebration days before the wine was ready. I don’t expect to hear talking animals or crying stones in my lifetime, but in an apocalyptic setting, who knows what might happen?
I think the message I would leave you with is that we are closer to creation than we think. Strip mining large tracts of land in West Virginia by ripping off the surface growth, or burning hundreds of acres of the Amazon forest every single day, is not a cause for celebration. Nor is pollution. Christians need to be much better stewards than they have been, and it might not be a bad idea to teach this in church and Sunday School, either.
