By the end of the modern period, a particular world view had become firmly entrenched in the public understanding. Unlike most philosophical positions, which are sharply distinguished from scientific theories, this world view was widely seen as a direct implication of science, and even as the sine qua non for all scientific activity. For shorthand, let's call this view “materialism.”

Materialism consisted of five central theses:

1. (1) Matter is the fundamental constituent of the natural world.

2. (2) Forces act on matter.

3. (3) The fundamental material particles or “atoms” – together with the fundamental physical forces, whatever they turn out to be – determine the motion of all objects in nature. Thus materialism entails determinism.

4. (4) All more complex objects that we encounter in the natural world are aggregates of these fundamental particles, and their motions and behaviors can ultimately be understood in terms of the fundamental physical forces acting on them. Nothing exists that is not the product of these same particles and forces. In particular, there are no uniquely biological forces (vitalism or “entelechies”), no conscious forces (dualism), and no divine forces (what came to be known as supernaturalism). Thus materialism implied the exclusion of dualism, downward causation (Bøgh Andersen et al., 2000), and divine activity.

5. […]

“I refute it thus!” Samuel Johnson famously dismissed Bishop George Berkeley's argument for the unreality of matter by kicking a large stone (Boswell, 1823). In the light of modern physics, however, Johnson's simple reasoning evaporates. Apparently solid matter is revealed, on closer inspection, to be almost all empty space, and the particles of which matter is composed are themselves ghostly patterns of quantum energy, mere excitations of invisible quantum fields, or possibly vibrating loops of string living in a ten-dimensional space–time (Greene, 1999). The history of physics is one of successive abstractions from daily experience and common sense, into a counterintuitive realm of mathematical forms and relationships, with a link to the stark sense data of human observation that is long and often tortuous. Yet at the end of the day, science is empirical, and our finest theories must be grounded, somehow, “in reality.” But where is reality? Is it in acts of observation of the world made by human and possibly non-human observers? In records stored in computer or laboratory notebooks? In some objective world “out there”? Or in a more abstract location?

THE GROUND OF REALITY

When a physicist performs an experiment, he or she interrogates nature and receives a response that, ultimately, is in the form of discrete bits of information (think of “yes” or “no” binary answers to specific questions), the discreteness implied by the underlying quantum nature of the universe (Zeilinger, 2004).

It is no secret that we are in the midst of an information-processing revolution based on electronic computers and optical communication systems. This revolution has transformed work, education, and thought, and has affected the life of every person on Earth.

THE INFORMATION-PROCESSING REVOLUTIONS

The effect of the digital revolution on humanity as a whole, however, pales when compared with the effect of the previous information-processing revolution: the invention of moveable type. The invention of the printing press was an information-processing revolution of the first magnitude. Moveable type allowed the information in each book, once accessible only to the few people who possessed the book's hand-copied text, to be accessible to thousands or millions of people. The resulting widespread literacy and dissemination of information completely transformed society. Access to the written word empowered individuals not only in their intellectual lives, but in their economic, legal, and religious lives as well.

Similarly, the effect of the printed word is small when compared with the effect of the written word. Writing – the discovery that spoken sounds could be put into correspondence with marks on clay, stone, or paper – was a huge information-processing revolution. The existence of complicated, hierarchical societies with extended division of labor depends crucially on writing. Tax records figure heavily in the earliest cuneiform tablets.

Just as printing is based on writing, writing stems from one of the greatest information-processing revolutions in the history of our planet: the development of the spoken word.

This chapter operates from a theological perspective – broadened, however, by information on the development of classical philosophy and metaphysics and some experience in the global science-and-theology discourse of the last 20 years. I ask the question: Can we imagine and penetrate the reality classical theology had in mind when it spoke of the ‘spiritual body’? And beyond that, can we convince non-theological mindsets that this concept not only makes sense in the orbit of religion, but that it has illuminating power beyond this realm because it is firmly rooted in a reality, and not just confined to one complex mode of discourse?

The preparation for this task requires a few sophisticated preliminary steps. First we have to differentiate ‘old-style’ and ‘new-style’ metaphysics as two possible frameworks for the approach. Second, we have to discern an understanding of creation in the light of Biblical creation accounts and in the light of ‘old-style’ metaphysics. Third, on the basis of the Biblical creation accounts, we see that the notion of a creator as a mere sustainer of the universe is spiritually not satisfying and salvific. Fourth, this will prepare us for an understanding of the role of the resurrection in divine creativity in general, and provide an understanding of the nature and the importance of the ‘spiritual body’ of Jesus Christ in particular. Fifth, we will try to comprehend the transformative power of this spiritual body and the involvement of human beings and other creatures in it.

Evolutionary natural history has generated “caring” – by elaborating, diversifying, conserving, and enriching such capacities. A first response might be to take care about that “caring”; the word is too anthropopathic. The framework one expects in contemporary biology is rather termed the evolution of “selfishness” (as if that word were not also anthropopathic). Selfishness, however, is but one form of caring; “caring” is the more inclusive term. Minimally, biologists must concede that organisms survive and live on, and that, over generations, they seek adapted fit. Or, if “seek” is still too anthropopathic, they are selected for their adapted fit. Maybe “select” is still too anthropopathic. Try computer language: the organic systems are “calculating.” Whatever the vocabulary, for all living beings some things “make a difference”; they do not survive unless they attend to these things.

At least after sentience arises, neural organisms, human or not, evidently “care.” Animals hunt and howl, find shelter, seek out their habitats and mates, feed their young, flee from threats, grow hungry, thirsty, hot, tired, excited, sleepy. They suffer injury and lick their wounds. Sooner or later every biologist must concede that “care” is there. Call these “interests” or “preferences” or whatever; if “caring” is too loaded a term, then call these animal “concerns.” Staying alive requires “self-defense.” Living things have “needs.” One of the hallmarks of life is that it can be “irritated.” Organisms have to be “operational.” Biology without “conservation” is death.

Theories of information that attempt to sort out problems concerning the status and efficacy of its content – as it is understood in thoughts, meanings, signs, intended actions, and so forth – have so far failed to resolve a crucial dilemma: how what is represented could possibly have physical consequences. The legacy of this has been played out in various skeptical paradigms that either conclude that content is fundamentally relativistic, holistic, and ungrounded, or else is merely epiphenomenal and ineffectual except for its arbitrary correlation with the physical properties of the signs that convey it. In this chapter I argue that the apparent conundrums that make this notion controversial arise because we begin our deliberations with the fallacious assumption that in order for the content of information to have any genuine real-world consequences it must have substantial properties, and so must correspond to something present in some form or other. By contrast, I will show that this assumption is invalid and is the ultimate origin of these absurd skeptical consequences.

The crucial property of content that must be taken into account is exactly the opposite: its absence. But how is it possible for a specific absence to have definite causal consequences? A crucial clue is provided by Claude Shannon's analysis of information in terms of constraint on the entropy (possible variety) of signs/signals (Shannon, 1948; Shannon and Weaver, 1949). In other words, the capacity to convey information is dependent on a relationship to something that is specifically not produced.

It is no longer a secret that inherited notions of matter and the material world have not been able to sustain the revolutionary developments of twentieth-century physics and biology. For centuries Isaac Newton's idea of matter as consisting of ‘solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, and movable particles’ reigned in combination with a strong view of laws of nature that were supposed to prescribe exactly, on the basis of the present physical situation, what was going to happen in the future. This complex of scientific materialism and mechanism was easily amalgamated with common-sense assumptions of solid matter as the bedrock of all reality. In the world view of classical materialism (having its heyday between 1650 and 1900), it was claimed that all physical systems are nothing but collections of inert particles slavishly complying with deterministic laws. Complex systems such as living organisms, societies, and human persons, could, according to this reductionist world view, ultimately be explained in terms of material components and their chemical interactions.

However, the emergence of thermodynamics around 1850 already began to cast doubt on the universal scope of determinism. Without initially questioning the inherited concepts of corpuscular matter and mechanism, it turned out that the physics of fluids and gases in thermodynamically open systems can be tackled, from a practical point of view, only by using statistical methods; the aim of tracking individual molecules had to be abandoned.

The term “information” has become nearly omnipresent in modern biology (and medicine). One would probably not exaggerate if the famous saying of evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobhzhansky, that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” should nowadays be reframed as “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of information.” But are those two concepts, evolution and information, somehow internally related? And if so, how?

INFORMATION IN EVOLUTION

In textbooks, newspapers, and even scientific papers, the meanings of the terms “evolution” and “information” are generally supposed to be well known, and they are rarely explained. And yet, there is no general consensus in science, or even in biology, about what they really mean. For instance, the preferred exemplar (in the Kuhnian sense) of evolution by natural selection is that of industrial melanism. In woodlands, where industrial pollution has killed the lichens and exposed the dark brown tree trunks, dark forms of the peppered moth – melanics – are supposedly better camouflaged against predation from birds than are the light gray forms that predominated before the Industrial Revolution. The observation by 1950 that darker forms had largely displaced lighter forms was thus taken as evidence for natural selection in action. This exemplar does indeed illustrate the effect of natural selection, but whether it shows evolution depends on your idea of evolution.

Ever since the elucidation of the molecular basis of living systems, we have known that all elementary processes of life are governed by information. Thus, information turns out to be a key concept in understanding living matter (Küppers, 1990). More than that: the flow of information at all levels of the living system reveals the properties of communication. This means that the information stored in the genome of the organism is expressed in innumerable feedback loops – a process through which the genetic information is continually re-evaluated by permanent interactions with the physical environment to which it is exposed. In this way, the living organism is built up, step by step, into a hierarchically organized network of unmatched complexity.

The fact that all phenomena of life are based upon information and communication is indeed the principal characteristic of living matter. Without the perpetual exchange of information at all levels of organization, no functional order in the living organism could be sustained. The processes of life would implode into a jumble of chaos if they were not perpetually stabilized by information and communication. In this chapter, I should like to consider some of the consequences that follow from this for our philosophical understanding of reality.

ABOUT “INFORMATION” AND “COMMUNICATION”

In daily usage, the terms “information” and “communication” are not always clearly distinguished from each other. Yet, even the etymology of the two words indicates that the reference of the concepts cannot entirely overlap.

The matter concept has had an extraordinarily complex history, dating back to the earliest days of the sort of reflective thought that came to be called ‘philosophy’. History here, as elsewhere, offers a valuable means of understanding the present, so it is with history that I will be concerned – history necessarily compressed into simplified outline.

This story, like that of Caesar's Gaul, falls readily into three parts. First is the gradual emergence in early Greek thought of a factor indispensable to the discussion of the changing world and the progressive elaboration of that factor (or, more exactly, cluster of factors) as philosophic reflection deepened and divided. Second is the radical shift that occurred in the seventeenth century as the concept of matter took on new meanings, gave its name to the emerging philosophy of materialism and yielded place to a derivative concept, mass, in the fast-developing new science of mechanics. Third is the further transformation of the concept in the twentieth century in the light of the dramatic changes brought about by the three radically new theories in physics: relativity, quantum mechanics, and expanding-universe cosmology, with which that century will always be associated. Matter began to be dematerialized, as it were, as matter and energy were brought into some sort of equivalence, and the imagination-friendly particles of the earlier mechanics yielded way to the ghostly realities of quantum theory that are neither here nor there.

Copenhagen is the perfect setting for our discussion of matter and information. We have been charged ‘to explore the current concept of matter from scientific, philosophical, and theological perspectives’. The essential foundation for this work is the output of the intense intellectual struggles that took place here in Copenhagen during the twenties, principally between Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli. Those struggles replaced the then-prevailing Newtonian idea of matter as ‘solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles’ with a new concept that allowed, and in fact demanded, entry into the laws governing the motion of matter of the consequences of decisions made by human subjects. This change in the laws swept away the meaningless billiard-ball universe, and replaced it with a universe in which we human beings, by means of our intentional effort, can make a difference in how the ‘matter’ in our bodies behaves.

THE ROLE OF MIND IN NATURE

Unfortunately, most of the prevailing descriptions of quantum theory tend to emphasize puzzles and paradoxes in a way that makes philosophers, theologians, and even non-physicist scientists leery of actually using in any deep way the profound changes in our understanding of human beings in nature wrought by the quantum revolution. Yet, properly presented, quantum mechanics is thoroughly in line with our deep human intuitions. It is the 300 years of indoctrination with basically false ideas about how nature works that now makes puzzling a process that is completely in line with normal human intuition.