What Is Meant by "Processual Reality?" An Introduction

"Toward a progression of universal complexity."
Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

An Introduction

What Is Meant by "Processual Reality?"

An Exploration of Process-Based Metaphysics

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

The task of metaphysics is not to name the Sacred, but to describe the

conditions under which the Sacred could meaningfully be named at all.

- R.E. Slater

“The universe is a creative advance into novelty.”

 - Alfred North Whitehead

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe

is that it is comprehensible.”

- Albert Einstein

Statement

“Reality unfolds not as a collection of things, but as a layered process of becoming - where matter, life, mind, and meaning, all emerge through coherence.

“What we call reality is not produced all at once, but arrives in layers - each new form emerging from, and reshaping, a concrescing whole.” This is visualized in the illustration above.

In this way, matter, life, consciousness, and meaning, evolve from one another in varying ways and latitudes, deepening reality as it gradually unfolds as a single, ongoing process.

In essence, “Reality is not built; it becomes over-and-over, again-and-again - ever becoming and never arriving, in endless pursuit of beauty and value, meaning and identity. A labyrinth of eternal gyration.”

Purpose and Scope

This essay proposes a multi-part inquiry into the nature of Reality, the Sacred, and meaning using a process-based metaphysical framework capable of holding within itself the contemporary sciences, philosophies, and theologies - without collapsing into reductionism, supernaturalism, etc.

This project does not aim to prove God, disprove God, or rehabilitate traditional metaphysical systems. Instead, it asks a more fundamental question:

What must reality be like for intelligibility, life,

consciousness, value, and beauty to arise at all?

By addressing this question prior to theological commitment, the series seeks to establish a shared metaphysical ground on which skeptics, atheists, agnostics, and people of faith can stand together without intellectual compromise. So long as they share a processual foundation they can explore together the mysteries of their separate interests towards concrescing forms of beauty, value, meaning, and identity.

Let's describe our approach as "Methodological metaphysical openness."

Here, we will describe reality as processual, without deciding, in advance, whether that process is: self-originating, divinely grounded, or divinely identical. Those epistemic interpretations will be addressed only after the metaphysical structure and conditions of reality itself has been carefully clarified.

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Why This Project Is Necessary

Modern discourse about reality is fragmented:

• Science models reality with extraordinary precision but often refrains from metaphysical interpretation.

• Philosophy analyzes concepts of being, causation, and knowledge but struggles to remain connected to lived meaning.

• Theology preserves symbolic depth and existential orientation but is frequently accused of supernaturalism or explanatory excess.

As a result, reality itself is increasingly treated as either:

• a closed mechanical system devoid of meaning, or

• a stage upon which supernatural interventions occasionally occur.

Both options fail.

This project proposes a third way: Reality understood as process - an ongoing, self-conditioning, relationally-unfolding reality in which novelty, coherence, beauty, and value are intrinsic rather than imposed.

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Foundational Assumptions

This series proceeds from several working assumptions:

1. Reality is neither static nor binary.
   It is not composed of fixed substances but of organically driven events, relations, and processes whose differences emerge along continua rather than rigid either-or, black-and-white divisions. More simply, process unfolds by degrees, gradients, and relational ambiguities. Binary thinking is not merely a logical error in a lived processual reality - it is a metaphysical misreading of reality itself.

1. Material and immaterial are descriptive - but not separable realms
   Mathematics, life, language, consciousness, and value function as conditions of intelligibility within reality, not as external entities floating outside of reality's basin.

2. Circularity is not necessarily a fallacy
   When reality is understood as recursive and self-conditioning, mutual implication replaces linear causation. Reality branches outwards, loops back upon itself, and reinforces emerging patterns, developing organically rather than progressing linearly along chains of cause and effect.

3. God-language is interpretive, not additive
   The Sacred names reality encountered at depth - as meaningful, relational, and trustworthy. In this sense, sacred language does not introduce a new ontology; it interprets the same reality under modes of depth, value, and participation rather than as cosmic mechanism alone.

4. Process philosophy and process theology are mutually illuminating
   One describes reality; the other renders it inhabitable:

Process philosophy describes reality in terms of becoming, relation, and coherence. It offers a disciplined metaphysical account of what is and how it unfolds without appeal to supernatural intervention.

Process theology does not alter this description, but interprets it in terms of value, trust, and existential orientation. Where process philosophy explains the structure of reality, process theology renders that same reality habitable - capable of being lived within, committed to, and responded to meaningfully.

Taken together, they do not compete as explanations. They operate at different semantic elevations, addressing the same reality under different modes of engagement.

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Central Proposal

The core proposal of this series can be stated simply:

Reality is a self-generating, relational process whose internal conditions give rise to matter, life, consciousness, coherence, and value - and when this process is apprehended as meaningful and trustworthy, it has historically been named “God.”

This claim does not require belief.
It does not deny faith.
It reframes both in a processual framework.

The central proposal of this series is that reality is best understood as a processual unfolding rather than a finished structure. Reality is not a static collection of substances, nor a closed system governed solely by linear causation, but an ongoing, relational becoming in which coherence, novelty, and differentiation arise through time.

Within this framework, matter, life, consciousness, meaning, identity, beauty, and value are not anomalies layered onto an otherwise indifferent universe. They emerge as internal developments of reality itself - expressions of the conditions, constraints, and relational dynamics through which reality organizes, intensifies, and reflects upon its own unfolding.

This proposal does not assume that reality is self-originating, nor does it presuppose a transcendent Cause or external Designer. Instead, it asks what reality must be like in itself for intelligibility, emergence, and participation to occur at all. Questions of divine grounding, sacred meaning, or ultimate trust are therefore not denied, but deferred - to be addressed only after the metaphysical structure of reality has been carefully described.

In this sense, the project proceeds neither by reduction nor by addition. It does not reduce reality to cosmic mechanism alone, nor does it add metaphysical entities beyond necessity. Rather, it seeks to articulate a process-based metaphysics capable of holding together scientific description, philosophical rigor, and lived experience, while remaining open to multiple interpretive horizons - secular, sacred, or otherwise.

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Methodological Approach

The essays that follow proceed through three disciplined and interrelated movements:

Description - What reality is like

(metaphysics and ontology)

This movement attends to the structure of reality itself: its processual character, relational dynamics, scales of emergence, and conditions of intelligibility, prior to theological or ethical interpretation.

Interpretation - How reality is encountered as sacred or meaningful

(process theology and symbolic depth)

Here, reality is read under a mode of depth, value, and significance. Sacred language is employed as interpretive rather than additive, naming reality as meaningful, relational, and trustworthy without introducing new ontology.

Participation - How observers, agents, and communities shape what becomes real

(ethics, responsibility, coherence, and measurement)

This movement explores how participation within reality - through observation, decision, valuation, and communal action - contributes to the ongoing formation of the world, without granting human consciousness ontological primacy.

Importantly,

Scientific models, philosophical analysis, and theological language are employed without conflation and without isolation, but are treated as aspectual descriptions of a single, evolving reality rather than competing explanations.

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Overview of the Series

Essay 1 – What Is Reality?

Processual description before sacred naming
Reality as event, relation, and self-conditioning process.

Essay 2 – Reality and the Sacred

Two languages, one reality
How God-language arises as an interpretive grammar of depth.

Essay 3 – God, Grounding, and Creativity

First cause or first process?
Aquinas and Whitehead translated into non-supernatural metaphysics.

Essay 4 – Coherence and Decoherence

Order, emergence, intelligibility
From quantum physics to cosmological structure.

Essay 5 – Beauty as Ontological Signal

Harmony as a guide to truth
Why elegance matters in science and meaning.

Essay 6 – The Death of Supernaturalism

Divine action reimagined
From intervention to persuasion, from miracle to transformation.

Essay 7 – Quantum Measurement and Participation

Observation, actuality, and becoming
Reality as participatory rather than fully pre-determined.

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Intended Audience

This project is written for:

• scientifically literate readers dissatisfied with reductionism

• philosophers seeking metaphysical coherence without abstraction

• theologians navigating faith after supernaturalism

• thoughtful skeptics open to meaning without dogma

The tone is scholarly, but the aim is accessibility without dilution.

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What This Project Is Not

• It is not apologetics.

• It is not metaphysical speculation detached from science.

• It is not a defense of classical theism.

• It is not a rejection of religious language.

It is an attempt to think reality honestly, at depth, in our time.

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Closing Orientation

If reality is indeed processual - creative, relational, unfinished - then our task is not merely to explain it, but to participate responsibly in its becoming.

The essays that follow begin that work.

If reality is indeed processual - emergent, creative, relational, and unfinished - then our task is not simply to describe it from a distance, nor to master it through explanation alone. It is to attend carefully to the conditions under which reality becomes intelligible, meaningful, and responsive to participation.

This inquiry therefore proceeds with restraint. It does not rush to metaphysical closure, theological declaration, or scientific reduction. Instead, it seeks to clarify the structure of reality as it unfolds, trusting that deeper interpretations - whether philosophical, theological, or ethical - must arise from within that clarified structure rather than being imposed upon it.

By beginning with process rather than doctrine, relation rather than substance, and coherence rather than control, the essays that follow aim to reopen questions often assumed to be settled: what reality is, how meaning arises, and why participation matters. These questions are not merely theoretical. They shape how we inhabit the world, how we understand responsibility, and how we respond to one another within an unfinished (processual) universe.

What follows, then, is not a system, but a trajectory - an invitation to think of reality as an (organic) becoming, to speak carefully about the Sacred without excess, and to consider how non-human/ human consciousness participates in the ongoing formation of meaning itself.

The work begins not by naming ultimate answers, but by learning how to ask better questions - faithful to reality as it is encountered, and open to what reality may yet become.

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Becoming

Not becomed all at once,

but a coalescing gathering;
not structured, but arising -
in an organic cosmic weave,
learning its own contours
through time and space,

fields and dimensions.

What is real did not arrive complete,

but lies incomplete at all times;
listening to what was,

leaning towards what might be,
and knit together just long enough
to become more than it was

a moment earlier....

We stand within this cosmic movement,

formed by what we did not choose,
yet invited into what is not finished.

Reality does not demand belief.

It just is  - and asks for our attention,

to participate with it,

to become with it,

to add to its being and value,

in togetherness attitude.

R.E. Slater
January 22, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Process Resources

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947.

John B. Cobb Jr., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976.

Catherine Keller. Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Ilya Prigogine. The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Karen Barad. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

David Bohm. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge, 1980.

Terrence W. Deacon. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.

Henri Bergson. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt, 1911.

Alfred North Whitehead. Religion in the Making. New York: Fordham University Press, 1996.

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Non-Processual, Non-Theological Resources

Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by Hugh Tredennick and G. C. Armstrong. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933.

Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.

Wilfrid Sellars. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

W. V. O. Quine. From a Logical Point of View. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Hilary Putnam. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

David Chalmers. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Thomas Nagel. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Daniel Dennett. From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

Stuart Kauffman. At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Sean Carroll. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. New York: Dutton, 2016.

Carlo Rovelli. Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity. Translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. New York: Riverhead Books, 2017.

Lee Smolin. Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Ilya Prigogine. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.

Paul Davies. The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.