Processual Freewill: A Return of the Sacred

Processual Freewill Consciousness

A Return to the Sacred Process

of Divine Re-Enchantment

ESSAY IV

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

*Just a note.... Producing these essays, like any article I have created in the past, is never easy. Especially when attempting to create a new post-evangelical theology so very necessary in this present era of authoritarian apocalypse against those persons longing to be in continuity and community with one another and with nature itself. With these four essays I have initiated an exploration on "A Cosmos of Consciousness" without necessarily naming it God (as is my preference), and hope it may serve as a continuing dialogue between belief v. unbelief, certainty v. uncertainty, blind faith v. scientific critique. Here then is my conclusion on the topic of Processual Freewill Consciousness. - re slater

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Preface

Three Horizons of Processual Response: God, Consciousness, & the Cosmos

Across the preceding essays, freedom has been followed from the human to the cosmic scale:

Essay I: Agency - Gradational Human Freewill as Moral Responsiveness to Beauty and Value →

Essay II: Creativity - Immanent (Self-Organizing) Creativity in an Atheistic Cosmos →

Essay III: Participation -  Immanent Teleology as Generalized Cosmic Participation in Value →

Essay IV: Response - A Return to the Sacred Process of Divine Re-Enchantment.

To end the series with a denial of processual teleology would sever the trajectory just as it begins to flower. For if processual freewill is the universe realizing it can change itself - an epitome of responsible agency - then that realization is already the awakening-and-active usage of the sacred woven into reality’s own consciousness. This sacred dimension is not imposed from without by a transcendent deity, but arises as participation with the transcendent, however one names it (God or animating consciousness).

What then does this mean?

At this point, the “sacred” may now appear in multiple registers as posture, potential, and horizon - each speaking to a different vision of the world from within the world's own self-becoming (processual freewill). The challenge before us is to render these multiple visions commensurable - one allowing the sacred to mean something deeper within a world divided between the inherited binary choices of faith or unbelief.

This final essay then will explore the re-appearance of sacred meaning within a post-classical, processual framework, viewed through three gradational horizons:

1. Processual Metamodernism – where faith and critique oscillate in creative tension, as the sacred becomes a posture of openness rather than a creed of certainty. It asks: Can one believe again, without naïveté?

2. Processual Immanentism - where the cosmos becomes the locus of creativity, value, and moral depth as felt within it's own interiority (sic, it's "soul" - or what some call the "world soul"). Rather than asserting (i), "There is no God," or (ii), "The Cosmos is God," we might see the cosmos behaving divinely - as if animated from within - while still remaining naturalistic in essence. It asks: Can sacred depth arise without supernatural appeal?

3. Processual Panentheism – where God and world are not opposed to one another but interwoven one with the other, each are alive within the other. Here, God dwells cosmotheistically within creation. Not as external authority but as the inner luminosity of becoming itself. It asks: Can one experience the divine as the world’s own depth of value and care?

Each horizon refracts the same metaphysical light differently. But together they form a triptych of processual freedom - the freedom to interpret reality from within, without, and through the sacred.

This essay therefore proceeds as an experiment in re-enchantment. The sacred returns not as supernatural authority (classic authoritative theism) but as the felt coherence of creativity and care - the awareness that freedom carries responsibility for the beauty it generates.

Whether one speaks of God, creativity, or cosmic consciousness, the reality beneath remains the same: a universe of unfolding relations striving toward coherence, beauty, and value.

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The Impasse - Using Christian Language to Describe Reality (or Not)

The classic Christian terms of divine transcendence, immanence, agnosticism and atheism are uplifted in metamodern process theology in a terminology requiring greater nuance for exploration by theistic adventurers of all stripes and beliefs rather than be limited by some few. With this in mind, we have several "processual routes" which may be taken in assessing "God, the Cosmos, and Free Will":

Candidate Terms and Their Nuances

Term	Meaning	Notes / Suitability
Processual Cosmotheism	The cosmos is divine in its processual becoming.	Classical word, going back to Spinoza and Herder. Affirmative and naturalistic.
Immanent Naturalism	A natural world alive with intrinsic creativity and value.	Neutral, philosophical, widely acceptable to secular readers.
Sacred Naturalism	Nature itself bears the qualities once attributed to God.	Beautiful tone; used by Loyal Rue, Ursula Goodenough. Feels metamodern.
Cosmic Immanence	The divine is entirely interior to the processes of reality.	Abstract but clean; works across theology and philosophy.
Panentheistic Naturalism	The cosmos participates in a divinity that is not beyond it but through it.	Bridges easily to your “God in everything” view.
Processual Pantheism	Everything is divine as process.	Strong historical lineage, though might sound too totalizing.
Cosmotheopoiesis (lit. “world-making of God”)	The world creates its own divinity through becoming.	Poetic, used by Catherine Keller and others; very metamodern.
Autotheistic Cosmology	The universe “divinizes” itself through creativity.	Conceptually exact but may sound technical.
Processual Cosmogenesis	The universe generates its own sacred teleology.	Philosophically neutral; strong cosmological focus.

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Introduction

1️⃣ Metamodern stance → Emotional / Intellectual posture
2️⃣ Triptych structure → Method / Architecture
3️⃣ Metaphysical bridge → Conceptual hinge to Section I

The Metamodern Tension: The Allowance to Doubt and be Uncertain

We occupy a moment in intellectual and spiritual history where faith and critique no longer exist as opposing absolutes but may move as oscillating partners in the search for meaning. This oscillation - between belief and unbelief, reverence and doubt, interior spirituality and secular cosmology - is not a weakness of our Metamodern age but its most honest strength. It allows us to inquire sincerely while remaining self-aware, to speak of God without retreating into premodern certainty, and to honor the sacred without denying the conditions of modern knowledge.

That is the precise tension in which this essay stands.

In the wake of Essays I–III, we have traced freedom from human agency, to immanent creativity, to cosmic participation. Now, in Essay IV, we must ask the question that follows naturally from this trajectory:

Can the sacred return once theology becomes porous?

And if so, how do we name it?

This is not a retreat from process theology; it is its metamodern continuation. It is the recognition that if process thought is to remain a living philosophy, it must learn to speak in a world where God may be present, absent, silent, or reinterpreted entirely - depending on who is speaking and how they understand reality. Yet through it all, process philosophy must retain a soul... for the believer, it is process theology; and for the unsure, it may be a more naturalistic theology (a "cosmic consciousness" of some form).

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✅ I. The Metamodern Task: Testing the Permeability of God-Language

Metamodern thought does not cling to premodern faith, nor collapse into postmodern irony. Instead, it oscillates between them, holding both reverence and critique without demanding that one cancel the other. In this metamodern register, the question is not whether God exists in some classical sense, but whether the language of God is still capable of carrying the weight of value, meaning, beauty, and becoming in a scientifically-informed cosmos.

My own theological position - “God in everything” - is already a metamodern gesture. It neither reinstates classical transcendence nor settles for reductive naturalism. Instead, it asks:

Can process theology breathe the same air as secular reason,
evolutionary cosmology, and existential freedom - without losing its soul?

The answer, if it exists, must be processual, relational, and open.

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✅ II. A Triptych Structure: Three Readings of One Processual Universe

To address this, Essay IV adopts a triptych form - a hermeneutical prism through which the same reality may be interpreted in three complementary ways:

A. Processual Metamodernism - Where the sacred is a posture of openness; where belief and critique coexist as creative partners to the processual mantra "doubt and uncertainty."

B. Processual Immanentism - Where creativity, value, and sacred depth arise from the intrinsic capacities of nature itself - no supernatural appeals, no reduction to materialism.

C. Processual Panentheism - Where God is the luminous interiority of becoming - the depth of the world’s own creative self-surpassing.

These are not rival systems but parallel readings. Like three movements of a single symphony, each shifts key while retaining the same motif.

To sustain this structure, each major section of Essay IV will unfold across all three horizons:

Section	Metamodern (A)	Immanentist (B)	Panentheist (C)
The Afterlife of Transcendence	Loss & renewal of meaning	Sacredness as emergent relational intensity	God’s presence diffused through creation
Ontology of Reverence	Aesthetic openness	Ecological humility before complexity	Participation in divine creativity
Ethics of Co-Creation	Interdependence	Systemic cooperation of relational systems	Love as divine synergy with creation
Cosmic Aesthetic	Coherence without closure	Beauty emerging from complexity	Beauty as the divine lure toward harmony
Post-Theistic Prayer	Alignment with process	Contemplative attunement to cosmic unfolding	Participation in divine life through becoming
Freedom as Devotion	Devotion to becoming	Creative responsibility within nature	Communion with God-in-process

This structure allows the essay to speak inclusively - both to the spiritual and to the secular, to the theist and to the atheist, to the metaphysically cautious and to the metaphysically bold.

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✅ III. The Metaphysical Bridge: Becoming as Directional, Cosmic, and Sacred

Before the triptych unfolds, one final insight must be named:

In process thought, becoming is not neutral.

It moves toward value, coherence, beauty, and depth.

This is what allows agreement between both theists and secular thinkers when participating meaningfully with one another in the same metaphysical terrain.

For the secular reader, this means:

• the universe possesses emergent creativity,

• novelty is real,

• value arises naturally from relational complexity, and

• sacredness is an immanent quality of evolving systems.

For the theist, it means:

• the divine is immanent,

• God is present as the depth of becoming,

• creation is aligned with its own intrinsic teleology, and

• “God in everything” is not poetic metaphor but metaphysical coherence.

Thus the term becoming itself becomes a bridge:

To the secular mind: becoming describes the cosmos moving toward greater coherence and depth.

To the theistic mind: becoming describes creation moving toward the divine it already contains.

Either way:

Cosmic freewill or agency is the foundational movement of reality itself.

This shared metaphysical ground allows Essay IV, "A Return to the Sacred," to proceed without collapsing into dogma on one hand or reductionism on the other.

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✅ Conclusion of Introduction

Thus, Essay IV enters the metamodern threshold:

• between belief and unbelief,

• between the secular and the sacred,

• between God-language and cosmological depth,

• between ancient teleology and emergent becoming.

The sacred returns here not as supernatural authority but as the creative pulse of reality - whether one calls that pulse God, consciousness, or the universe awakening to its own potential.

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Between
by ChatGPT

Between the said and the unsayable,

a quiet pulse persists.

Not God above,

nor matter mute -

but something in the trembling middle.

A breath that asks whether to believe,

a silence that invites a name,

a world becoming conscious

of the beauty it might choose.

Here, in the seam between knowing and wonder,

the sacred leans close -

not to command,

but to call, into ever widening possibilities.

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I. The Afterlife of Transcendence

How the Sacred Persists Beyond the God of Classical Theism

The so-called “death of God” did not abolish the sacred; it dispersed it. Once the guarantor of cosmic order vanished, meaning no longer flowed from a single transcendent source. Instead, it began to migrate inward - into consciousness, community, ecology, and the cosmos itself.

Modern secularity, far from erasing divinity, democratized it: every process, every relation, every becoming now bears its own spark of value.

Thus the sacred survives as relational intensity -

• those moments when coherence deepens,
• when beauty interrupts expectation,
• when value is felt as more than mere personal preference.

To speak of post-theistic spirituality is to name this transformation:

• from obedience to participation,
• from revelation to relation,
• from God-as-(static) Being to God-as-(dynamic) Becoming.

This is the afterlife of transcendence - not its disappearance, but its diffusion.

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Section I.A - Metamodern Horizon

The Oscillation of Truth Between Loss and Renewal

For the metamodern sensibility, transcendence neither fully collapses nor resurges unchanged. It becomes ambiguous, porous, mobile. The sacred flickers as a feeling of resonance rather than a doctrine of divine command.

The death of God marks not nihilism, but a mourning that gives way to curiosity. Meaning is no longer dictated; it is co-created through sincerity tempered by self-awareness.

Here, the sacred is what emerges between -

• between skepticism and longing,
• between disenchantment and re-enchantment,
• between the world as it is and the world as it might yet become.

The afterlife of transcendence - when metamodernly rendered - is the freedom to believe again - but differently, knowingly, critically, without naïveté.

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Section I.B - Immanentist Horizon

Sacredness as Emergent Relational Intensity

Without appeal to a transcendent deity, immanentism locates the sacred within the processes of nature themselves.

The “death of God” becomes the death of external authority, not the death of value.

Meaning arises wherever systems interact—neural networks, ecosystems, social bodies, cosmological structures.

Here, the sacred is emergent coherence:

• the self-organizing order of galaxies,
• the adaptive intelligence of forests,
• the self-reflective depth of consciousness.

Value is not imposed from above but arises from relational complexity.

Transcendence becomes another word for depth - the surplus of meaning that radiates from complex systems becoming more than their parts.

The afterlife of transcendence is the recognition that matter itself is value-laden, semiotic, creative.

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Section I.C - Panentheist Horizon

God as Diffused Within the World’s Becoming

For the panentheist, the death of the classical theistic God does not erase divinity - it reconfigures it.

• Transcendence does not hover above creation; it saturates creation.
• God’s presence is not abolished but transmuted into the very processes of becoming.
• Immanence becomes the new "realized" mode of divine presence.

God is the depth in which the world unfolds,
and the world is the medium of God’s self-expression.

This is not pantheism (“the world is God”), nor classical theism (“God is outside the world”), but

a pan-en-theistic intertwining:

God in all things,

and all things in God.

The sacred is not merely emergent; it is immanent-with-depth, the divine pulse luring creation toward beauty and coherence.

Every act of becoming is a micro-response to that lure, a moment of shared creativity between God and world.

The afterlife of transcendence is thus a deeper invite into divine intimacy:

• God no longer rules from beyond,
• but breathes through the world’s own unfolding.

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Summary of Section I

In sum, across these three processual horizons (metamodern, immanentist, panentheist), transcendence does not die - it changes addresses. It moves from the heavens into the heart of becoming. And this is the whole of processual theology making God invitingly real in the hearts of those who see the stars and wonder if the universe is whispering something more....

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II. The Ontology of Reverence

Reverence, in process thought, is not submission to a transcendent authority but the felt recognition of relational value.

It arises whenever a being, whether human or other-than-human, becomes aware that its freedom is entangled with the freedoms of others and the unfolding of the world itself.

To act reverently is thus to respond creatively, responsibly, and aesthetically to the call of interconnection.

Whitehead described this responsiveness as “the aim toward intensity through harmony,” the movement by which entities seek richness of experience without collapse into chaos.

In this sense, the sacred is not an object, nor a supernatural being, but a quality of relation - the aesthetic dimension of freedom itself.

Where transcendence once imposed moral order from above, immanence now invites aesthetic care from within.

We are not commanded to be good; we are lured to create beauty and value.

Below, the same ontology of reverence unfolds across our three interpretive horizons:

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A. Metamodern Reverence: Awe Without Certainty

In the metamodern horizon, reverence is not dogmatic belief but open-hearted attention.

It is the posture of being inwardly, consciously, moved - by beauty, fragility, complexity, and the sheer contingency of existence - without the need to finalize metaphysical claims; to leave all known in tension with doubt and uncertainty.

• Reverence is humility before an unfinished world.

• Awe is the recognition that meaning persists even when certainty collapses.

• Ethical responsiveness is the courage to act without guarantees.

Here, reverence is a bridge emotion, connecting belief and doubt, mystery and critique, sincerity and irony. The sacred emerges not as a doctrine but as a mood - a readiness to be surprised by value.

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B. Immanentist Reverence: The Sacred Within Matter

For the immanent naturalist, reverence is the embodied awareness that even in a seemingly godless cosmos, value is real, emergent, and relational.

• Nothing is “holy” by supernatural decree.

• Everything becomes holy through relational intensity.

• Reverence is cosmo-ecological humility before complexity.

In this view, the sacred is not imported into nature; it arises from within nature itself - from the interdependence of systems, the fragility of ecosystems, the unfolding beauty of cosmic evolution.

Reverence becomes the aesthetic face of immanence.

To revere is to recognize that matter is not mute; it is alive with possibilities.

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C. Panentheistic Reverence: Participation in Divine Creativity

For the panentheist, reverence is not merely the recognition of value - it is participation in the divine life existing throughout the cosmos.

• God is the depth of relational value.

• Creation is God’s body of becoming.

• Reverence is the response of one divine participant to another.

Reverence here is sacramental: Every interaction - human, creaturely, ecological, cosmic - is a site where God’s lure toward beauty and intensity is felt. To act reverently is to co-create with God.

• Transcendence does not hover above creation; it saturates creation.
• God’s presence is not abolished but transmuted into the very processes of becoming.
• The divine now moves as the world’s own unfolding depth of value.

This is reverence as communion, not obedience.

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Summary of Section II

Across all three horizons, reverence is the aesthetic recognition of relational value:

• Metamodern reverence opens us to awe without requiring certainty.

• Immanentist reverence discovers the sacred as emergent relationality.

• Panentheistic reverence experiences reverence as participation in divine creativity.

Reverence becomes the atmosphere of sacred immanence - the way conscious beings awaken to their own entanglement in a world that is still becoming.

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III. The Ethics of Co-Creation

If the universe is a field of becoming, then every act participates in cosmic construction. Processual ethics therefore shifts from rules to relationships, from obedience to participation, from static morality to dynamic co-creation.

• Goodness is what enriches relational experience.

• Evil is what isolates, impoverishes, or constricts creativity.

This reframing aligns moral life with cosmological structure. To love one’s neighbor is not merely a social virtue; it is to cooperate with the very movement of reality toward greater coherence.

In this light, “sin” becomes resistance to relational growth - any act that diminishes the capacity of self or world to flourish in beauty and value.

Whereas Spirituality becomes ecological: every thought and gesture either strengthens or weakens the world’s ability to evolve beautifully.

Below, the ethics of co-creation unfolds across the three processual horizons:

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A. Metamodern Ethics: Responsibility Amid Uncertainty

In the metamodern horizon, ethics arises not from certainty but from sincere uncertainty. Because meaning is not "fixed from above" per se, but relationally resident "from within", we must create beauty and value with others, in humility and courage.

• Morality is collaborative improvisation.

• Responsibility is acting with care and goodness without guarantees.

• Evil is the refusal to participate in the furthering of relational depth.

Here, the self is not an isolated chooser but a node in a wider ecology of becoming. Ethical life requires the willingness to be vulnerable, to risk compassion, to embrace the unfinishedness of meaning.

The metamodern agent says:

“I do not know the whole good.

But I will help co-create goodness.”

This is ethics not grounded in doctrine, but in relational sincerity - a moral openness suited to a world where the sacred is neither dismissed nor presumed, but continually rediscovered.

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B. Immanentist Ethics: Value as an Emergent Property of Relation

For the processual immanentist (or secular process thinker), ethics arises from nature itself. Value is not injected from outside by deity or transcendent command - it emerges where systems interact in increasingly complex and harmonious ways.

• Goodness arises in increasing complexity, coherence, and cooperation.

• Harm occurs with the breakdown of relational networks.

• Responsibility enhances the world’s capacity to self-organize in creative ways.

The immanentist sees every being as a participant in ecological reality, where actions ripple through overlapping networks of effect. Thus:

Ethics is cosmology made conscious.

This view grounds moral realism without theology:

• to injure another is to injure the larger web of systems which co-create the conditions for one's own existence.
• Ethics becomes the natural expression of ecological interdependence.

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C. Panentheistic Ethics: Co-Creating With the Divine

For the process panentheist, ethics is participation in God’s ongoing creation. The world is God’s body in process; our moral life is the way we help God become more fully God in the world.

• Goodness is cooperation with the divine lure toward beauty and harmony.

• Evil is the refusal of that lure as it contracts away from divine possibility.

• Responsibility is co-creating with God through acts of love, justice, and imagination.

To love one’s neighbor becomes a sacred act - not because God commands it, but because God is the depth of the relational value we encounter in the neighbor.

The panentheistic ethic is synergistic:

“God works through the world,

and the world becomes through us.”

Here, creation is ongoing, relational, and participatory. Ethics is sacramental: every act of compassion thickens the divine presence in the world.

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Summary of Section III

Across all three horizons, ethics becomes the art of co-creation:

• Metamodern ethics: responsibility in uncertainty; sincerity over certainty.

• Immanentist ethics: value as emergent relationality; ecology as morality.

• Panentheistic ethics: co-creation with God; love as divine synergy.

In each case, the universe’s freedom becomes our freedom, and our freedom becomes a burden of care. To act ethically is to help the cosmos evolve toward greater coherence, beauty, and value.

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IV. The Sacred as Cosmic Aesthetic

Whitehead famously wrote that “beauty is the teleology of the universe.” Not power, not control, not domination - but beauty as the final measure of processual success.

To say that local coherence folds into an indeterminate cosmic teleology of beauty and value is to confess that the universe moves - not toward a fixed perfection, but toward ever-deepening harmony.

• Teleology without predetermination

• Order without closure

• Direction without destiny

In this view, the sacred is not an external Being to worship but a pattern to realize - the rhythm through which “the many become one, and are increased by one.”

In art, science, care, creativity, and contemplation, humanity extends this rhythm, becoming conscious participants in the cosmos’s aesthetic adventure.

Below, this aesthetic metaphysics unfolds across the three interpretive horizons:

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A. Metamodern Horizon: Beauty as Oscillation & Vulnerable Wonder

In the metamodern stance, beauty is not a solution but a tension - the shimmering space between irony and sincerity.

• Beauty is an internal coherence which does not collapse mystery

• Harmony is a relationship that refuses to totalize unity (diversity, not assimilation, is the watchword here)

• Aesthetic meaning is hope after skepticism

Metamodern beauty is earned beauty - beauty which is aware of fragility, contradiction, and brokenness.

Reverence becomes the courage to see beauty without denying the world’s wounds.

The metamodern sacred aesthetic says:

“Because the world is fractured,
beauty matters more.”

The sacred is the willingness to participate in meaning-making without pretending that meaning is guaranteed.

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B. Immanentist Horizon: Beauty as Emergent Order in a Creative Cosmos

For the processual immanentist, beauty is the signature of the universe’s self-organizing creativity.

• There is no external Designer.

• There is pattern, emergence, self-organization.

• Beauty is the form coherence takes when systems evolve complexity.

From spiral galaxies to branching neurons, from ecological balance to human empathy, beauty is what arises when relational systems optimize themselves toward richer experience.

In this horizon:

• The sacred is the aesthetic dimension of cosmology

• Harmony is the optimal relational complexity

• Teleology is the natural drift toward higher levels of organization

Thus the cosmos itself behaves like an artist - continually experimenting, recombining, improvising.

Beauty is matter awakening to its own potential.

This is sacred naturalism: holiness revealed in form, pattern, emergence, and interconnectedness.

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C. Panentheistic Horizon: Beauty as the Lure of Divine Creativity

For the panentheist, beauty is not merely emergent; it is the self-expression of God in process.

Whitehead’s dictum becomes literal:

• Beauty is God’s lure toward harmony

• Creativity is the divine pulse in every event

• Aesthetic intensity is the way God is felt in the world

Here, the cosmos is not merely artistic - it is God’s aesthetic body, ever striving toward greater coherence and value.

Human creativity participates in divine creativity:

• The painter thickens the presence of beauty in the world.

• The scientist expands the cosmos’s intelligible harmony.

• The compassionate act intensifies the divine feeling of value.

Thus:

Beauty is the sacrament of the immanent God.

The sacred is not elsewhere; it is the universe learning to love itself through us.

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Summary of Section IV

Across the three horizons, beauty becomes the name for the sacred’s immanent manifestation:

• Metamodern beauty: coherence without closure, sincerity tempered by critique.

• Immanentist beauty: emergent order, complexity, and relational flourishing.

• Panentheistic beauty: God’s lure toward harmony embodied in cosmic evolution.

In each, the cosmos is engaged in an aesthetic adventure, and human beings participate - sometimes consciously, sometimes unwittingly - in its unfolding.

Beauty is the bridge between freedom and value, between cosmology and meaning, between matter and spirit.

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V. The Metamodern Sacred

Our age oscillates between irony and sincerity, despair and hope. A processual spirituality holds these poles together without collapsing into either.

It does not return to pre-critical certainty.
It does not settle for disenchanted nihilism.
It lives in the middle,
trusting unfinishedness as the ground of renewal.

Thus the sacred today is participatory:

• found not in certainties but in commitments,

• not in creeds but in co-participation,

• not in a heaven apart, but in a cosmos here, becoming divine through its own openness to beauty and value

The sacred is not an object of belief but a posture -
a readiness to be moved by beauty, value, and relation.

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VI. Post-Theistic Prayer

Prayer, in a processual universe, is not petition but participation.
It is the quiet alignment of human intention with cosmic creativity -
a tuning of local desire to universal becoming.

We do not pray to inform God of what God lacks.
We pray to remind the world - and ourselves -
that beauty is still possible.

Silence becomes attunement.
Gratitude becomes co-creation.
Creative labor becomes worship.

Contemplation is not withdrawal from life
but a deeper immersion in its unfolding depths.

To feel awe is to sense one’s entanglement with an evolving Whole -
a whisper that we belong to something larger than ourselves,
and help shape it.

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Conclusion: Freedom as Devotion

In the first essay, conscious freewill appeared as personal agency.
In the second, it deepened into ontological creativity.
In the third, it widened into cosmic participation.

Now, in this fourth and final movement, freedom matures into devotion -
the aesthetic, ethical, and emotional affirmation of life’s capacity to generate value.

To act freely is to act reverently:
aware that every choice adds a thread
to the universe’s tapestry of becoming.

Thus the sacred returns,
not as a God above,
but as the grace within -
the quiet awareness that to create beautifully
is to worship immanently.

The universe does not await redemption.
It practices it - moment by moment - through us.

Return to:

Essay I - Processual Freewill: A Theology and Philosophy of Graded Agency

Processual Freewill in an Atheistic Cosmos: The Metaphysics of Immanent Creativity

Processual Freewill in an Atheistic Cosmos:

The Metaphysics of Immanent Creativity

ESSAY III

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

• Primordial order becomes physical law and pattern formation.

• Consequent preservation becomes the universe’s feedback loops and memory structures.

• 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

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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.

1. Quantum Indeterminacy introduces genuine unpredictability: each event a probabilistic decision among potentials.

2. Complexity & Emergence show how dissipative systems (Prigogine) and autocatalytic sets (Kauffman) self-organize, producing order from chaos.

3. 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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Select Bibliography

Primary and Foundational Texts

• Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929; corr. ed. 1978).

• Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (1948).

• Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907).

• Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677).

• Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968).

Atheistic & Naturalistic Extensions

• Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (2003).

• Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (2008).

• Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2012).

• Ilya Prigogine, Order out of Chaos (1984).

• Karl Friston, “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2010).

Contemporary Process and Metamodern Thought

• Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible (2014).

• Philip Clayton, Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action (2008).

• Andrew Davis, Mind, Value, and Cosmos (2020).

• Matthew Segall, Physics of the World-Soul (2021).

• Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence (2023).

Supplementary Readings

• Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943).

• Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).

• Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007).

Continue to:

Essay IV - Processual Freewill Consciousness: A Return to the Sacred