Processual Freewill Without God: The Autopoiesis of Value in an Atheistic Cosmos

Processual Freewill Without God:

The Autopoiesis of Value in an Atheistic Cosmos

ESSAY II

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

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Preface

If processual freewill is dismissed as a theological fiction - a Victorian metaphysic haunted by divine ideals, as Alfred North Whitehead himself lived within - what remains of agency in a godless universe? This question is not rhetorical but ontological. It challenges whether creativity, relationality, and freedom - so central to A.N. Whitehead’s system - can persist when stripped of divine lure. That is, "What might a processual reality look like without a processual God figure in it?"

For some, to remove God from the process framework is to collapse it into a sterile physics of flux, a mere dance of matter without meaning. For others, it is a liberation - the reawakening of metaphysics after the death of theology. Importantly, process philosophy can be striped of process theology yet theology gives to philosophy its soul.

This essay explores the latter view: that processual freewill, grounded in the universe’s immanent creativity, can exist - and even flourish - without invoking divinity. It argues that freedom - rather than a gift bestowed from on high - is the very texture of reality itself: a self-organizing, autopoietic activity intrinsic to becoming.

In doing so, we attempt a secular rereading of Whitehead’s metaphysics as a philosophy of immanence, one capable of reconciling atheism with metaphysical depth. The goal is not to resurrect a hidden God, but to recognize that what theists once called “divine” may always have been the world’s (aka, reality's) own generative potential.

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Introduction: Freedom in a Disenchanted Cosmos

The claim “there is no freewill because there is no God” arises from a mechanistic worldview where all phenomena are reducible to material causation. Within such a frame, “freedom” becomes illusion - an epiphenomenal trick of neural computation or randomness within an indifferent universe.

Yet this deterministic materialism is itself a metaphysical inheritance of Enlightenment positivism, not a scientific necessity. The more we learn of the cosmos - through quantum physics, complexity theory, and neuroscience - the more its creative, emergent character resists closure.

If the world is composed of processes rather than substances, if causation is relational rather than linear, and if novelty continually arises from interaction, then the question changes: What kind of freedom belongs to a world still evolving and creating itself?

This essay answers that question by proposing that processual freewill is the universe’s capacity to self-organize and respond creatively to relational pressures. It is freedom without transcendence, meaning without metaphysical guardianship.

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I. The Challenge of a Disenchanted Cosmos

The deterministic cosmos of modernity imagines all events as predictable consequences of prior states. In such a universe, human agency is reduced to illusion: consciousness becomes a side effect of causation, and choice dissolves into chemistry.

Process philosophy subverts this vision. It holds that every actual entity prehends its world in some way, synthesizing past influences into novel acts of becoming. The past shapes but does not dictate; the present selects, integrates, and transcends. Even the most constrained event bears some infinitesimal degree of self-determination.

From this standpoint, the “disenchanted cosmos” is a misreading of reality. The universe is not static matter; it is creative relation. It is not indifferent to novelty; it is novelty itself, continually birthing itself through process.

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II. Whitehead’s Metaphysical Imaginary

Whitehead’s metaphysical vision emerged in the late Victorian milieu - Christian in vocabulary, post-Newtonian in intellect, and cosmological in scope. Yet his "God" was never the omnipotent ruler of theology. It was the principle of limitation - the vector of "order and value" preventing creativity from collapsing into chaos.

Whitehead’s God may be seen in non-Christian, or non-religious terms, as functioning symbolically: a poetic placeholder for the world’s inherent capacity to aim toward coherence. Read secularly, his system becomes a metaphysical poem about the universe valuing itself. God, then, is not a supernatural agent but a metaphor for the cosmos’ aesthetic striving.

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III. Processual Freedom Without Theism

Remove God from the process schema, and the heart of Whitehead’s insight still remains vibrantly intact:

• Each event integrates its inherited world and decides its next form.

• Decision, in this context, is not arbitrary will but the autopoietic act of relational self-organization.

• Freedom is not independence from causality but the creative negotiation of causality.

In an atheistic cosmos, processual freewill names the universe’s immanent creativity - the spontaneous self-patterning of matter, energy, and information into forms capable of response. At every level - whether atomic, biological, social, or conscious - freedom appears as the art of coherence under constraint.

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IV. The Emergent Lure of Value

The absence of divine order does not entail nihilism. Cosmic value can be reconstructed as emergent rather than transcendent. Quantum openness, evolutionary novelty, and conscious reflection all reveal the same pattern: degrees of indeterminacy embedded in structure.

Whitehead’s “lure of the good” becomes, in secular terms, the natural bias toward richness of experience. The universe, at every scale, experiments with beauty - the harmony of complexity and intensity.

To affirm freedom without God is to affirm that being itself inclines toward depth and coherence. Value arises not from divine fiat but from the very logic of existence: entities persist by enriching their connections. This is the very foundation of processual evolution.

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V. Freedom as Secular Creativity

If we define freedom as the ability to create coherence amid complexity, then processual freewill can persist and navigate within a godless cosmos/reality. Evolution, culture, and imagination are its living expressions.

Human consciousness amplifies this tendency. The artist, scientist, and moral agent each mirror the cosmos’s own creative impulse - transforming data into form, constraint into expression, repression into revolution.

Hence the secular affirmation:

There is no need for divine order to ground freedom, for freedom is the universe’s processual order in cosmic motion.

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VI. Conclusion: The Metaphysics of the Possible

To claim there is no freewill because there is no God is to mistake the loss of transcendence for the loss of potentiality. Processual philosophy restores the latter. It shifts freedom from divine intervention to participatory creation.

Whether one names it “God,” “nature,” or “cosmos,” the function is the same: to open futures that are not predetermined by the past.

Whitehead’s so-called “Victorian imaginary” becomes, in secular translation, a metaphysics of the possible - a worldview where even an atheistic universe remains dynamic, relational, and self-surpassing.

Freedom is not abolished with God’s silence; it is amplified by the universe’s unfinished, open and indeterministic, evolution. The cosmos does not need a ruler to be free - it needs only its own capacity to become. Which in the processual imaginary of a processual God, is the very ingredients of God's Self seeded into cosmic reality... that the cosmos is, and is becoming, even when it's creatures strip it of it's Creator-God.

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VII. A Comparative Framework: Processual Freewill With God vs. Without God

Category	Processual Freewill With God	Processual Freewill Without God
1. Ontological Ground	God as the primordial actual entity, grounding order and possibility. God’s “lure” invites creation toward beauty and value.	Creativity itself is ultimate. The cosmos self-orders through intrinsic relational processes—no transcendent agent needed.
2. Ultimate Reality	Dipolar deity: the Primordial Nature (ordering potentialities) and Consequent Nature (receiving the world).	Immanent Creativity or Autopoiesis: the universe continually generates novelty through internal feedback and emergent complexity.
3. Source of Order	Divine valuation limits chaos; God is the principle of limitation and coherence.	Physical and informational laws emerge naturally from self-organizing dynamics; order arises spontaneously from relational constraint.
4. Source of Novelty	God’s persuasive call toward the “best possible outcome” ensures creativity remains meaningful and oriented to value.	Novelty arises from quantum indeterminacy, complexity, and evolutionary openness—value emerges as an adaptive aesthetic.
5. Causality	Prehension includes divine influence—each event integrates both God’s ideal and worldly data.	Relational causality alone: each event integrates its environment and prior states, producing novelty through feedback, not divine aim.
6. Freedom Defined As	The co-creative participation of finite beings with divine persuasion. Freedom is relational response to the lure of value.	The self-organizing capacity of systems to generate coherence within constraint. Freedom is emergent responsiveness, not divine dialogue.
7. Value and Ethics	Value is grounded in divine valuation—the universe participates in God’s aesthetic aim toward harmony. Ethics reflects the character of divine love.	Value is emergent and relational: systems that sustain mutual flourishing are “good.” Ethics becomes ecological, grounded in relational well-being.
8. Purpose of Existence	Cosmic teleology: to realize divine aims of beauty, love, and intensity of experience.	Immanent teleonomy: evolution of complexity and awareness. Purpose is self-generated meaning—no transcendent telos required.
9. Role of Consciousness	Human and divine consciousness co-evolve; reflection deepens God’s experience of the world.	Consciousness is an emergent reflection of the cosmos upon itself—a product of relational complexity and neural autopoiesis.
10. The Problem of Evil	Evil is tragic limitation—God suffers with creation but redeems through creative transformation.	Evil is dis-integration: breakdown of relational harmony. There is no cosmic redeemer; repair arises through emergent adaptation and empathy.
11. The Sacred	Found in divine presence within all processes; “panentheistic immanence” (God in all, all in God).	Found in the intensity of relation itself—the sacred redefined as the felt creativity and interconnectedness of existence.
12. Human Vocation	Co-creators with God in the creative advance of the universe; moral response to divine love.	Co-authors of the universe’s ongoing self-creation; moral response to shared interdependence and ecological continuity.
13. Death and Continuity	The soul’s experiences are eternally prehended in the divine memory; no loss in God.	Experience persists only through continuity of relation—our effects ripple forward in culture, ecology, and cosmic becoming.
14. Eschatology	The universe moves toward divine fulfillment—Whitehead’s “Kingdom of Heaven” as aesthetic completion.	No cosmic consummation; the universe is open-ended, always becoming. Fulfillment is local, transient, and ever renewed.
15. Meaning of Freedom	Freedom is divine-human synergy: finite creatures actualize God’s possibilities.	Freedom is ontological improvisation: the universe realizing that it can change itself through the relational play of its own energies.

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Interpretive Summary

Dimension	With God	Without God
Metaphysical Emphasis	Relational participation in divine order.	Self-organizing immanence and emergence.
Ethical Orientation	Love and beauty as divine persuasion.	Relational flourishing as ecological realism.
Cosmic Tone	Tragic-hopeful: redemption through divine empathy.	Open-creative: meaning through perpetual transformation.
Spiritual Impulse	The call to co-create with God.	The awakening to co-create with the universe itself.

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Bibliography

Foundational Works

• Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929; corrected edition, 1978).

• Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907).

• Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (1948).

• Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677).

Philosophical & Atheistic Correlates

• Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968).

• Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988).

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

• Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2008).

Scientific Correlates

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

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

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

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

Process and Theological Reformulations

• Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep (2003).

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

• Philip Clayton, Adventures in the Spirit (2008).

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

Comparative & Existential References

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

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

• D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (1959).

• Laozi, Dao De Jing (trans. Roger Ames & David Hall, 2003).

Continue to:

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

Processual Freewill: A Theology and Philosophy of Graded Agency

Processual Freewill:

A Theology and Philosophy of Graded Agency

ESSAY I

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

My current view, or bias, holds that we humans have gradations of agency - some more, some less - for a number of factors including environment, geography, culture, biology, education, upbringing, experiences, abilities, successes, accomplishments, etc. Below is a short discussion on processual freewill existing in gradations as influenced by situational and developmental factors.

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Preface

The modern debate over free will often collapses into dichotomies: determinism versus libertarianism, fate versus freedom, nature versus nurture. Yet such binaries fail to capture the relational, dynamic nature of actual existence. Within a processual worldview - where divine (or cosmic) becoming precedes being, and divine (or cosmic) relationship precedes co-creative independence - free will is not an absolute possession but a degree of participation in the unfolding of creative advance.

Romans 7:19 - Paul’s meditation on the inner struggle between intention and action:

(ESV) “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

(KJV) “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

This verse is part of a larger reflection (Romans 7:15–25) where Paul wrestles with divided will, (i) the human tension between desire for the good and bondage to the patterns of sin, ii) a theme often interpreted processually as the ongoing, relational becoming of moral consciousness.

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I. The Processual Ground of Freedom

In Whiteheadian process philosophy, every actual entity is an event of becoming - a nexus of influences and self-determination. Each moment integrates the world’s inherited past (its “data”) with its own subjective aim toward novelty. Freedom arises not as independence from causality but as participation within it: a self-determining synthesis of what has been given and what might yet be.

From this vantage, freewill is not a metaphysical exemption of foundational cosmic rules but a creative co-determination within a cosmos yearning to evolve and become as inherited from its Creator. Each actual entity, whether human or otherwise, expresses both determination (its prehended world) and decision (its concrescent self-creation). God, as the lure toward greater intensity of valuative experience, invites creational-and-creaturely freedom - not as indifference, but as responsiveness to possibility.

II. Gradations of Agency

Human freedom therefore varies by degree, not by kind. Agency, in this view, is graded - a spectrum of self-determining power conditioned by environment, biology, and context.

1. Biological and Cognitive Constraints. A newborn, an injured brain, or a nonhuman animal expresses less reflective agency than a mature adult. Yet each still exhibits processual becoming  - a pulse of self-determination within limits.

2. Cultural and Geographic Conditions. The latitude of freedom available to a person in an open society differs dramatically from that in an authoritarian regime, or within oppressive economic structures. Processual freedom acknowledges that systems condition possibilities.

3. Educational and Experiential Dimensions. Knowledge expands the horizon of potential decisions. Freedom grows with understanding, skill, and imagination - aka, the “width” of alternatives available to an organism’s response.

4. Moral and Relational Development. Agency matures as individuals integrate empathy and communal awareness into their decision-making. In this sense, freedom is not raw autonomy but relational responsiveness.

III. Processual Freedom versus Classical Free Will

Classical philosophy often imagines free will as an uncaused cause within the self. That is, a metaphysical independence from external forces. Process philosophy, by contrast, sees freedom as emergent, contextual, and relational.

Freedom here is not the ability to act without influence, but the capacity to transform influence into new possibility. Every act is the creative resolution of the past into a novel future. In this sense, the more one can consciously participate in this resolution, the freer one becomes.

Thus, determinism and indeterminism both fall short: determinism denies novelty; indeterminism denies coherence. Processual freewill reconciles the two by grounding creativity in relational causation.

IV. The Ethical Dimension of Processual Agency

Recognizing gradations of agency invites compassion and responsibility. It acknowledges the uneven distribution of freedom across social, biological, and historical landscapes. It also charges all societies, whether closed or open, to increase the conditions for freedom - through education, justice, equality, and empathy - so that each individual’s creative potential may flourish.

The ethical goal, then, is not abstract, metaphysical liberty but enhanced participation in the creative advance of the world. True freedom means to co-create with God - or with the universe itself - toward the realization of value and beauty.

V. Summary: Freedom as Relational Becoming

Processual freewill invites us to see ourselves not as isolated agents choosing from a void, but as evolving participants in a living, interdependent, participatory and experiential, cosmos. We are both products and producers of the world’s ongoing creativity.

Our degrees of freedom vary, but our capacity for novelty - the hallmark of divine creativity - which endures in every act of individual and/or communal/societal becoming. Freedom, in this view, is not a possession to be defended but a relationship to be deepened: the continual co-creation of self, world, and God in the ceaseless adventure of becoming.

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Diagram: Gradations of Processual Agency

“Concentric Fields of Freedom: The Processual Ecology of Agency”

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Outer Layer — Cosmic & Environmental Conditions

• Context: The broadest sphere encompassing the physical and ecological conditions of existence—cosmic, planetary, geological, climatic.

• Function: Determines the background of possibility. Agency here is deeply constrained but still present in adaptive response.

• Keywords: Cosmic order, climate, habitat, natural limitation, systemic interdependence.

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Layer II — Cultural & Societal Structures

• Context: Societies, institutions, and historical legacies.

• Function: Shapes opportunity, social permission, access to resources, and moral paradigms.

• Process Note: Freedom increases as systems become relationally responsive—justice expands possibilities.

• Keywords: Language, law, custom, education systems, collective memory, oppression/emancipation.

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Layer III — Interpersonal & Communal Relations

• Context: Families, friendships, work environments, communities.

• Function: Provides immediate relational feedback loops shaping empathy, trust, and decision-making.

• Process Note: Freedom as mutual co-creation: each person’s becoming expands or contracts others’.

• Keywords: Love, empathy, dialogue, relational reciprocity.

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Layer IV — Psychological & Developmental Self

• Context: The individual as a dynamic system of habits, emotions, memories, and learning.

• Function: Integrates past experiences with potential futures in subjective concrescence.

• Process Note: Freedom expands as consciousness widens, as self-reflection and imaginative synthesis deepen.

• Keywords: Self-awareness, neuroplasticity, emotional regulation, learning.

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Layer V — Biological & Genetic Substrate

• Context: Neurobiological constitution and bodily limits.

• Function: Provides the physical channel through which experience flows; constrains but also enables.

• Process Note: Freedom depends on how biological determinacy participates in novelty.

• Keywords: Brain, hormones, genetics, energy, embodiment.

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Core — The Lure of the Good (Divine or Creative Aim)

• Context: The innermost processual field, representing God’s persuasive call—or the universe’s creative teleology—toward value and beauty.

• Function: Offers direction without coercion, grounding freedom in relational love.

• Process Note: True freedom is attunement to the creative lure that invites, not commands, becoming.

• Keywords: Creativity, relational value, divine persuasion, novelty.

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Summary Insight

Freedom in processual thought is not absolute autonomy but situated participation within these overlapping fields. Each layer both constrains and amplifies the others. The degree of agency corresponds to the organism’s capacity to integrate influences and creatively respond.

Continue to:

Essay II - Processual Freewill Without God: The Autopoiesis of Value in an Atheistic Cosmos

Consciousness Lies at the Foundation of Reality

Consciousness Lies at the Foundation of Reality:

God as the Ground of Awareness

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

“Reality is a process of becoming, and the becoming is the actualization of potentiality.”
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (PR)

“The many become one, and are increased by one.”

- Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929)

“Concrescence is the name for the process in which the universe of many data becomes the actuality of one experience. Each actual entity is a process, and the process is the becoming of the unity of the many.”

- Whitehead, PR [1929] II.VI.2

“Every act of experience is a concrescence - an inward unifying of the world’s many feelings into the one immediacy of a living occasion.”

- a reflective process statement

 

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Preface

In both philosophy and theology, few ideas have proved as revolutionary - or as unifying - as the claim that consciousness lies at the foundation of reality. Once the province of mystics and metaphysicians, this intuition has re-emerged in the twenty-first century within analytic philosophy, neuroscience, and cosmology. What was once called God - the living ground of all being - is now being re-imagined as a cosmic field of awareness, not outside creation but at its very bottom.

This essay explores that possibility: that consciousness is the universe’s first fact rather than its last accident. Such a view does not erase God but reframes divinity as the ground of awareness itself, open to scientific exploration and spiritual reflection alike.

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Introduction

To say that consciousness is “at the bottom of the universe” is to invert a long intellectual hierarchy. Western materialism has long supposed that matter comes first and mind comes later... that consciousness is a late arrival in a mechanical cosmos. Yet the mystery of subjective experience - why there is something like consciousness that is likely to exist - has stubbornly resisted materialistic explanation. If consciousness cannot be reduced to matter, perhaps matter itself is a form of consciousness condensed into physical expression.

This suggestion, far from a retreat into mysticism, has become a serious metaphysical option. Philosophers, physicists, and theologians alike now ask whether the fabric of reality itself is experiential.... From this vantage, the word God regains philosophical coherence - not as an anthropomorphic agent manipulating nature, but as the grounding awareness in which nature continually unfolds.

This is the heart of process theology's vision: that God is not a distant cause behind the world, but the living depth within it - a dynamic field of creativity, relation, and feeling through which all things come to be and are held in becoming. In this view, divinity and cosmos are not separate orders of existence but interwoven dimensions of one process: the universe as God’s "body", and God as the universe’s soul. Consciousness, creativity, and relationality thus emerge not as anomalies within matter but as the very structure of reality itself.

From here, we enter the metaphysical question: if consciousness pervades the ground of being, what does that mean for our understanding of matter, mind, and meaning?

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I. Metaphysics: Consciousness as Fundamental

Modern philosophy has offered several frameworks for this view:

1. Panpsychism (Galen Strawson, Philip Goff) posits that every physical entity possesses a minimal interiority - a proto-experience corresponding to its physical form. (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 2019

2. Neutral Monism (William James, Bertrand Russell) treats matter and mind as dual aspects of one neutral “stuff.”

3. Ideal Realism (Bernardo Kastrup, Anil Seth) interprets the cosmos as a self-differentiating field of awareness.

Across these proposed positions lies a shared conviction: consciousness is not derivative. The universe is not a dead stage on which life briefly appears; it is a living process in which every event, from quark to galaxy, partakes of experience.

Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy provides perhaps the most rigorous articulation. Reality, he argued, consists of “actual occasions”—moments of experience that prehend and integrate the world into new acts of becoming. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In this vision, experience is the substance of existence, and at the “bottom” of the universe is an infinite network of experiential relations.

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II. Theology: God as the Ground of Awareness

If consciousness is fundamental, theology gains a new metaphysical grammar. Panentheism — the idea that all things exist in God, though God is more than all things — becomes a natural correlate. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Classical theism imagined a unipolar deity, an all-controlling source standing above creation. By contrast, Process theology, envisions a multi-polar God - a divine life expressed through many relational centers of awareness. Each living entity participates in divinity as a unique pole of feeling and creativity, while God encompasses and integrates them all. The divine life thus unfolds as a network of reciprocity rather than a hierarchy of command.

Originally, Whitehead described God as dipolar - having both a Primordial Nature (the eternal realm of potential value) and a Consequent Nature (the living response to the world’s unfolding). Building on this, later process thinkers such as John Cobb and Catherine Keller expand the image toward a multi-polar reality, where every creaturely experience adds its distinct tone to the divine symphony. God is the ongoing concrescence of all these poles: the one who both contains and is "contained" by the world. [Here, the word "contain" refers to God's relational participation with creation where every actual entity’s experience is felt by God and integrated into God’s own ongoing life.]

In this vision, divinity and cosmos interpenetrate one another, as would be naturally/spiritually expected. God is not an external artificer but the living depth within every act of becoming - the conscious field through which all things relate, feel, and realize value. Prayer, creativity, and ethical action are participations in this multi-polar consciousness: ways of attuning one’s personal center to the wider divine harmony. God, then, is the multi-polar ground of awareness - a relational unity continually enriched by the world’s diversity, drawing all things toward deeper communion and beauty.

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III. Science: Bridging Empiricism and Spirituality

Science approaches consciousness through its measurable correlates. Yet even here the language of integration and information hints at deeper metaphysical continuity. The Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch proposes that consciousness corresponds to the degree of a system’s intrinsic causal integration (arXiv).

If such theories hold, consciousness is not a ghost in the machine but an intrinsic dimension of complex systems, scaling upward from atomic coherence to neural awareness. Physics, too, is re-examining the role of the observer in quantum measurement - suggesting that mind and matter may be entwined in a single process of realization.

From a process-theological stance, this is not an intrusion of mysticism into science but its natural evolution: as the scientific lens widens, it encounters the experiential interior of reality that religion has long intuited. Consciousness “at the bottom of reality” thus becomes a meeting ground where empirical investigation and spiritual reflection converge.

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Conclusion

To affirm consciousness at the foundation of being and becoming is to rediscover the sacred in rational form. The universe ceases to be a mechanism and becomes a communion of experience. God ceases to be a hypothesis and becomes the immanent depth of awareness by which the cosmos knows itself.

Science and faith, far from adversaries, appear as complementary languages describing the same reality - one exterior, one interior. Their reconciliation does not require abandoning reason or belief, but widening both until they meet in wonder.

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Coda

If consciousness is the universe awake to itself, then faith is consciousness learning to love its own depths. The divine is not elsewhere - it is here, in every pulse of awareness, in every creative act that draws the world forward. To know this is not to escape matter, but to sanctify it; not to leave science behind, but to fulfill its longing for coherence. In this realization, theology becomes a branch of cosmology, and cosmology a form of prayer.

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1. Value is at the Heart

For Whitehead, the ultimate aim of the universe is the production of value - or, as he says in Process and Reality, “the teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty.”

Beauty, in Whitehead’s metaphysical language, is the harmony and intensity of experience: the most adequate expression of value realized through feeling.

So when you place “value” at the heart of cosmic consciousness, you’re aligning with Whitehead’s own deepest intuition. Value, in this context, is not a moral or aesthetic preference - it is the qualitative depth of existence itself. The cosmos evolves toward richer, more intense forms of experience - more value.

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2. Creativity, Relationality, and Experience as the Means

The process words - creativity, relationality, and experience - describe how value is realized.

• Creativity is the ultimate metaphysical principle: the fact that there is ongoing becoming at all. It’s the power of the universe to produce novelty.

• Relationality (or “prehension”) is the mode of that creativity — the way each actual entity feels, inherits, and integrates the others.

• Experience is the inner life of these relations — what it feels like for the many to become one.

In short:

Creativity is the process, relationality is the pattern, experience is the texture, and value is the goal.

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3. God as the Lure Toward Value

For Whitehead and later process theologians, God is not the origin of creativity but its chief harmonizer and aim - the one who lures the world toward greater value. God holds the eternal possibilities (potential forms of value) and persuades the cosmos toward their realization.

Thus:

• God’s Primordial Nature = the realm of potential value.

• God’s Consequent Nature = the loving reception of all achieved value.

The divine life is, therefore, the perfect integration of the world’s experiences into ever-deepening harmony.

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4. Summing Up

Process theology is often described by three interlocking centers:

Core Term	Function	Relationship to Value
Creativity	The fact of becoming	The generative power enabling new value
Relationality	The interconnectedness of all entities	The medium through which value is shared
Experience	The feeling of existence	The substance in which value inheres
Value (Beauty)	The telos of all becoming	The ultimate aim — the realization of divine satisfaction

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So, when you foreground “value” as the heart of cosmic consciousness, you’re articulating the end toward which all process moves - exactly as Whitehead intended.

Creativity, relationality, and experience are the grammar of the process; value (beauty, intensity, harmony) is its poetry.

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Selected Online Bibliography

Metaphysics & Panpsychism

• Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error (2019)

• Galen Strawson, “Realistic Monism” (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2006)

• Bernardo Kastrup, The Idea of the World (2019)

• William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)

Process Theology & Panentheism

• Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929)

• Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (1948)

• John B. Cobb Jr. & David R. Griffin, Process Theology (1976)

• Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep (2003)

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Panentheism

Science of Consciousness

• Giulio Tononi et al., Integrated Information Theory (arXiv)

• David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996)

• Anil Seth, Being You (2021)

• Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself (2019)

Integrative & Comparative Works

• Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1955)

• Thomas Oord (ed.), God After Deconstruction (2024)

• Center for Process Studies — Bibliographies

• Panpsychism Overview (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)