God's Reason for Becoming

Theists have never agreed on God's reason for creating. Maimonides held that we cannot know why God created the world; Al‐Ghazali taught that God created “to reveal his power…” (Hartshorne and Reese 2000, 107). We sometimes find different emphases in the same source. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches both that “God has no other reason for creating than his love and goodness” and that “the world was made for the glory of God.” ⁵ This diversity suggests that God's reason for becoming is not central to theism; Mullins does not include it in classical theism's hard core. It is, however, central in pandeism.

Linda Zagzebski usefully distinguishes two types of reasons: purposes and motives. One has a purpose when one acts for an end; one's motive is the core emotion or desire that pushes one to seek an end. A purpose‐based explanation tells us that an agent acts to achieve a certain end or goal, but a further explanation is then needed to explain why the agent has that end or goal. The agent's motive provides it. “The most basic explanation for both an act and the end of an act is the motive of the act” (Zagzebski 2004, 99).

To explain God's Becoming, LGP needs a motive, and there are fewer rational motives for becoming a world than for creating one. The two most plausible candidates are a desire for experience and love. A preference for one over the other is a preference for an auxiliary hypothesis; it does not alter this research program's hard core.

A desire for experience also motivates God in a different research program. On this alternate map, call it death of God pandeism (“DGP”), God ceases to exist at the Becoming, and our world consists of “God's debris” (Adams 2001). Both LGP and DGP claim that God became the Universe, but on DGP God becomes the world in much the way a crystal goblet becomes broken shards of glass, not in the way a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. A consideration I will call the priority condition distinguishes LGP from DGP. I will explain and defend it below.

We turn now to God's plausible motives on LGP.

Desire for Experience: A pandeist website asks:

Can a being that is alone in existence experience fear, much less conquer fear through courage? Can it overcome grief, anger, despair, and experience comfort, contentment, triumph? It can do so only through existence as a Universe which may come to be populated by beings capable of having these feelings, with no portion of the Creator reserved outside the Creation to assuage these beings to any degree. ⁶

Becoming a world would, in principle, let God experience everything that world has to offer. God could “feel the rain on His petals, and His fruit being eaten by a bird; and he could taste the fruit like a bird. He could make love as a badger and as an elephant; make love as a man and as a woman.” If motivated by a desire for experience, God would become a variegated world that “He could take part in and experience first‐hand” (Dawe 2016, 113–16).

Alan Watts (1966, 14) identifies Brahman's reason for becoming the world as a desire for experience:

God likes to play hide‐and‐seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. … He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

This understanding of God's motive aligns with the notion that the world is māya; the ocean of God may be real but its creaturely waves are not.

Competing Research Programs

Theological research programs prioritize self‐consistency, tradition, and religious experience, but they cannot ignore the world that science discloses. “A theology,” writes Sallie McFague (1992, 50), “that is not commensurate with reality as culturally understood is not credible.” To create the appearance of consistency, many traditions appeal to natural theology. But the research program approach used in science differs fundamentally from the approach usually taken by natural theologians. The latter starts from the world—typically asking why it is and why it is as it is, then offer God as the answer. But their best arguments, the cosmological argument and the argument from the fine‐tuning of nature's laws, even were they to succeed, would only point to a creator of some sort, not to theism's God (Palmqvist 2020, 25–28).

Here, that approach will be reversed. Starting with a concept of God, we will ask what sort of world that concept implies. The answer will imply specific claims (hypotheses) that empirical data can confirm or falsify. Note, however, that this approach can work only for a God concept that has specifiable implications for the natural world. Theism has few of these for two reasons:

1. On theism, God's attributes belong only to God; one cannot infer the world's nature or structure from them.

2. Many reasons for creation that theists attribute to God have nothing to say about the created world. Even when theism claims that love or goodness led God to create, those motives cannot specify the world's nature or structure. To do that, they would have to hold that our world optimally manifests God's reason for creation. But no major theistic tradition makes that claim. The resulting indefiniteness of what theism's God might create negates any possible use of God's motive to frame predictions about the world.

The canonical objection to the claim that God should and therefore would create “the best of worlds”—read: “the world that best effectuates God's motive”—is this:

• : No created world can be optimal in any way, for the infinite God could always do better.

• : Since no optimal world can exist, even God cannot create one.

• : God can only create a less‐than‐optimal world and chose to create ours out of grace.

This argument's first and crucial premise is that an unbridgeable gap exists between God's power of creation and the capacity of any created world to receive the result. Bonaventure described that gap in terms of creatures, but his logic applies equally to worlds: “[N]o matter how big or how good a creature [world] may be, there is always a point at which one must stop, because any creature [world] is finite. And what God does with regard to that creature [world] is good within that limit, so that He does not do anything more. But I think that it is never the case that God could not do something more” (Pini 2009, 287).

Contrast LGP:

1. The Universe that God wholly becomes must possess each of God's great‐making attributes, and each to an unsurpassable degree. For if any great‐making attributes were lost or diminished in the Becoming we could then conceive of something greater than God: namely, a Reality whose greatness would not diminish upon Becoming. Another way of saying this: if the Becoming diminished God's greatness, whatever became the Universe would not still be God; nor would God‐and‐Universe comport with Anselm's dictum.

2. The claim that God wholly became the world instead of creating it defeats Bonaventure's premise. For (on A) the Universe that God becomes would retain God's unsurpassable causal power/effectiveness and with it the capacity to optimally realize God's motive.

If God wholly became the world, a clear statement of God's nature and motive would give us a basis for making testable predictions. Darwin's research program offers an analogy. Darwin knew that natural selection would require at least hundreds of millions of years to produce all existing forms of life. So, it came as a blow when William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) calculated the Sun's age to be far less than that. But Darwin's program answered many biological questions, so scientists kept trying to reconcile these findings. In 1895, geologist Thomas Chamberlain suggested, “No careful chemist would affirm either that atoms are really elementary or that there may not be locked up in them energies of the first order of magnitude.” ⁹ A decade later, Einstein wrote down the equation that showed how energy locked up in atoms lets the Sun shine for billions of years. The special theory of relativity made natural selection consilient with physics. Just as Darwin and his supporters could not say how the Sun could shine so long but knew that, in some way, it had to, LGP's predictions about the world must, if its claims are true, be satisfied in some way, though not necessarily in a foreseeable way. To this extent, LGP makes testability possible. Theism and other maps of God do not.

Reality and Unity

If God became a universe, it ought to be basically real and unified. But because pandeism posits real change, no world that God becomes could be a changeless block; it would have to be a changing, unified system. And this is the standard monistic view: “The core tenet of historical monism is not that the whole has no parts, but rather that the whole is prior to its parts” (Schaffer 2010, 33). On LGP, this view (“priority monism”) should be true. By contrast, theism sees the Universe as a collection of ontologically distinct substances (Mullins 2016, 330–32). The truth of priority monism, if confirmed, would support pandeism as against theism.

To see how a world of diverse phenomena might still be One, start by asking how anything can be one. We take a cat to be a unified reality because its diverse pieces and parts interact in a systematic way—the cat stalks and leaps together—and because the whole brings its parts into being: the cat evolves from a single cell; its paws and ears do not join up to form their owner. The standard contrast is with a heap of sand. It has no structure to speak of, no diverse pieces or parts that systematically interact; and the heap does not create the sand grains: it comes into being when grains are swept together. A cat is a unified system; a sandpile is an aggregate. If God became our world, it should be catlike.

Like a cat, our world did not begin by combining constituents. They all came into being through the operation of its physical laws. Our Universe originated at what physicists call a “time‐like singularity”: When one follows the histories of its structures backward, they appear to converge at a singular point in the past (Mithani and Vilenkin 2012).

Our world's physical laws govern the Universe, not its pieces or parts. To minimize noise from the environment, physicists try to isolate the systems they study. But noise always creeps in, for no physical system other than the Universe evolves in exact conformity to the laws of physics, as if those laws applied to that system alone. “Newton's first law of motion,” explains physicist Lee Smolin, “asserts that all free particles move along straight lines. It has been tested and confirmed in numerous cases. But each test involves an approximation, for no particle is truly free. Every particle in our universe feels a gravitational force from every other” (Smolin 2013, 100). This “principle of no isolated systems,” as Smolin calls it, is a core feature of the physical world (Smolin 2013, 110). The Universe is the only truly isolated system. “Being the one system for which nothing is ‘outside’ [it] is the one system immune to disruption. This means that the cosmos is the one and only thing that evolves by strict laws” (Schaffer 2013, 75).

Priority monism's main competitor is priority atomism. Following Democritus, priority atomists focus on the smallest “uncuttable” instances of matter, whatever they may be. They say the Universe is a collection of things composed of simpler things, and ultimately of these philosophical “atoms,” ¹⁰ which might be quarks and electrons or something smaller. If this were true, the Universe would be further removed from basicness than anything in it.

This idea once gained support from the “wave‐particle” metaphor often used to explain quantum physics. According to this metaphor, quarks, electrons, photons, and so on (call them all “quanta”) sometimes behave as particles and sometimes as waves, depending on the way they are measured. The notion that quanta are in some sense particles let atomists take them to be their “atoms.” But quanta are no longer seen even partly as “particles”; many physicists want to ban that word entirely (Zeh 2003; Hobson 2013). “In quantum theory,” writes Euan Squires (1994, 93), “what we thought was a particle, a tiny object following a well‐defined path in space, is really a wave.” Each wave owes its existence to the universal quantum field in which it metaphorically “waves”; the fields do not owe their existence to their many quanta. Nobelist Steven Weinberg calls this the “central dogma of quantum field theory: the essential reality is a set of fields subject to the rules of special relativity and quantum mechanics; all else is derived as a consequence of the quantum dynamics of those fields” (Pagels 2011, 269).

A “particle” would be real if it both existed as a separate entity and was “always present somewhere in the three‐dimensional Euclidean physical space” (Sassoli de Bianchi 2011, 7, 15). But owing to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, a quantum does not always have a definite location in space; and owing to quantum entanglement (discussed below) it does not exist as a separate entity. “[O]ur widespread belief in the existence of microscopic particles is only the result of a cognitive illusion, as microscopic particles are not particles, but are instead the ephemeral spatial and local manifestations of non‐spatial and non‐local entities” (Sassoli de Bianchi 2011, 1). That is, of the quantum fields. If we consist of quanta and they are waves in quantum fields, the fields are more basic than we are. Our reality depends on their ontologically prior reality. But the fields are interconnected and fill the Universe, so the Universe is basic and prior to its contents (see Le Bihan 2018).

Three further points on this front:

Consciousness

“Consciousness is experience” (Koch 2019, 1). For a being to be conscious there must be “something it is like” to be that being, to have its experiences. A pinprick and the taste of cheese are just two of the limitless things that consciousness can be “like.”

The claim that the Universe is conscious has gained credibility for several reasons. First, decades of thought and research have failed even to hint at how consciousness might emerge from chemistry and physics. The idea that they do looks increasingly like a category mistake (see Goff 2017, 23–132). Water's liquidity is a textbook example of emergence. It only becomes a liquid when millions of water molecules collocate at certain temperatures and pressures. But for water's liquidity to emerge, each molecule must already have a potential for it, a structure that lets it slip around but cohere with others. “If,” writes Galen Strawson, “it really is true that Y is emergent from X then it must be the case that Y is in some sense wholly dependent on X and X alone, so that all features of Y trace intelligibly back to X… Emergence can't be brute” (Strawson 2006, 18). As Leibniz's famous thought experiment of the mill already suggested, the electrochemical interactions that occur between and within neurons have no apparent potential for consciousness. A growing acceptance of this conclusion—“There will,” writes neuroscientist Christof Koch (2012, 3), “never be a reductionist, mechanistic account of how the objective world is linked to the subjective one.”—has prompted a search for other explanations.

The prejudice against widespread animal consciousness has also faded. “The apparent restriction of the phenomenon of consciousness to the higher forms of life,” Père Teilhard de Chardin (1959, 55) wrote, “has long served science as an excuse for eliminating it from its models of the universe.” Today, that excuse no longer serves. It seems increasingly likely that, perhaps to varying degrees, nearly all animals are conscious (see Barron and Klein 2016; Feinberg and Mallatt 2016; Medeiros 2021).

These developments have fueled interest in panpsychism, the modern version of which comes in two flavors: constitutive and nonconstitutive. Constitutive panpsychism is the claim that, just as each of us has an interior conscious self, every ultimate (i.e., basically real) physical reality has an interior nature that instantiates experiential properties. Ultimacy is the key. To say that consciousness began with the first cell or the first brain would, on this view, be arbitrary. Why should it begin there and not somewhere else? If consciousness exists at reality's basic level, that question does not arise. We “only” have to explain how this base quality becomes our variegated experiences.

So long as elementary “particles” were thought to be basically real, they were the primary locus of speculation. Panpsychists theorized that our consciousness derived from theirs by way of combination. But this view has obvious problems. First, quanta are not basically real; they therefore cannot, by panpsychism's own logic, be the ultimate sources of creature consciousness. Second, no one has explained how the tiny sparks of consciousness that quanta purportedly possess could combine into sensations like that of riding a bike downhill. The difficulty of this “combination problem,” Barbara Montero (2017, 223) writes, suggests “that panpsychists should think of the fundamental nature of the world as comprising, not discrete particles, but rather a continuous expanse of consciousness … the underlying experiential, nondiscrete nature of the universe.”

There are also affirmative arguments for priority cosmopsychism, the version of constitutive panpsychism that says the Universe is the ground of conscious experience (see Nagasawa and Wager 2017). If some brain activities depend in part on quantum effects (see, e.g., Jedlicka 2017) the quantum connection could favor a holistic ground of experience. “The simultaneous unity and complexity of subjective experience is very difficult to understand from a classical physics perspective,” writes Christof Simon (2020, 204). “In contrast, quantum entanglement is naturally both complex and holistic.” And if priority monism is true, priority cosmopsychism logically follows from constitutive panpsychism's core premise:

• : Consciousness must be grounded at reality's most basic level.

• : The Universe is the only basic reality.

• : The Universe must be the ground of conscious experience.

Another alternative is nonconstitutive panpsychism (“NCP”), the notion that structures, not ultimate physical realities, instantiate consciousness. A leading neuroscientific theory of consciousness, the integrated information theory (“IIT”), is an NCP theory (see Tononi 2016; Koch 2019). “[I]n line with the central intuitions of panpsychism, IIT treats consciousness as an intrinsic, fundamental property of reality” (Tononi and Koch 2017, 1). Yet, it also holds that creature consciousness can only arise in entities (living or nonliving) with the right causal structure. In particular, systems doing a lot of recurrent processing—those whose information processing is strongly causally integrated—are more conscious than systems doing less. Structures not integrated in the requisite way do not instantiate consciousness.

IIT has empirical support, but Anthony Peressini (2013, 192) poses two conceptual challenges to it and other NCP theories. First, “why and how is it that [causally integrated] neuronal complexes … have something it is like to be them as opposed to nothing at all?” Constitutive panpsychism claims to rest on the interior nature of physical reality, but structures qua structures have no interior nature. What makes them conscious? Second, what links particular causal structures to particular experiences? Why is one causal state of an integrated structure a “red” experience and another a “salty” one?

Gregg Rosenberg (2017, 172) says the missing piece could be a universal ground or “base quality” that is “simple only in the way that, say, white noise or white light is simple.” White noise and white light are relatively simple qualities, but each masks a complex structure that superposes all possible sounds or colors. Similarly, cosmic consciousness may be a multiply superposed wave structure (a field) that includes in potentia all possible experiences but appears simple in its totality. The right sort of structure could then actualize individual experiences by reshaping cosmic consciousness, much as a radio transmitter reshapes a carrier wave in the electromagnetic field. At each conscious moment, “it is as if the intrinsic qualities behave as though they were waves, and a Fourier transform on the shape of the input waves occurs, resulting in a wave of a new shape” (Rosenberg 2017, 173).

If Rosenberg's idea was true, the underlying field (Keppler and Shani 2020 call it the “ubiquitous field of consciousness” or “UFC”) would include every possible gradation of sensation. Brain structures—perhaps of the sort that IIT postulates—would modulate this field, creating localized patterns of experience in the UFC.

Knowledge and Intelligence

When the terms are used to describe a world, knowledge and intelligence can be defined as information and the capacity to process it. The Universe is relatively unsurpassable in both respects. First, it always possesses complete information about its past and present. It is hard for us to see this, for the hundreds of tiny, unnoticed influences at play in even simple events make detailed information about their past states irretrievable by us. And the quantity of this hidden information, the world's entropy, is always growing. But while information is always being hidden from us, none is ever lost, for our physical laws are both reliable and reversible.

Rules encode a system's causal patterns. If, given a certain state (S₁), no rule let us predict what comes next (S₂), information would be lost; the two states would not belong to the same, unified system. Since they make such predictions possible, our physical laws are reliable. But they are also reversible: one cannot only predict S₂ from S₁; one can also retrodict S₁ from S₂ (see Lane 2010, 67–71). A world governed by irreversible rules would lose information about its past states with every state transformation. That does not happen in our world, for our laws of physics conserve information, even within black holes (Pennington et al. 2020). This is significant, for the conservation of information in black holes is unlikely to be a requisite of our existence. ¹⁶ Yet, LGP predicts it, for a world that loses information about any of its prior states would not be unsurpassably knowing. Nor would it be an unsurpassably unified system, for its past and present states would not be unsurpassably linked.

Our world also processes information. Physicist Seth Lloyd (2006, 174) describes it as a quantum computer.

In the computational universe, space is filled with “wires,” paths along which information flows. … The wires meet at quantum logic gates, where that information is transformed and processed. The quantum logic gates, in turn, tell space how much to curve at that point. The structure of spacetime is derived from the structure of the underlying computation.

At each moment since the Becoming, the Universe has computed its own, ever more information‐filled and computationally powerful future state. Since no part of it can compare, the Universe is relatively unsurpassable in processing power/intelligence.

Does this make it unsurpassable in Anselm's sense? A classical theist might argue that her God also knows the detailed past and present states of the Universe, but in addition knows the future in its detailed entirety. As Alan Turing showed, this possibility is not open to a computational process; it can only know its future state by computing it (see Lloyd 2006, 34–37). Yet, our theist would argue, we can conceive of classical theism's God.

Or can we? Many deny that even God can know the future in exhaustive detail. Neo‐classical and open theism reject the idea (Mullins 2016, 331–33). And there are other reasons to think classical theism's God would be less knowing than God‐as‐Universe. No theistic God can experience our pains and triumphs exactly as we do, and the disabilities of classical theism's God are even greater. It can have no experiential knowledge (Sarot 1991) and cannot even know a range of propositional statements (Grim 2003).

Effectiveness/Plenitude

On LGP, the Universe must be both One and vastly many. Teilhard (1959, 45) wrote, “The stuff of the universe, woven in a single piece according to one and the same system, but never repeating itself from one point to another, represents a single figure.” A vast and various figure. The observable Universe includes ∼2 trillion (2 × 10¹²) galaxies (Conselice 2016). Each has ≥100 billion (10¹¹) stars. Nearly all of these have planets (Cassan 2013), which come in all possible sizes and orbital arrangements. The whole Universe is at least 250 times larger than the observable part (Vardanyan et al. 2011). And our world's proliferation of structure does not stop with astronomy. Smolin (1997, 163) notes that we “not only find structure on a variety of scales, we find structure on every scale we have so far explored.” At the smallest scale, what seems to be quantum indeterminacy may be the world changing holistically to become ever higher in structural diversity (Smolin 2016).

Is the Universe unsurpassably vast and various? The weak anthropic principle (“WAP”), the tautological truth that any world we observe must support our existence, offers a way to address this question. Naturalistic explanations of cosmological fine‐tuning rest on the WAP, but it can only explain why our world exhibits enough structural richness to support our existence, to make it seem plausible that we evolved. In itself, the WAP cannot explain superfluous structure: any vastly more abundant array of phenomena than our existence requires. Superfluous structure, if it exists, would require another explanation, and LGP offers one. It predicts superfluous structure because it predicts that our physical laws should be hyper‐tuned: tuned to a degree far beyond our requirements to maximize structure, life, and consciousness.

Why life? Living creatures are both the most complex structures we know and the most prolific producers of nonliving structure. As just one example, more than two‐thirds of the 5,000 or more mineral species known to exist on Earth are the result of changes life has made. ¹⁷ They are also the only forms of consciousness we know. So, the hyper‐tuning hypothesis predicts that life, including complex life, should be far more widespread in the Universe than it had to be for us to exist. It should be a major contributor to the world's superfluous structure.

To learn how much superfluous structure there is, start with our astronomical requirements. “[O]ur solar system,” writes Stephen Hawking (2008, 130), “is certainly a prerequisite for our existence, as is an earlier generation of nearby stars in which heavy elements could have been formed by nuclear synthesis. It might even be that the whole of our galaxy was required. But there does not seem to be any necessity for other galaxies to exist, let alone the million or so of them that we see, distributed roughly uniformly throughout the observable universe.” Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan (2016) make a supporting point: For us to be the only technological civilization in the observable Universe to date, the odds against such a civilization evolving on any particular planet in any particular star's habitable zone would have to be between 2.5 × 10²² and 2.5 × 10²⁴ to 1. Thus, if the actual odds were only ten billion to one against a technological civilization arising on a representative planet, we could expect that somewhere between 2.5 trillion and 250 trillion such civilizations have come to exist since inception.

Even so, might the actual odds be so enormously great that little of this structure is superfluous? Life is the great complexifier, and most considerations once thought to make complex life rare are now thought not to have that effect (see, e.g., Gowanlock 2011; Kasting 2012; Imachi 2020; Sandora 2019). The key factor therefore seems to be the ease with which life arises from nonlife.

The frequency with which life arises remains a mystery, but we may soon have the answer. If even primitive life is found to exist (or to have existed) on extraterrestrial bodies within our observational reach, especially those within our solar system, the likelihood would be high that life is widespread. If we observe no signs of extraterrestrial life, that would suggest it is not widespread. The absence of such signs would tend to falsify the hyper‐tuning hypothesis, and LGP with it.

By contrast, neither outcome—plentiful life or none—would falsify or confirm theism. Theism is consistent with a world “full” of living and nonliving structures, but it does not imply such a world. Unlike medieval Christian theology, contemporary theology is “more inclined to say that God willed to create finite beings who should be capable of personal relationship with Himself” (Hick 1977, 77). Again, LGP makes a testable claim while theism does not.

Eternity

Eternity is a great‐making attribute, but it poses a challenge for LGP. Entropy measures a loss of ordered energy and structure, and the second law of thermodynamics says it always increases. It therefore seems unavoidable that, sooner or later, the stars will burn out and structure will disappear. Yet, if God became the world only to die with it, God could not be God. Anselm's dictum would preclude it.

The answer seems to be a return to God at the end of this age. With nothing left to love or experience, God could then choose to become a new Universe. The energy requirement for a new Becoming would be minimal. According to Andrei Linde, 1/100,000 of a gram of matter would be enough (Holt 2004). No matter how large the Universe becomes, God's choice to Become would be unitary. The knowledge of physics and other sciences that creatures in our world accumulate would enable the design of a new one, as would the experiences of our world's sentient creatures. God would sacrifice most of this knowledge at the new Becoming, but would gain an evolving world. God's consciousness (in the sense of the UCP) would continue, as it continued from the last world to ours.