Participatory Cosmos
Discussion
The Idea of a Participatory Cosmos
Matthew Segall:
"In his magnum opus Process and Reality, Whitehead remarked that one urgent task for philosophy is to secularize the concept of God’s function in the world. This phrase is rich with meaning, but one key implication—as I understand it—is learning to relate to those who have passed on as though they remain as influential as ever in our present reality. However one interprets that metaphysically, the main takeaway is that Whitehead’s suggestion invites us to look for the immanence of spirit in the evolving cosmos.
I want to mention a volume titled Whitehead & Teilhard: From Organism to Omega (Orbis, 2025), edited by Ilia Delio and Andrew Davis, which emerged from a 2023 conference at the Center for Christogenesis. This collection contains a number of wonderful essays, including my own piece, “Process Theology and the Modern World: Science, Religion, and Christology After Whitehead and Teilhard.” That chapter offers a background and more precise arguments that I will only be able to sketch in this talk.
I use the phrase “participatory cosmos” to invoke a theoretical approach that extends beyond religious studies into epistemology and ontology. My usage aligns with the work of Jorge Ferrer and Jacob Sherman, who, in their 2008 edited volume The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies, argue that the way we know and comport ourselves toward the world elicits and evokes the aspects of it we perceive. In other words, how we look largely determines what we see. A participatory cosmology entails that spirit is not an otherworldly entity but something intimately present among us and between us. Teilhard urges us to discover what goes on in our own hearts and minds—to cultivate that “cosmic sense”—while Whitehead’s impetus to “secularize God’s function in the world” calls us to seek spirit within our shared world, rather than in some transcendent beyond.
As a transdisciplinary researcher, I have long been motivated by the need to reintegrate science and religion in mutually illuminating ways. My goal is to move beyond the typical conflict narrative that dominates popular culture. In my view, achieving this reconciliation requires religion to accept the truth of evolution, and it requires science to recognize that the intelligence, virtue, and beauty at work in the human being call for an explanation broader than a strict materialist or mechanistic account of nature. A more participatory perspective on the cosmos, I believe, opens such possibilities."
(https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/science-and-religion-in-a-participatory)
Toward a Participatory Theory of Knowledge and Reality
Matthew Segall:
"One of the biggest hurdles to developing a truly participatory view of the cosmos is the ideal of observer-independence, a Cartesian legacy that strictly separates mind and matter. If one tries to do science from an imagined vantage point “outside” the universe, one forgets that such a standpoint is impossible. We are part of what we study. As William James put it in A Pluralistic Universe, “Philosophies are intimate parts of the universe, expressing something of its own thought of itself. Our philosophies swell the current of being and add their character to it.” In other words, thinking is not a mental representation but the universe’s own reflective activity, a intimate expression and intensification of cosmic process.
Historically, one can trace these issues back to the theology that gave birth to modern science in the seventeenth century—namely, Deism. Pioneers like Descartes, Kepler, and Newton believed in a divinely designed universe. Mechanistic laws offered proof of God the designer; hence the universe’s intelligibility seemed guaranteed by divine fiat. Over time, however, science grew more instrumental. Increasingly, it pursued know-how over understanding, prioritizing technological manipulation of nature over metaphysical insight. As a result, by the nineteenth century, the human mind effectively replaced God as the ground of intelligibility. Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy exemplifies this shift: he concluded that space, time, and causality are functions of the mind rather than eternal forms structuring the cosmos. No longer did one need a divine designer to account for the world’s intelligibility—only the transcendental categories of human reason.
Yet a participatory theology would differ significantly from Deism. Teilhard suggests (and Schelling, Steiner, Owen Barfield, and others echo the idea) that the universe is an ongoing incarnation, the gradual embodiment of the divine in and through evolving materiality. This is far removed from a God who creates a mechanistic universe from nothing and remains outside it. The idea of cosmogenesis as divine embodiment implies that God is continually involved in creation, making participation ontologically real—both for nature and for us as its centers of self-reflection."
(https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/science-and-religion-in-a-participatory)