A Miraculously Coherent Universe
Both science and spirituality have come to affirm the essential underlying oneness of the world. How is it that these two traditions of inquiry, so different in their methodology, have come to a common meeting ground on the ontology of reality?
The gist of the miracle of the world is that the universe we inhabit is coherent—coherent enough to be comprehensible. Why is it not just an unordered heap of unrelated things? How the order we find in the universe would have come about is, at least statistically, extremely improbable. Beyond our amazed perception, there is an explanation provided by science. It is not a full and complete explanation, but it is as far as an explanation based on observation and experiment can reach.
The probability that the kind of order we find in the universe would have come about through random interactions among the things that emerged in space and time is nearly nil. Yet this is precisely what mainstream physicists have been asserting until quite recently. In recent years, however, with the advent of powerful computation and more wideranging and precise observation, it turned out that the order exhibited in the universe is so complex and precise that random processes would take longer than the age of the universe (which is presumably about 13.8 billion years, the time that elapsed since the Big Bang).
The order exhibited in the universe is complex and precise, and highly sensitive to alteration. A change amounting to no more than one billionth of the value of the mass of the proton would change the rate of the expansion of the universe and it would make impossible the evolution of enduring systems such as stars, and thus prevent the creation of enduring flows of energy from “hot” stars to their planets. This would make the universe a lifeless sphere of physical processes.
But if not mere chance is responsible for the coherence that makes the universe comprehensible —and life in it possible— then what is? Must we assume that it is due to the design of a higher intelligence? Not necessarily. There is design behind the evolution of the universe, but it may not be design exercised by an extra-universal, transcendental Being. It could be, and most plausible is, not a consciously injected design, but a system of laws that together introduce nonrandomness into otherwise random processes. In science, this nonrandom effect of the laws of nature constitutes what is called a systemic “attractor”.
Attractors are assumed to be present in the behavior of complex systems that manifest some form of order. Systems “governed” by attractors tend toward some specifiable state or condition in preference to others.
These can be recurring states, governed by periodic attractors, or a goal state which suggests that presence of a point-attractor. Elements of randomness can be mixed with nonrandom elements, as in the case of systems governed by “strange” or “chaotic” attractors.
The attractor at work in the universe appears to be a formative influence that orients the state of the universe toward forms and elements of integration, coherence, and order. This attractor is best described by the term Stanislav Grof used in regard to the orientation of the subconscious mind toward order: “holotropic” (made up of holos—meaning wholeness or whole in Greek—and tropein, meaning oriented in some direction).
We can say that the universe at large is governed by a holotropic attractor, as manifested by its overall orientation toward coherence and wholeness. This attractor works statistically and not as a mechanical principle. Whenever there is an element of freedom in the selection among alternatives, there is a bias built into the universe that selects toward those alternatives that enhance coherence and wholeness.
As a consequence of the action of the holotropic attractor, the systems that evolve in the universe tend to be integral ensembles of their parts: “wholes” and not “heaps”. A whole is distinct from a heap: it is a dynamic entity as contrasted with a random agglomeration of unrelated items. The diverse elements of the whole function together to maintain it in its environment. The paradigm for such a whole is the living organism. Here cells that are often highly diverse among themselves form multicellular systems that complete and complement each other. The manifest course of evolution in the universe indicates that there is an underlying trend in evolution toward the integration of diverse elements in integral cooperative wholes.
This is the evolution Bohm called “holomovement”. It is a progressive movement toward the formation of wholes from parts through coherence among the parts, and between the wholes constituted by the parts and the rest of the universe. The coherence-building process occurs and recurs on multiple levels, on higher and higher scales of order and dimension of size. The emerging whole-systems jointly form super-systems, building the manifest universe into an embracing super-super system.
This evolutionary process is based on the minute bias toward coherence that is built into every element of the interconnected system. Just as a butterfly flapping its wings can create a storm through the minute alterations from randomness created in the weather-system, so every minute “bias” in the quanta that constitute the basic architecture of the world can create a coherently ordered universe. All that is needed for this to occur is a strongly interconnected system, with not-entirely random connection among its elements. The dynamic impetus that introduces bias into the system is what we call the holotropic attractor—and the religions and spiritual systems call divine will and cosmic intelligence.
