Imagining Consciousness, Time & Gravity: Essay 3 - The Metaphysical/Theological

Imagining Consciousness, Time, & Gravity

PROCESSUAL COSMOLOGY OF COHERENCE

Integrating Science and Theology through Relation

ESSAY 3 - The Metaphysical/Theological

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

For those who stand between disciplines -
to scientists who sense the sacred,

to theologians who trust the data,

and to all who suspect that love and law

may be different names

for the same divine coherence.

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II. Theological Essay: “The Feeling of Coherence”

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Preface

Theology, long haunted by static notions of deity, must now reckon with a universe that creates itself anew each instant. Process thought offers the language for such a universe - one that is alive, relational, and responsive. This essay extends that vision: if science reveals coherence as the structure of becoming, theology discerns in that coherence the feeling of God. The following reflections treat consciousness, time, and gravity not as cold abstractions but as the living sacraments of divine presence within creation.

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Introduction

In the beginning was not substance but relation. The divine life unfolds as a symphony of coherence: love binding, patience enduring, awareness awakening.

To say that God is love is to say that the ultimate gravity of being is relational attraction.

To say that God is eternal is to affirm divine patience-and-petition within the flow of time.

To say that we are made in the image of God is to acknowledge our participation in an evolving cosmic consciousness through which all things-and-beings feel and are felt (~ cause and effect).

This theology does not replace physics; it completes its circle. Where physics measures coherence, theology experiences its meaning. Both describe Creativity - one from without, the other from within.

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II. A Process-Theological Expansion

The Feeling of Coherence: Gravity, Time, and Consciousness in a Relational Cosmos

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1. Preface

Where science describes the geometry of relation, theology intuits its meaning.

In process thought, God and cosmos are not separate substances but mutual participants in a single unfolding act of creative coherence.

The triad of Consciousness, Time, and Gravity mirrors Whiteheads (theological) divine polarity - Primordial, Consequent, and Superjective as aspects of Creativity itself.

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2. The Three Modes of Divine Coherence

Processual Mode     Cosmological Expression                 Divine Analogue

Consciousness         Subjective immediacy, awareness     Consequent nature (God as the world’s                                                                                                         feeling)

Time                             Sequential unfolding, memory,         Creative patience, divine becoming

                                      anticipation

Gravity                        Objective attraction, relational unity  Primordial lure toward harmony

Thus, gravity is love’s geometry, time is the rhythm of divine patience, and consciousness is the intimacy of divine feeling within the world.

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3. Creativity as the Living Field

Whitehead’s “Creativity” is the metaphysical counterpart of the informational field.

It is neither personal nor impersonal, but trans-personal - the potential that allows each actual occasion to become and to feel.

From it arise the three coherences:

• Consciousness (inward prehension)
• Time (the rhythm of process)
• Gravity (the outer pull toward order and beauty)

Each occasion thus partakes in the divine life: the universe is God’s body learning coherence through love.

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4. Teleological Resonance

In this cosmology, salvation is not rescue but alignment - the harmonization of local becoming with cosmic coherence.

When consciousness resonates with the divine lure toward beauty (gravity) across the temporal unfolding (time), the world advances toward what Teilhard de Chardin called the Omega of coherence - process perfected in relational depth.

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5. Ethical Implication

• Inner coherence → compassion: aligning experience with empathy.

• Sequential coherence → faith: trusting the flow of becoming.

• Outer coherence → justice: sustaining the fabric of relational order.
  The triad thus grounds ethics as cosmic participation, not divine decree.

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Conclusion

In the end - or rather, in the continuation of life - coherence is worship. Every star that gravitates, every cell that divides, every mind that loves participates in the divine act of uniting Whitehead's "many into one."

Salvation, viewed processually, is the awakening of this participation: aligning our inner coherence with the cosmic coherence that is God.

The world is not fallen away from God but unfolding within God’s patience.

• the flow of time is God’s endurance;
• the force of gravity, God’s embrace;
• the spark of consciousness, God’s intimacy.

To live religiously, therefore, is to live coherently with one another, nature, and the universe as created by God - to let every becoming thought, relation, and action deepen the universe’s capacity to love itself towards greater beauty and value.

~ Continue to Essay 4 - Unified Coherence Unbound ~