Preface
Atheism, in its most reflective form, does not abolish metaphysics - it reopens it. The denial of a personal or providential God need not entail the denial of depth, relation, or creativity within reality itself as we imagine it existing within our known cosmos. Indeed, if divinity once served as the symbol of ultimate coherence, its absence challenges philosophy to re-imagine how freedom and value might arise in a self-ordering universe.
The previous discussions asked whether freedom could survive the death of God. In Processual Freewill (Essay I), we traced freedom as a gradation of agency woven through relational becoming. In Processual Freewill Without God (Essay II), we stripped the system of its theological scaffolding and discovered autopoiesis - the universe’s capacity to organize and value itself.
This third essay begins from that discovery. If value and agency are emergent rather than transcendent, what metaphysical architecture sustains their continuity across the cosmos? How does creativity endure as a universal trait of existence when divorced from any divine source?
Here we move from critique to construction: from asking whether freedom persists without God to exploring how it operates within the living fabric of an atheistic cosmos. We will argue that the universe, far from inert, is a dynamic ecology of immanent creativity - a field of relational processes continuously self-organizing toward greater coherence.
The result is not a theology in disguise but a natural (processual) metaphysics: a vision of reality as self-creating, self-valuing, and open to perpetual novelty.
This essay argues that processual freewill - the capacity for self-determination within relational becoming - can thrive in an atheistic cosmos. What traditional theology called divine lure can be redescribed as the immanent creativity of matter itself, manifesting as emergence, complexity, and consciousness.
Introduction: The Death of God and the Birth of Process
The modern atheist inherits a universe stripped of divine intentionality but endowed with astonishing dynamism. From subatomic fields to neural networks, reality teems with generative potential. The metaphysical vacuum left by God’s withdrawal has not produced lifeless mechanism but open-ended evolution.
In this light, Whitehead’s process metaphysics - though originally framed in quasi-theological language- can be reinterpreted as a natural ontology of creativity. What he named “God” as the primordial ground of order can be secularized as the universe’s own propensity toward pattern, coherence, and novelty. The “consequent nature of God,” the reception of all experience into divine memory, may instead describe the continuous feedback by which reality integrates its past into the living present.
The central claim of this essay, then, is simple:
"Even in a godless universe, becoming remains self-creative, relational, and free in degrees."
I. The Problem of Freedom After Theism
Modern determinism portrays the world as a closed system of efficient causes, leaving no room for genuine agency. In this view, every act is the inevitable consequence of prior states, while indeterminate randomness offers only chaos - neither meaning nor purpose, neither structure nor goal.
Yet contemporary science undermines that closure. Quantum physics, chaos theory, and systems biology reveal that the universe is a system of structured openness - lawful yet unpredictable, stable yet creative. The cosmos is not a mechanical clock but a living process that generates order and novelty together. Hence, Whitehead's original philosophy was known as the "Philosophy of Organism" rather than it's coined description today as "Process Philosophy."
Yet contemporary science undermines that closure. Quantum physics, chaos theory, and systems biology reveal that the universe is a system of structured openness - lawful yet unpredictable, stable yet creative. The cosmos is not a mechanical clock but a living process that generates order and novelty together. Hence, Whitehead’s original philosophy was rightly called the Philosophy of Organism - emphasizing that reality is not (Platonically) inert substance but living, organic, dynamic interrelations - long before it became known as Process Philosophy.
This ontological openness reintroduces precisely what determinism sought to exclude: choice as emergent self-organization. Freewill becomes not exemption from causality but participation in a creative network of causes whose outcomes are not pre-fixed.
Process philosophy treats these discoveries not as metaphor but as metaphysical insight. Every event is a site of decision, integrating inherited conditions into a novel synthesis. Freedom, therefore, is not a supernatural interruption of causality but its creative negotiation - the capacity of relational processes to transform what they receive.
From this vantage, the cosmos experiments with itself. It does not unfold according to a pre-written law but improvises within relational constraints, generating form from flux. Each act of becoming is a micro-expression of universal freedom - an instance of the universe realizing, moment by moment, that it can change itself.
II. Whitehead without God: Creativity as the Ground of Being
Whitehead’s philosophy centers on Creativity, the ultimate principle by which the many become one and are increased by one. His “God” functions as the initial valuation of possibility. In an atheistic reinterpretation, this role can be filled by the intrinsic capacities of matter and energy to self-organize.
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Primordial order becomes physical law and pattern formation.
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Consequent preservation becomes the universe’s feedback loops and memory structures.
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Value becomes relational coherence - systems that persist by enhancing their internal and external harmony.
Here, freedom is not bestowed but emerges whenever relational complexity allows for choice among alternative actualizations.
For Whitehead, "Creativity" was placed at the apex of his metaphysical hierarchy - it was to be the "universal of universals." Traditionally, he coupled this with a divine ordering principle - yet in Essay II we dismantled that religious interpretation and dependence as can be done in any non-theological, religionless philosophy.
Thus, in pursuing an atheistic re-interpretation of process philosophy we may now posit "Creativity" as an immanent ontological dynamism: the generative power inherent in every relational pattern. The universe requires no external aim; its very fabric is oriented toward novel coherence.
Autopoiesis - which is the inner engine of self-production and self-maintenance within coherent (cosmic) systems - names this principle in biological and cybernetic terms. From galaxies to neural networks, the same logic applies: entities persist by recreating themselves through relation.
Freedom, in this sense, is the expression of Creativity’s self-renewal. The universe is not governed per se - it becomes within its cosmic expression.
Of Note
Alfred North Whitehead placed Creativity at the apex of his metaphysical hierarchy—the “universal of universals.” Traditionally, he coupled this with a divine ordering principle. Essay II dismantled that dependence.
Now we reinterpret Creativity as immanent ontological dynamism: the generative power inherent in every relational pattern. The universe requires no external aim; its very fabric is oriented toward novel coherence.
Autopoiesis—the self-production and self-maintenance of systems—names this principle in biological and cybernetic terms. From galaxies to neural networks, the same logic applies: entities persist by recreating themselves through relation.
Freedom, in this sense, is the expression of Creativity’s self-renewal. The universe is not governed—it becomes.
- re slater
III. The Science of Immanent Creativity
Processual freewill emerges from the interplay of order and openness. Determinism provides stability; indeterminacy provides novelty. Their tension births creativity.
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Quantum Indeterminacy introduces genuine unpredictability: each event a probabilistic decision among potentials.
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Complexity & Emergence show how dissipative systems (Prigogine) and autocatalytic sets (Kauffman) self-organize, producing order from chaos.
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Neurodynamics & Predictive Processing (Friston) demonstrate how living systems minimize surprise through adaptive inference, turning uncertainty into learning.
These phenomena are the natural analogues of Whitehead’s concrescence: the integration of the many into one. In each case, relational feedback produces self-determination without external direction. The "Science or Architecture of immanent creativity" thus rests on reciprocal causality - a cosmos perpetually inventing itself.
IV. Ethical Consequences of a Godless Freedom and Self-Creating Universe
Where Essay II described the loss of transcendence as the emergence of relational value, here, in Essay III, explores how those values stabilize into ethical coherence.
In a self-creating universe, goodness cannot be obedience to an external will; it is the enhancement of relational flourishing. Ethics becomes cosmo-ecological (as versus, theo-cosmo-ecological): actions are good insofar as they deepen connectivity, coherence, and creative potential.
Sartre’s dictum that humanity is “condemned to be free” gains new meaning here. Freedom is not isolation but participation. Responsibility arises from the recognition that every act reshapes the relational web. Compassion becomes metaphysical realism - the felt acknowledgment that to harm another process is to diminish the creative field itself.
V. The Aesthetic Dimension of Immanent Freedom and Its Philosophical Implications
Processual thought insists that value is aesthetic before it is moral. The universe seeks intensity of experience, harmony within contrast, and beauty as the pattern of fulfilled relation.
Even without a divine lure, the cosmos exhibits aesthetic bias: systems endure because they balance complexity and coherence. Art, love, and even scientific inquiry are human elaborations of this cosmic tendency. We beautify existence by increasing its capacity to experience itself.
Freedom, then, is not arbitrary choice but aesthetic discernment - the art of responding creatively to what is given.
Philosophical Implications: From Transcendence to Immanence
In the absence of God, the categories of classically-imposed transcendence - Law, Will, Providence - yield to those of processual immanence - Relation, Creativity, Value.
- Cosmic Being becomes processual becoming.
- Cosmic Order becomes emergent process.
- Cosmic Purpose becomes the folding of local coherence into an indeterminate teleology of beauty and value.
This shift does not diminish the sacred; it redefines it. The sacred is no longer a transcendent presence but the felt intensity of connection - the realization that the universe’s creative pulse and our own volition are phases of the same unfolding.
Through this recognition, immanence itself becomes reverence: a spirituality of participation, where every act of creativity, every gesture of care, and every search for beauty echoes the universe’s own self-expression.
The Paradox of Indeterminate Teleology
This paradox lies at the heart of process philosophy: a universe oriented toward beauty and value, yet forever uncertain of its own becoming. Teleology here is not a preordained plan but a lure toward value - a direction without destination. Indeterminacy does not negate purpose; it makes purpose possible.
The cosmos aims without pre-meditation, in a sense, of what it is aiming at; and in that open-ended striving, novelty itself becomes sacred. What appears as contradiction - teleology entwined with indeterminacy - is, in processual terms, the creative pulse of existence: the freedom of the universe to become more than it has been.
The cosmos aims without design or forethought (indeterminism), drawn forward by the lure of possibility rather than the certainty of outcome (determinism). In that open-ended striving, novelty itself becomes sacred. What appears as contradiction - teleology entwined with indeterminacy - is, in processual terms, the creative pulse of existence: the freedom of the universe to become more than it has been. And for the process theologian, is another way of saying, "God is within (immanently so) his creation."
Conclusion: The Universe Realizing It Can Change Itself
The atheistic preference for the death of God does not end metaphysics; it returns "the process" to the world of the non-religious. "Natively" freed from divine immanence, process philosophy may re-discover itself in the cosmic processes of the universe - or in process reality itself, as we think of "reality" - rather than in God's Self, as the inner, creative pulse of value and rhythm of becoming. The cosmos, far from being "soullessly mechanistic," is a field of experiential relations where each moment negotiates between the given and the possible.
Freedom endures as the rhythm of immanent becoming - the universe’s own pulse of possibility. Each event, each processual consciousness, each creative act is the living dynamo of the cosmos testing its potential to be otherwise. Not a single mind but a web of interwoven experiences, the universe feels its way into novelty. And yet, for the process theologian, as for the atheist, the "cosmos" is not another word for "God" but as a descriptor for a "living, evolving organism" that is both mystery and wonder.
To call this awareness or value-sensitivity is not to anthropomorphize the universe but to recognize its relational texture. In every process - from the atomic, biological, emotional, cultural, etc, scales - as the same processual movements repeat over and over again as "inheritance and innovation, pattern and surpris". The universe "learns" even as it "becomes". In sentient terms, the universe is conscious, and consciously evolving, on a scale we have yet to understand and can only infer through processual metaphysics.
Thus, even in an atheistic cosmos, the sacred is not absent but diffused. What was once imagined as divine command now appears as the creative impulse of reality itself, urging coherence out of chaos, beauty from tension, value from flux.
Processual freewill is the universe’s declaration that it is unfinished - and in that unfinishedness lies hope. Each act of care, of imagination, of love extends the range of what the universe can be.
To know this is not to recover a vanished God, but to perceive the divine hidden within the very processes itself - as the immanent vitality of cosmic becoming. The sacred endures not above creation, but within creation’s own capacity to renew itself through freedom.
Select Bibliography
Primary and Foundational Texts
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Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929; corr. ed. 1978).
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Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (1948).
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Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907).
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Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677).
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Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968).
Atheistic & Naturalistic Extensions
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Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (2003).
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Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (2008).
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Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2012).
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Ilya Prigogine, Order out of Chaos (1984).
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Karl Friston, “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2010).
Contemporary Process and Metamodern Thought
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Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible (2014).
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Philip Clayton, Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action (2008).
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Andrew Davis, Mind, Value, and Cosmos (2020).
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Matthew Segall, Physics of the World-Soul (2021).
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Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence (2023).
Supplementary Readings
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Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943).
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Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).
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Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007).
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