Retroactive Ontology and Creation Consonance. Part Two.

Substack SR 1057. Retroactive Ontology and Creation Consonance. Part Two. Evolutionary Emergence.

In this Substack series on retroactive ontology, I am on the hunt for consonance. I would like to find consonance between what a Christian theologian can say about God’s creation and scientific models of the physical world. I would not want to ask the scientist to construct a doctrine of creation, of course. I would not want to ask the scientist to practice theology without a license. That would ask too much of the scientific method. But dissonance between what the scientist observes about nature and what the theologian observes about creation could be disconcerting. So, I’m opening windows to view possible points of contact, overlapping observations about physical reality, shared pictures of how our world works. In a previous work, I employed the term “hypothetical consonance” to describe this window-opening (Peters, 1998, 18).

My friend, John Haught, who teaches systematic theology at Georgetown University, has already found consonance between retroactive ontology and the scientific account of cosmic evolution. “A scientifically informed theological vision will think of God as creating the world not from out of the past but from out of the future” (Haught, 2020, 185).

With this in mind, I nominate three domains within science where we might discover remarkable consonance with creation understood as retroactive ontology: (1) evolutionary emergence; (2) Big Bang cosmology; and (3) quantum mechanics.

In the previous post, I introduced epigenetic emergence within evolutionary biology. In this follow-up, I’d like to explore whole-part and future-past causation. Might we find consonance here? I hypothesise that we will.

Might we think of the entire cosmos from beginning to end in both time and space as a whole? A whole that integrates all disparate parts? Physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) would say so. “It follows that each thing is internally related to the whole, and therefore, to everything else” (Bohm, 1990, 273). The entire universe is on the move, so to speak. Bohm calls it the “holomovement.” Growing holism heals the competition and friction of parts in conflict. We can expect the future to be more whole than the past or present. This is a physicist talking.

Might this exhaustive relationality of all things within a single cosmic whole find consonance with the divine promise to integrate and heal all things eschatologically? Might that future wholeness redound backwards in time to the present with proleptic healing? At minimum, could the natural world as scientists grasp it be open to such a view of retroactive ontology?

Because God’s creation occurs over historical time, according to theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, the consummate whole of finite reality remains future. The whole is eschatological.

How do God and the whole of reality relate? The whole of reality is not itself God, to be sure. Nor could God be only one part of the larger whole, because that would make God one more finite object among others. Yet, the whole of physical reality will be an eschatological accomplishment of divine creation. “The category of the whole (and its relationship to the parts) therefore has its specific significance for theology in that it makes possible the conceptual mediation between the finite and the absolute reality of God”(Pannenberg, 1990, 146-147). As we anticipate the eschatological whole, we anticipate the emergence of a reality that is more than merely the sum of all its historical parts.

Might the future whole retroactively affect past and current parts? Might we find any consonance here? Let’s look briefly at emergence within holistic evolution.

A century ago, Jan Smuts (introduced in a previous post) introduced the healing effect of holism into evolutionary theory as an implication of epigenesis. Today, the vocabulary has changed slightly. Now the key term is emergence. Out of apparently random parts emerge wholes with new properties. Out of chemicals emerges life. Out of matter emerges mind.

Evolutionary biologists Terrence Deacon and Ursula Goodenough identify the key principle in the dynamics of emergence: “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” (Goodenough and Deacon 2006, 854). “Emergence can be thought of as nature’s mode of creativity, giving rise to ever more complex outcomes by virtue of thermodynamics, morphodynamics, and teleodynamics” (Goodenough and Deacon 2006, 865).

The late Arthur Peacocke, an eminent Oxford University scholar, observed emergence in biology. Then he drew out implications for an “emergentist monism.” Peacocke affirmed, “that natural realities, although basically physical, evidence various levels of complexity with distinctive internal inter-relationships between their components, such that new properties, and also new realities, emerge in those complexes--in biology in an evolutionary sequence” (Peacocke 2007, 14).

It did not go unnoticed that the emergence of unprecedented new things in the physical world of nature suggests moral responsibility in human nature. At least according to theologian Cynthia Crysdale. “Emergent probability…is a heuristic explanation of world process that contradicts determinism by which all of creation is governed according to classical laws” (Crysdale 2003, 249). Amending exhaustive determinism from past causes opens the immediate future for contingency. Thereby, God frees human decision-making and moral responsibility for what happens in the future. In emergence, new properties appear in nature’s history that could not have been predicted based on past causes.

The theologian should pause here to distinguish between strong and weak emergence. The strong emergentist position, according to theologian Philip Clayton, “makes two claims. First, new things emerge in natural history, not just new properties of some fundamental things or stuff; and, second, these emergent things exercise their own types of causal power. Such ‘downward causation’ [including whole-part causation] occurs at many different levels in nature. Strong emergence is a thesis about the nature of natural evolution” (Clayton, The Emergence of Spirit From Complexity to Anthropology to Theology, 2006, 295).

The weak emergence position is the starting point for most natural scientists. Weak emergence is understood among scientists as a result of limits in our human analytic possibilities. That is, research scientists assume methodologically that we simply cannot yet account for all the factors that cause emergent properties. They stop short of drawing out ontological implications.

My treatment of retroactive ontology draws out ontological implications of strong emergence. The observation that new properties appear in the passage of time suggests strongly that the flow of time is open to new things, perhaps even the new things God has promised. The future is not already entailed in past causes.

To be sure, this falls short of proving scientifically that retroactive ontology should provide us with our metaphysics. But there is sufficient consonance to render theological speculation applicable and coherent.

The task of worldview construction we are tendering here begins with a specific theological hypothesis: God creates from the future rather than the past. Other terms, such as retroactive ontology or proleptic eschatology, are also monikers. The key that unlocks retroactive ontology is the definitive role played by newness and healing. Newness and healing are implied in the biblical symbol of new creation. Only when the world is redeemed – healed -- will it be created. Only when it is created will we hear God unambiguously enunciate the words we want to hear, “Behold, it is very good.”

Evolutionary emergence is undergirded in part by David Bohm’s notion of holomovement. Here in this scientific model, we find whole-part and future-past causation, a model of causation that includes both newness and healing. Might this provide us with a window through which light can shine in two directions?

In upcoming Substack posts, we will wiggle through this window and follow a path leading us to the future. It is a path that leads us through Big Bang cosmology and quantum mechanics. Get ready to click.

Patheos ST 2002. What is creation?

Patheos ST 2022. What is Scandinavian Creation Theology?

Patheos ST 4147. The proleptic power of new creation. Miracles 7

Substack SR 1056. Retroactive Ontology and Creation Consonance. Part One. From Archonic to Epigenetic Thinking

Substack SR 1056. Retroactive Ontology and Creation Consonance. Part Two. Evolutionary Emergence

Substack SR 1057. Retroactive Ontology and Creation Consonance. Part Three. Big Bang Cosmology.

Substack SR 1057. Retroactive Ontology and Creation Consonance. Part Three. Quantum Physics

Meet Ted Peters. For Substack, Ted Peters posts articles and notices in the field of Public Theology. He is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and an emeritus professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union. His single-volume systematic theology, God—The World’s Future, is now in its 3^rd edition. He has also authored God as Trinity plus Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society, as well as Sin Boldly: Justifying Faith for Fragile and Broken Souls. In 2023, he published The Voice of Public Theology, with ATF Press. More recently, he has published an edited volume, Promise and Peril of AI and IA: New Technology Meets Religion, Theology, and Ethics (ATF 2025), and, along with Arvin Gouw, an edited collection, The CRISPR Revolution in Science, Religion, and Ethics (Bloomsbury 2025). Soon to be released is a volume of essays, A Handbook on Astrobiology, Astrotheology, and Astroanthropology, co-edited with Carolina Azucena Sanz de la Fuente and Arvin Gouw, with Amsterdam University Press.

See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com and Patheos blog site.

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Bohm, David. 1990. “A New Theory of the Relationship of Mind and Matter.” Philosophical Psychology 3 (2): 271-286.

Bohm, David. 1980, 1995. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge.

Clayton, Philip. 2006. “The Emergence of Spirit From Complexity to Anthropology to Theology.” Theology and Science 4:3 291-307.

Crysdale, Cynthia. 2003. “Playing God? Moral Agency in an Emergent World.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 354:6317 243-259.

Dhelonga, Williams. 2026. Temporal Symmetry and Divine Providence: Theological Reflection on the Two-State Vector Formalism and Weak Measurement. STM Thesis, Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University.

Goodenough, Ursula, and Terrence W Deacon. 2006. “The Sacred Emergence of Nature.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, eds., Philip Clayton and Zachery Simpson, 853- 871. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haught, John F. 2020. “The Unfinished Sacrament of Creation: Christian Faith and the Promise of Nature,” Ecotheology: A Christian Conversation, eds., Kiara A. Jorgenson and Alan G. Padgett, 165-189. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Lee, Hyung-Joo. 2026. “A New Hope for Christian Eschatology in Cosmic Perspective: Beyond the Predictions of Standard Big Bang Cosmology.” Theology and Science 24:1 159-178.

Pannenberg, Wolfhart. 1990. Metaphysics and the Idea of God, tr. Philip Clayton. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Peacocke, Arthur. 2007. All That Is: A Naturalistic Faith for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis: Fortress.

Peters, Ted, Ed. 1998. Science and Theology: The New Consonance. New York: Harper/Westview.

Peters, Ted. 2015. God--The World’s Future: Systematic Theology for a New Era. 3rd. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

Peters, Ted, and Carl Peterson. 2026. “Holistic Determinism and God’s Action in Nature’s World: David Bohm and Quantum Theology.” Theology and Science 24:1 1-29.

Peters, Ted, and Martinez Hewlett. 2009. Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Nashville, TN: Abingdon.

Russell, Robert John. 2026. “Editorial Introduction to A New Hope for Christian Eschatology in Cosmic Perspective.” Theology and Science 24:1 157-158.

Smuts, Jan C. 1926, 1987. Holism and Evolution. New York: Macmillan.