"The proposition and development of the "panpsychism process of organism" means re-imagining the "consciousness of the universe" as a living collective and evolving dynamic of "creational panpsychism" where normal, everyday pancreational contexts point to the panexperiential, panexistential, and panpsychic elements of creation and creation's God." - re slater
Creational Beingness
If we are in agreement that the Spirit of God enlivens all creation at its birth with a divine vibrancy of possibility, renewal, re-creation, and wellbeing, then we are travelling together in healthy circles of potentiality.
Meaningfully, God has birthed creation with the urge to be more than itself - within its very soul and its cosmic structures - against the destructive urges which would tear it apart from the connectivity creation feels within itself and all that is encompassed within its "being, energy, or cosmic comportments".
To this testament words fail. Yet this is what is meant by creational "urgency" imbued by the living God when "birthing or transferring" Himself (sic, God's Image; God's Divine Being) into the evolutionary birth of creation. God has birthed creation with a divinity fully inhabiting all creational (or cosmic) structures. This is what gives to creation its urgency, its purpose, its teleology: God's Self.
Creation's urgency, purpose, or teleology comes from God's Self.
Mankind is but the sum of all which came before it. Mankind is not the exception to creational homogeneity. Humanity is evolved from within the greater context of creation's "soul, consciousness, or beingness," however we try to explain it. Mere words fail. Even the bible cannot describe creation's "soul" apart from using anthropomorphic terms telling of stones crying out, trees clapping their hands, and the mountains dancing for joy.
Man is not the creational exception to consciouness
Cosmic Consciousness
God has birthed creation from Himself. His Essence, Soul, Being has been birthed into creation. Humanity is but one of many "children" of God. It is what is meant by "cosmic consciousness all the way down". Consciouness, beingness, soulness is not singular to the human experience. However it is described by the term panpsychism it tells us God's Self is within the thing He has made.
Which is why we describe God and Creation as essentially similar yet dissimilar in ontological self. One is God - the other is created. But they are the same thing - filled with agency, love, generative wellbeing, purposeful drive for creativity and novelty, and so forth.
Besides the difference of ontological being would be the difference of holiness versus sin. Creation bears both. God does not. It is the theological problem of freewill agency. With agency comes the matter of sin and how it does not love, nor fellowship, union, connectedness, wellbeing, peace, or harmony. Agency brings with it a rogue's gallery of destructive urges to beingness, selfhood, consciousness, etc. It is the reason Christ came to atone for sin and remove its destructiveness through Himself and within the course of history as it plays out. We know this as the Christian hope.
Panpsychism is not a Separatistic Emergent Process
Cosmic conscious panpsychism stands against the emergentist position of a separately evolved process birthed out of nowhere, out of the ether as it were. It is the theoretical posit of an action unlike any action, trait, or ontology found within creation itself.
Non-Christian emergentists posit the exterior condition of the development of neurological brain connectivity which may then form an exotic (out of nothingness) consciousness unfamiliar to creation's interior processes. Consequently, this esoteric element of "consciousness" came from nowhere but the process itself.
Christian emergentists posit the non-evolutionary development of humanity as a (singular) miraculous event bring consciousness along with it. Most likely from the God which created mankind. A humanity which shares likeness with creation only in that creation shares a likeness with God. In this process, it is an exterior event disconnected from creation's (evolutionary) process of development. Thus it is described as an emergentist position or proposition.
The Christian evolutionist will state that emergentism is without connectivity to the creational pan-connected universe describing it's panexperiential, panexistential, and panpsychic elements of creation. That this esoteric emergentist "matter" known as "consciousness" is more magical, mystical, even *miraculous, when claiming esoteric existence out of nothing coming before it. As if it came from the very ether it exists within.
This emergentist position is known as bio-panpsychism denying holistic creational connectivity with creation's "essence". It is why the non-emergentist will claim creational panpsychism all the way down to the lowest elemental elements and forces of the universe. That everything within creation breathes the same life and dynamo of its Creator-God without exception. And that human consciousness but reflects the greater consciousness found within the very expanses of creation.
The sum of humanity's evolutionary development is not greater than the whole from which it was birthed. The consciousness of humanity but shares with the whole of creation, and in all its parts: all that it is, will be, and ever will become. Creation is conscious' mother. God is it's Father. Humanity is the bearer of both acts.
R.E. Slater
August 25, 2020
*All (open and relational) process theologians will struggle with miracles "out of nowhere" interrupting the free flow of one agency-filled process to the next. When God does miracles in the bible it is not as an exterior force interjected into the present complex of process-filled forces of creation. If anything, the miracles of God come from within the process of creation moving in agreement and partnership with God as it can against the reality of sin and evil which contend against all things God and God filled.