What Is Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation?

“No one knows how the universe began. Maybe it was created by God (or more likely by the Tao); maybe it exploded out of a gigantic black hole in (or at the death of) another universe; maybe it was born from an earlier version of itself; maybe it flowered from a “bud” on the side of a parallel universe; maybe it began out of nothing; and maybe it has always existed.  I am an Agnostic on the entire question of “creation.” But I do see Nature’s Continuing Creation all around me — in the processes of evolution and in the inventive work of human beings. Because I can see it — and even participate in it – Nature’s Continuing Creation is the source of my personal secular-spirituality.  I bear in mind that “Nature” includes Human Beings and all our sciences, ecospheres, technology, machines, computers, and “artificial intelligence.”   — J.X. Mason.  

Nature’s Continuing Creation: The Growing, Organizing, Direction of the Cosmos is Nature’s drive to build structures and systems that are increasingly complex. This increasing complexity is possible when there is an open energy flow, such as we have from the Sun. The fundamental process of Continuing Creation is this: When a steady flow of energy encounters a receptive environment, it can weave patterns and create systems of increasing Complexity. Such systems are called “open-energy systems.”  In contrast, closed-energy systems eventually run out of energy, through the depletion process called entropy.) 

We use the phrase “Growing, Organizing, Direction of the Cosmos,” because when there is a steady flow of energy from a star such as our Sun (or from Earth’s molten magma core), the processes of Continuing Creation produce Growth in the Direction of increasing Organization and Complexity.  It also often grows in the Direction of increasing Beauty. The Direction toward Complexity and Beauty often includes greater Diversity.  For example, an increase in the number of different car motors (piston, rotary, hybrid, electric) shows that motor technology has become more complex.

Nature’s Continuing Creation is the set of linked processes that have created everything in the universe and are creating them still. Creation did not happen all at once or during the first seven days. Creation has been continual since the Big Bang (Initial Singularity), and it is accelerating now in humankind’s tool-making and programming, i.e., in our hands & minds.

As we shall discuss, the very earliest Creation was a process of “splitting apart,” or “freezing out,” which created space, time, and the universe’s four fundamental forces.

Ever since the Big Bang, Creation has meant making new Wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. For example, when early humans cut holes in the centers of two wooden or stone circles, put a wooden rod through the holes of those “wheels,” and placed a wood platform on top of the rod (now called the “axle”), Creation took place. The Whole new assembly (a cart) was capable of carrying things. None of the cart’s individual components could do that on their own – not the wheels, holes, or the axle – or the platform.  Only the cart as a whole could carry things. The cart was, therefore, different than any of its parts.  In fact, the cart was different than the sum of all those parts if the parts were just lying in a loose pile on the ground. The cart’s difference (its “cart-ness”) depends on the organization of its parts. Over time, we humans invented the carriage, bicycle, and the automobile.

While this book of Essays sometimes explores the difficult disciplines of physics and philosophy, the fact that simple parts can combine to make greater wholes is really all one needs to know to understand what we mean by “Growing, Organizing, Direction.”

Synergy is another name for this process of Creation by Combination. In the natural world, synergistic phenomena are ubiquitous:

• In physics, different combinations of quarks produce protons and neutrons.
• In chemistry, the gases hydrogen and oxygen combine at room temperature and pressure to form a liquid compound – water.
• In biology, the simple instincts of bees, when aggregated in colonies, will form elaborate honeycombs.” ¹

However, Continuing Natural Creation on Earth is not inevitable.  Its Processes must contend with human destruction of the ecosphere, entropy, cataclysmic events (such as collision with a gigantic meteor), and the ultimate death of our Sun. We will take these subjects up a bit later. ²

Still, Nature’s Continuing Creation has tremendous resilience and staying power. It is the only true miracle in our universe. Beginning with the Initial Singularity (“Big Bang“), it has ever since been both prevalent and ongoing. The Processes of Continuing Creation are both miraculous and completely consistent with scientific knowledge, which is itself growing.

“Nature’s Continuing Creation does not accept any religious miracle stories as factual. Jehovah did not speak to Moses through a burning bush; Jesus did not walk on water     nor rise from the dead; Muhammad did not ascend into the sky for a visit; and the mineral crystals revered in “New Age” spirituality do not heal sickness. All these mythical   tales violate science and everyday common sense.”  — JXM

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
  The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
              — Attributed to Albert Einstein

The natural history of Continuing Creation on Earth is an endless chain of wondrous events.  When we mentally and wholistically connect with Nature’s Continuing Creation, we establish a true and marvelous basis for living an ethical, virtuous, and fulfilled life.  All these qualities of life are addressed later in this Book.  (Also, see our Essay, “Overpopulation Threatens Nature’s Creation.”)

Why J.X. Mason Wrote Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation

Mason wrote (with help from others as listed on the Author Page) this collection of Essays (and Journal Entries) for three main reasons:

1. To show that Life’s Purpose & Meaning are found in Nature, Science, & History.
2. To oppose the magical myths, religious strife, and outdated moral standards of religious fundamentalism.
3. To describe the daily Practice of Continuing Creation and show how it can improve our individual lives.

Our Goals are “to get it right” and “to make it useful.” We aim to make our explanations of science as accurate as possible without getting lost in detail. We also strive to make our Practice as useful as possible for people who are living average, productive, family-and-friends-oriented lives amid modern democracy and technology.  For a list of contributors to this book, and a reading list of related books, see the Page on this website called About the Author.

Our Path is Based on Nature, Science, History, & Reason

By traveling Our Path and engaging in Our Practice, we mean cultivating a deep intellectual and emotional connection with, and positive participation in, the ongoing creativity of the universe.

Nearly all humans find Purpose & Meaning in Nature, and an appreciation of Nature can by itself sustain a person’s practice in the Path of Continuing Creation. We feel awe, elation, and a sense of connectedness when we view the power of a spiral galaxy, the majesty of a tree, the vibrant colors of tropical fish, a mother duck guiding her troop of ducklings, and the reach of human intelligence into space exploration.  All these things are manifest features of Nature’s Processes of Creation.

However, our understanding of Nature can be greatly enhanced by knowledge of science, and science itself has a profound, connective Meaning within it. 

Our definition of Nature includes all the inventions and knowledge made and/or discovered by Human Beings, simply because Human Beings are themselves Natural.  And so, all the inventions, and knowledge made and/or discovered by Humans — our machines, computers, and artificial-intelligence robots — are also natural.

To appreciate Nature through science, one must have a basic understanding of science.  Nature, of course, is the subject matter of science.  All science grows (evolves) out of Nature, roughly in a progression like this: from Bacteria to Animals, to Mammals, to Opposable thumbs, to Larger brains, to Humans, to Reason, to Curiosity, to Culture, Science, and Technology!

Oxford University Professor Richard Dawkins has said, “An awful lot of people who call themselves religious simply don’t know there’s any alternative. If you probe what they believe, it turns out to be pretty much the same — we all have a sense of wonder and reverence at the majesty of the universe.” ³

For decades, many theologians and scientists have been calling for a reconciliation between religion and science. Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation answers that call.  We reject mythology and create a new secular and naturally inspirational “Way of Being” that is based on Nature, Science, and factual History.  Our New Path is evidence-based and open to change as human knowledge changes. The Practice of Continuing Creation must be continually corrected, updated, and expanded.

Nature’s Way of Continuing Creation is consistent with real science, evidence-based, and peer-reviewed. We are talking about physics, geology, chemistry, biology, ecology, anthropology, and psychology as they are taught at major accredited universities.  We are not talking about pseudo-science, such as “Dianetics’” assertion that spiritual beings called “Thetans” are reborn into successive human bodies, nor the “New Age“ idea that crystals possess “healing powers” for body and mind.

For all these reasons, The Practice of Continuing Creation focuses on finding Life’s Purpose & Meaning in Nature and Nature’s Processes. Ours is a New Path of Understanding for the Third Millennium. 

Main Events in the Story of Nature’s Continuing Creation

As we presently understand, the universe began as a very hot, small, and dense super-force (the union of the four fundamental forces), with no matter or structure. Then, about 13.7 billion years ago, this tiny, hot, dense ball (the Singularity of Initial Creation) exploded, creating time and space and then expanding space outward at lightning speed. (The Initial Singularity, also called the “Big Bang”). ⁴

Within the first micro-micro-seconds, the four fundamental forces (or the four fundamental interactions) of today’s universe – gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force – sequentially “separated out” from the original, unified super-force.

The first matter was a sea of infinitesimal, undifferentiated subatomic particles called quarks. Within another tiny fraction of a second, the quarks joined to form the first protons and neutrons, which combined within minutes to create the first nuclei.

But it took 380,000 years for electrons to be trapped in orbits around nuclei, forming the first atoms. These were mainly hydrogen (and some helium) atoms, which are still by far the most abundant elements in the universe. The hydrogen atoms have many different properties from the quarks and electrons that compose them. The emergence of this difference, and of all subsequent diversity, is the one-and-only miracle of Nature’s Continuing Creation.

1.6 million years later, gravity began to form stars and galaxies of stars from clouds of hydrogen and helium gas. Heavier atoms, such as carbon, oxygen, and iron, have since been continuously produced by fusing hydrogen in the nuclear furnaces of stars.  All these elements have since been dispersed throughout the universe in spectacular stellar explosions known as supernovae.

Today, these atoms have combined to form thousands of compounds, including water, which became the basis of life on Earth. Note that the characteristics of water are entirely different than the features of the hydrogen and oxygen which compose it. In the tropical and temperate zones of Earth, water exhibits liquidity and clarity, and during winter, it can form snowflakes of infinite geometric variety.  All our knowledge of oxygen and hydrogen could not predict the properties of liquid and frozen water. To view timelines of the Big Bang and early Universe, see Wikipedia’s Chronology of the Universe, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe. 

Over the eons, the vast variety of chemical elements and natural compounds have combined and recombined to form the plants and the complex, conscious, roaming animal creatures that inhabit the Earth today.  All our knowledge of oxygen, hydrogen, and the other 90 natural chemical elements cannot predict the specific creatures that inhabit Earth today.  The wholes made by Nature’s Continuing Creation are greater than, and different from, the sums of their parts.

One of these creatures – humankind — has gone on to create calculus, literature, airplanes, penicillin, and the rule of law.  Through humans, Nature’s Creative Flow achieves consciousness and self-consciousness, builds language, and establishes morality (e.g., do not murder, steal, lie, or have more than two biological children).

Nature’s Continuing Creation began with the Initial Singularity (Big Bang) and has continued to create, grow, and gain complexity ever since.  Nature’s Continuing Creation has proceeded through cosmic evolution, geologic evolution here on Earth, biological evolution, and (through humans) scientific, cultural, and technological evolution.

Nature’s Continuing Creation Requires a Steady Energy Flow

Our Book of Essays recounts the story of Continuing Natural Creation, which we have summarized above. But this Book also describes the methods and processes by which Continuing Creation accomplishes its constructive work.

Nearly all Creation on Earth is powered by energy from the Sun. Plants use photosynthesis to convert the Sun’s light (plus nutrients from the air, water, and ground) into stems and leaves.  Animals eat the plant materials (or other animals) and burn that food in their bodies using oxygen they inhale from green plants to generate the body’s energy. The sun was the source of the geothermal energy that likely gave rise to the earliest forms of Life on Earth. 

When humans burn coal and oil, we are burning ancient plant materials that have been converted into hydrocarbons (oil, coal, and natural gas) deep inside the Earth. Those hydrocarbons are a limited resource, but humans are developing new sources of Sun-powered energy – solar power, wind power, nuclear energy, geothermal energy, and others.

The plants, animals, human technology, and Earth itself are all Open Thermodynamic Systems because energy flows through them and out into space as heat.  However, these processes add information, structure, and complexity to our planet, our bodies, and the artifacts we create.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that when energy stops being generated, every system runs down – clocks, fires, living organisms, and stars. Our sun will likely continue to create light and heat for a billion more years, then become so hot that Earth becomes uninhabitable, and eventually explode (“go supernova”) or die out.  By that time, we will hopefully have colonized planets in other solar systems where a Sun-like star is still shining.

“Without the sun’s steady infusion of fresh, external energy, life as we know it would quickly end.  An external source is required because although energy cannot be destroyed, it constantly degrades into weaker, less useful forms, per the second law of thermodynamics.”  — Dr. Laurence C. Smith ⁵

Complexity increases when information and organization are added to a set of building blocks. For example, the human body is composed of water, carbon, iron, calcium, and other elements.  At a chemical supply store, they are together worth only about $4.50, according to the Mayo Clinic. However, in the human body, incredible information and complexity have been woven into those elements. (See our Essays, Nature Creates Increasingly Complex Systems, and Nature Creates Patterns of Information & Beauty.)

Having covered the requirement for a constant energy flow, we now turn to the Processes of Nature’s Continuing Creation that use that energy. There are three main processes of Continuing Creation: Crystallization, Combination, and Evolution. Within these three are many critical sub-processes, and we will mention a few of them as we go along.

1. Creating by Crystallization

As we described above, the early cooling of the universe caused space-time and then four fundamental forces to “separate out,” “freeze out,” “precipitate out,” or “crystallize out” of the Initial Singularity. The four fundamental forces are also called the “four fundamental interactions,” and their separation is also called “symmetry breaking.” (Scientists have used all of these descriptions. The English language often does not fully describe scientific events, but it does the best it can.)

 2. Creating by Combination and Interconnection

Combination and Interconnection are fundamental to modern Complexity Science (or Complexity Theory), but they are also evident in the earliest molecules, the earliest living organisms, and in the emergence of multicellular life.

Complex Wholes are created by combining and interconnecting simple parts. For example, hydrogen and oxygen are gases at Earth’s surface, but their combination forms water (H2O), which is usually a liquid or a solid (ice) on Earth.

Another everyday compound, table salt (sodium chloride), is utterly different from the two elements – sodium and chlorine – that compose it.  Common salt is necessary for animal life, and we eat it nearly every day. Yet sodium by itself will literally explode if it comes into contact with water, and chlorine is highly toxic at any dose other than an extremely low one.

“…parts often betray no hint of the whole. Just as you could never guess, unless you’d seen it, that individual carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms could run together into something as useful as an amino acid, you’d have no idea that a few amino acids could fold themselves into all the proteins that run a living thing.” — Sam King ⁶

The Wholes that are successively created by Continuing Creation can be objects, such as molecules or human beings, or they can be entire systems as well. Human beings are systems, just as hurricanes and factories are.  Systems flow through energy to maintain themselves and grow, and some systems can also self-replicate.

At the highest level of interconnection, all the biological communities in the world connect to form the geologic, climatic, and living system called the biosphere. Within the biosphere, human participants form energy systems, legal systems, financial systems, and many others.

2a. “Emergence” is a Sub-process of Combination & Interconnection.

Chemistry on Earth abounds with emergence. The compound benzene has a distinctive smell, yet the carbon atoms and Hydrogen atoms that make it up are odorless. Therefore, benzene’s distinctive smell is an emergent property.

There is nothing living in any of the individual atoms that make up a human body.  Life emerges from the arrangement, the pattern of those atoms, and from the throughput of energy.  If we study and know everything there is to know about all 92 of the natural elements, we will still be unable to predict the emergence of frogs. Yes, we may be able someday to explain each step between the two endpoints – atoms and frogs — but so many variables were acting on the systems over the millennia, that frogs could not have been predicted.  We might well have gotten only insects, no frogs.

The human brain evolved to survive and reproduce, but unexpected phenomena, such as poetry and mathematics, have also emerged from our brains.

Here is a key truth of Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation: The miracle of a complex whole is that complete knowledge of its component parts does not fully explain the Nature of the Whole! Complete knowledge about all 92 natural elements does not predict the trees and human beings that have evolved from them.  There is nothing about carbon or water or the law of gravity that predicts “tree-ness,” “human-ness,” or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. — J.X. Mason

Carbon and water do make humans (and therefore Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony) possible, but they do not begin to predict humans or the Fifth Symphony, or even to make them probable.  Except for the path of a random giant meteor that hit the Earth long ago, our planet might well be populated by intelligent dinosaurs rather than intelligent human beings.

The World Wide Web is a popular example of a modern decentralized system that exhibits emergent properties. There is no central organization rationing the links between web pages, yet there is clear self-organization based on mutual page popularity. The organization of the Web has emerged as a natural extension of the participants’ activities.

The added information and the increased organization of Nature’s Continuing Creation emerge from parts and simple sub-processes. This emergence is marvelous and surprising, yet it is all around us.  It is Emergence that makes the Interlocking Processes of Nature’s Continuing Creation the one and only true miracle in the universe. (See our two Essays, “Nature Creates Increasingly Complex Systems“ and “The Processes of Evolution – in Biology, Culture, & Technology.“)

So, in the mythical desert religion of old, creation happened all at once, from the top (from God) down. In our natural and modern Practice, Continuing Creation has happened and still does happen, from the bottom up. However, as systems grow in complexity, they often develop their own partial top-down control structures.  Our brains have evolved switching centers; markets have evolved central banks.

Additional Sub-Processes within Combination & Interconnection

Within the process of Creation by Combination, there are many key sub-processes which we describe in other Essays in this Book. These include:

• Competition and Cooperation; “Yang and Yin.” Human Nature is divided between the two. When a person is in physical danger, she experiences “fight or flight.”  But when a person balances and interrelates Yang and Yin, she experiences productivity and fulfillment.
• Pattern and Position. The properties of compounds, trees, and humans emerge from the way in which their components are organized — from the pattern in which their components are organized.
• Feedback Loops. Houses with central heating systems have thermostats that turn the furnace on or off as the home’s room temperature hits pre-set lower and upper limits.   Human bodies are kept at a constant temperature range of around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit in a similar way.
• Phase Changes, Chain Reactions, Paradigm Shifts. When combination and cooperation reach a critical mass, a new holistic behavior can emerge in a sudden cascade of change. For example:

“Two or three termites in a chamber will begin to pick up pellets and move them from place to place, but nothing comes from it; nothing is built.  As more join in, they seem to reach a critical mass, a quorum, and the thinking begins.  They place pellets atop pellets, then throw up columns and beautiful, curving, symmetrical arches, and the crystalline architecture of vaulted chambers is created.”  — Dr. Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. ⁷

These and other sub-processes of Nature’s Continuing Creation are discussed in our Essay, Nature Creates Increasingly Complex Systems.

  3. Creating through Evolution

The Science of Evolution is part of the Science of Complexity.  Complexity Science deals with all systems, but only some of those systems evolve.

When Continuing Creation combines components to form similar but somewhat different new things (e.g., organisms, computers, new songs), and then only one or a few of them work well enough to survive in their environment, Continuing Creation is using the processes of Evolution.  We say that the environment “selects” the organisms that work well enough with the environment to survive.  With respect to living things, Charles Darwin referred to this process as “natural selection.”

Many people do not understand that the Evolution of living things involves both Competition and Cooperation. They usually say that the surviving plant or animal “outcompetes” the plants or animals that die off.  However, we can just as accurately say that the surviving things successfully integrate with the environment to form a new and larger Whole.  For example, evolution combined the small size of dinosaurs with the Nature of Earth’s atmosphere to create flying dinosaurs, and a new process or system called “flight.” Later, certain flying dinosaurs evolved into birds. Today, we also have flying bats, flying insects, and gliding squirrels.  Fish that swim with fins in water are analogous to flying animals with wings.

The Five Arenas of Evolution

Cosmic Evolution began with the formation of the first nuclei, shortly after the Initial Singularity (also known as the “Big Bang”).

Evolution includes five Arenas, all of which remain ongoing:

• Cosmic Evolution — created & still creates the elements, galaxies, stars, and planets.
• Geologic Evolution — created & creates Earth, chemical compounds, atmosphere, oceans.
• Biological Evolution — created & creates all Earth’s plants and animals.
• Cultural Evolution — created & creates societies, languages, religions, law, and art.
• Technological Evolution — created & still creates wheels, steam engines, pharmaceuticals, computers, fabrics, and solar-power cells.

We are most familiar with biological evolution, where differences in living things are created by mutation of the genes or by different combinations of genes from the father and the mother. However, evolution also occurs in the formation of solar systems, language, law, art, technology, and even religions.  In each successive Arena, evolution proceeds more rapidly than in the prior Arena.

Evolution of The English Language (Cultural Evolution)

For instance, the English language has evolved from Old English (500-1100 CE), to Middle English (1150-1500 CE), to today’s Modern English.  New words and phrases are added each year, and old words and phrases become obsolete.  The passage below is from the Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous Canterbury Tales (circa 1395). Below, we show the original in Middle English; with a side-by-side translation into Modern English.

Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1395)

In technology, the history of the bicycle is a clear example of evolution. They began with huge front wheels and tiny rear wheels.  When gears and a chain drive were added, bikes with two wheels of equal size out-competed the old tall bikes, driving them to extinction in the marketplace.  Later, specialized bikes proliferated to fill specific “niche environments,” including the racing bike, mountain bike, and stunt bike. New systems build upon previous systems. As biologist Richard Dawkins wrote, “We cannot explain the bicycle in a single step – from atoms to bicycle.  We also know that complex things, like the bicycle, cannot be created in a single step.  Only by a series of small steps.”  ⁸

Like Complexity Science, Evolution Science also has a number of important sub-processes, including co-evolution, parallel evolution, adaptation, sexual recombination, speciation, and others.  We discuss these in our Essay, The Processes of Evolution – And Their Meaning.

The Evolution of “God” into “Nature’s Continuing Creation”

Religion Itself Has evolved over time.  The human vision of God is itself a “cultural artifact” that has seen tremendous evolution over the generations.

Earlier, humans had evolved conscious, reflective minds that could be curious, foresee real dangers, imagine fictional dangers, make plans, take action, become frustrated, experience suffering, and anticipate a certain death.  Then religion evolved to help people deal with all those apprehensions.  Interestingly, science also evolved as a means to address those very same apprehensions.

People seek the comfort and certainty that religion offers. We collect robes, hierarchies, sacred texts, rituals, liturgies, and other people all around who sing the same songs.  However, there can be no genuine religious certainty where there is contradiction and a lack of rational basis. The Weave of Continuing Creation offers testable and verifiable certainty: the certainty produced by science, critical thinking, historical scholarship, and logical analysis. However, this consistency must be continually open and self-correcting, because new inconsistencies, new gaps in our knowledge, may come to light. 

The most primitive human cultures often have animist religions where virtually everything – a mountain, river, a jaguar — is animated by a spirit or demon.  This likely arises because humans are intensely social creatures and have a natural tendency to believe that every natural event is explained by the active intention of something that possesses powers very much like their own. The behavior of these supernatural beings (and the wizards and witches who served as their human agents) was typically selfish and capricious.

2500 years ago, in large, post-animist tribes, such as Egyptian Civilization and the ancient tribes of Israel.  In Israel, the Hebrew God Yahweh (or Jehovah) was a Father-warrior God who brought victory over enemies in exchange for burnt offerings, loyalty, and obedience.  Human childhood lasts a long time, and children’s traits of love, trust, and obedience are the perfect mental framework for believing in a “super-parent” – a Father-God who will guide them.

Later, as Hebrew civilization developed, Jehovah was re-conceived as a lawgiver, maker of contracts, and supreme judge for the Jewish people.

Christianity extended morality beyond the tribe to encompass all humanity. Jesus went even further, preaching Universal Love, or Radical Love of All Humanity, meaning that we should extend love to our neighbors, loving them as much as we love ourselves (even the neighboring Samaritans, who were clearly not members of the nation of Israel).  Christianity changed the desert conception of Divinity from a judging and punishing God to a loving and forgiving God. Jesus preached that we should love even our enemies. (The Book of Matthew 5:44) Should we?  We discuss this in our Essays, Leading an Ethical, Moral Life and Leading a Virtuous & Honorable Life.

Jesus also preached radical sharing, meaning that “those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.” (Luke 14:25-26 and 33).  And “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” (Matthew 19:21; Luke 18:22; and Mark 10:21) If human wealth were spread out evenly across the world, we would all live in small huts. Science, technology, scholarship, and the arts all require capital concentration. Since the Path of Continuing Creation seeks to further knowledge and progress, we have written an Essay opposing the doctrine of Radical Sharing, titled “Radical Sharing & Universal Love Don’t Work.”

The doctrines of radical sharing and radical love are very impractical and inconsistent with human biology.  Love for our families and friends is naturally more intense than the consideration we feel for strangers. Radical Sharing is not family-oriented, because resources must be accumulated to support a family. Human sharing is, and should be, strongest within the immediate family.  After family, sharing and loving extend outward in diminishing circles of intensity to friends, tribe, nation, and to the ecosphere itself. Today, however, it has become vitally more important to help the ecosphere than our tribe or nation.

However, with the world’s richest 10% owning over 70% of all human wealth, the concentration of capital has already been achieved.  Therefore, a great deal more sharing could be done than we currently do.  ⁹

And if human overpopulation could be reduced, Earth would be able to provide everyone with a good standard of living.

A different problem is that Jesus did not preach sharing wealth with the biosphere – with Earth’s plants, animals, and ecosystems.  For that matter, neither did Muhammad.  The Practice of Continuing Creation argues that sharing in this direction is woefully underfunded in the Old Religions.

In short, Western religion has evolved from envisioning capricious gods to a sole, parental, and morally judging god, and then to a universally loving and forgiving God. Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation goes even further by recognizing the “Growing, Organizing, Direction of the cosmos,” which is an interacting constellation of continually creating and progressing natural processes. 

However, the Old Religions of Asia never had the authoritarian bent of the Old Middle Eastern Religions in the West.  In China, for example, one of the world’s oldest religions, Taoism, was from its very beginning a sophisticated and poetic statement of Continuing Creation: The Growing, Organizing, Direction of the universe.  Consider the following wisdom from Chapter 25 of the founding text of Taoism, the Tao Te Ch’ing (“The Way and its Power”), by Lao-Tzu, who lived in China during the 4^th or 5^th century BCE:

“There was something formless and perfect
Before the universe was born.
It is serene, empty.
Solitary, Unchanging.
Infinite.  Eternally present.
It gave birth to the universe.
For lack of a better name, I call it the Tao.
It flows through all things,
Inside and outside, and returns
To the origin of all things.”
       — Lao-Tzu, The Tao Te Ch’ing
          — Translation by Stephen Mitchell, 1988 ¹⁰

Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation presents a series of Essays on the major world religions. In each Essay, we compare and contrast one of the Old Religions with the Path of Continuing Creation. In doing this, we examine only the principal texts of the religions, rather than how modern people actually follow those faiths. Many modern people have abandoned textual verses telling them to “bathe after menstruating,” “sell all your possessions and give to the poor,” or “kill all the infidels,” because modern secular thought has thankfully shown most modern followers how ridiculous those behaviors are.  But the bizarre passages are all still there in the “sacred” texts, ready for new generations of radical fundamentalists to adopt and carry out.

There is also an Essay in which we evaluate more recent Spiritual and Secular-Spiritual paths, including Mormonism, Scientology, New Age Spirituality, and Postmodernism.  See “Modern Cults & Unusual Spiritual Paths.”  We also discuss Humanism and Postmodernism later in this Overview.

How Nature’s Continuing Creation Differs from God

The term “Nature’s Continuing Creation” is a restatement and correction of the supernatural mythical being or concept known as God. Today, in the third millennium, Western civilization possesses the language and knowledge to accurately describe the concept of Continuing Creation. There are already millions of people who believe in God but do not believe in the miracle stories of the Old Religions.  In addition, a large percentage of these people do not think that God is a person, or that “he” has personal, one-to-one conversations with individuals.  These people already are, or are very close to being, Practitioners of Nature’s Continuing Creation, which grows in the Direction of Complexity and Beauty.     

Today, many educated people believe that the concept of Continuing Creation is more meaningful than the traditional Western concept of God, but they continue to attend conventional churches out of tradition and a desire to belong.

In the Old Middle Eastern Religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), God is depicted as possessing all power, knowledge, and presence everywhere (omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence).  These Legacy Religions of the West see God as a “top-down” Creator who placed fully formed trees, lions, and humans on Earth.

In contrast, Participants in Our Way understand that Creation takes place from the “bottom up,” from the very simple to the exceedingly complex, over eons of time.  Only a few animals, and principally humans, have evolved the power to consciously and deliberately create new things.

Believers in the Desert religions often have doubts about their faith, or crises of faith, because the stories they are asked to believe are so patently ridiculous. However, the Path of Continuing Creation evolves as verified human knowledge advances. Yes, our Path comes with questions, but we have no doubt about our method and direction; therefore, we minimize psychic suffering from such doubt.

Nature’s Continuing Creation is based on Nature, Reason, & Science… and has no Myths.

• In the West, God is often viewed as a mythical Creator — a disembodied person or mind — whereas Nature’s Continuing Creation (NCC) is understood as a set of natural processes.
• God can be alternately punishing or loving, but NCC does not have a personality.
• There is no personal God who listens to and talks to human beings, but holding an imaginary conversation can be a way to enter the flow of NCC.
• Temples and Churches are houses of God, while schools, universities, research institutes, and Wikipedia are the houses of Nature’s Continuing Creation.
• Many believers say that God intervenes in individual human lives, while NCC affects individual lives only through the processes of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and probability.

Our posture as Agents of Continuing Creation is not one of adoration from afar, but rather active participation.  For us, a “relationship” with NCC is a mutual interchange of knowledge and energy.  It is a two-way flow of contemplation, meditation, teaching, learning, appreciating, building, and growing. The Path of NCC is well-suited to people who like to “get on with it” and like to “try something reasonable and see if it works.”

The Practice of Nature’s Continuing Creation in Theological Terms

Nature’s Way of Continuing Creation has a number of important Western forerunners.  Among these are Deism, Pantheism, and Process Theology.
Our Path of Nature’s Continuing Creation (NCC) is similar to, but not the same as, these four theologies:

• Deism: God / NCC created the natural laws, but does not supervise how it all works out.
• Pantheism: God / NCC is present in all life forms, processes, and things.
• Humanism: Moving toward rationality, goodness, and justice for all humankind.
• Process Theology: Natural Processes, not God, underlie all of Nature’s Continuing Creation; unless you feel the Natural Processes are (or may be) God.

These and other predecessor Western philosophies and theologies are discussed in our Essay, Forerunners to Our Path of Continuing Creation.

Process Theology

The Practice of Nature’s Continuing Creation is a type of Process Theology because we followers hold that knowledge and technology progress over time.

In Process Theology, a perfect creation does not happen all at once, “top-down,” at the beginning of time.  Instead, Creation happens incrementally through time, “bottom-up,” by assembling the simple into the complex.

• There is no anthropomorphic God who has a human-like mind and knows all things.  But all knowledge is part of Nature’s Continuing Creation.
• There is no all-powerful God who directs every event, everywhere…. but everything obeys the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, probability… and in certain systems, chaos theory.

Versions of Process Theology argue that  Nature’s Growing, Organizing, Direction will lead to what Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called “The Omega Point,” a unified supreme consciousness.  For de Chardin, “divine unification,” or God Himself, is the Omega Point.  In other words, as our “process” proceeds, evil and suffering will decline until they no longer exist. Chardin is saying that God did not create the world; the world creates God, i.e., creates the unified supreme consciousness. ¹¹

However, our own Path of Continuing Creation makes no such claim for a “happy ending.” Long before the inevitable death of our sun, humans may cause an irreversible degradation of Earth’s biosphere. Natural disasters, both on Earth and from outside the Earth, could wipe out all of humankind, wipe out all life on Earth, or even destroy the entire planet itself.  While the Processes of Continuing Natural Creation are vibrant and resilient, they are certainly not inevitable.

Problems with the Old World Religions

Most of the world’s religions are, at best, outdated.  At worst, they are dysfunctional. The major religions of the world (particularly the Old Middle Eastern Religions of the Middle East – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have three major faults.

The First Problem is that conservative followers of the Old Religions believe so fiercely in their own myths and doctrines that they fight deadly wars with followers of other Old Religions. These are the fundamentalists of their faiths. They believe that their particular religious text is literally the true word of God. The orthodox of each religion still assert that theirs is the only true religion. Even today, some literalists still see God as a war champion who will grant victory over enemy tribes in exchange for sacrificed animals, ceremonies, and fealty.

The Second Problem with Old Religions is that their morality is outdated. Their fundamentalist factions still subjugate women, perform genital mutilation, and practice death by stoning. They still call for war against neighboring ethnicities and nations. In addition, their sacred texts, written down when Earth’s human population was small, do not address today’s overpopulation, pollution, and the extermination of entire species.  The Path of Continuing Creation sweeps away all such outdated morality.  Every human being who is born deserves the full support of a loving family; however, the birth rate itself must be managed so that the Earth’s ecology is not damaged.

The Third Problem with the major Old Religions is that none of them were written after the Enlightenment or the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Therefore, no Old Religion incorporates science, industry, or technology, or makes its creative power and new knowledge integral to its spiritual path. Today, while ancient myths and stories can illustrate truths, it is ridiculous to base religions on the belief that such stories are literally true.  None of the Old Religions are synchronized to creativity and invention – the significant trends of the modern era. This book about Nature’s Continuing Creation provides that path.

The Path of Nature’s Continuing Creation Opposes “Religious Fundamentalism“

As we noted at the top of this Essay, The Practice of Continuing Creation is opposed to all forms of religious fundamentalism, including the literal interpretation of “sacred” books. Literalism is the curse of all religions. It cannot be supported by actual history, objective evidence, logic, reason, or common sense.

Fundamentalism leads to belief in demons and witches, the casting of spells, abandonment of reason, the end of critical thinking, the end of free speech, “thought police,” death by stoning, forced conversion, mind control, dressing women in black bags, theocracy, and the end of the separation between church and state.  By opposing fundamentalism, the Way of Nature’s Continuing Creation promotes intellectual freedom and helps eliminate irrational beliefs as a cause of war and violence.

• Fundamentalism comes from the desire for certainty and the desire for easy answers.
• It stems from having minds that are lazy, lacking the virtues of curiosity, critical thinking, and the scientific method.
• It stems from the notion that the founding religious text is inerrant.
• Fundamentalism stems from the desire to keep members in the fold by punishing those who leave and by fostering distrust of outsiders.
• It stems from the use of myths to explain natural phenomena.
• Fundamentalism comes from moralities that are outdated, including intolerance, the near enslavement of household workers, and the subjugation of women.  Fundamentalist subjugation of women can include physical confinement, denial of education, the marrying of female children to old men, genital mutilation of girls, and stoning women to death as punishment for alleged marital infidelity.
• And it stems from forming alliances with political leaders who utilize it to maintain secular control.

Some of the traditional Western religions have undergone liberalization over the years. Judaism used to have only Orthodoxy; now it also has Conservative and Reform Judaism, each version taking the original Biblical texts less and less literally.

Unfortunately, modern people can too easily revert to the harsher, fundamentalist beliefs of old; as we see today among Muslims in the Middle East, Ultra-Orthodox Jews living in the West Bank Settlements, and Fundamentalist Christians residing in the United States. They can revert to intolerant and often violent behaviors because they can find justification for those raw positions in their sacred texts. That is why we must modify those holy texts as they now stand, and instead look to Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation.

So, when we discuss a world religion in this book of essays, our discussion will focus on its original texts, rather than how modern followers interpret them through rose-colored glasses.

Participants in Our Natural Way say that people should mark the outdated and immoral passages in all religious texts and ignore those passages going forward. The outdated passages would include all the impossible miracle stories (e.g., parting the sea, walking on water, raising the dead). The marking could be done by printing these passages in a different color or by lining them through with fine lines (fine enough to leave the passages readable).

The Practices of Continuing Creation vs. the Practices of Old Religions

Throughout history, almost every sizable human society has had religion.  Why?  For two main reasons:

• First, religion readily leverages predispositions that are hard-wired into the human brain.  For example, humans are predisposed to view all events as caused by an agent, e.g., a god, demon, or spirit.
• Second, religion reinforces the cohesion of human tribes and societies. Cohesion enhances the ability to survive evolutionary competition between tribes and societies. (For more on both reasons, see our Essay, Religion and the Human Brain)

We practitioners of Nature’s Continuing Creation do not have “beliefs.” Instead, we reach conclusions and convictions that are open to change.  Because Nature’s Continuing Creation is not a super-person, we do not “worship” Him or Her; instead, we participate and celebrate in Our Progressing Practice.  As active and important agents within Nature’s Continuing Creation, we never kneel before “God,” never sacrifice animals, or engage in other rituals of submission.  We do not hide our faces and hair from Continuing Creation’s sunlight and air, except to protect them from over-exposure to heat, radiation, and cold.

Travelers on the Path of Continuing Creation do not plead with or blindly obey God; we participate in the Growing, Organizing, Direction of Nature’s Evolution.  We never ask for favors. We don’t pray, we envision and affirm. A typical envisioning for an Agent in Nature’s Continuing Creation would be, “May I move closer to the Flow of Continuing Creation and become more positive, kind, helpful, creative, and productive.” When we do this, we are addressing our better selves. However, since we are each a part of Nature’s Continuing Creation, we cannot be said to be talking with Nature’s Continuing Creation.

Unlike most religions that worship a God, the Way of Nature’s Continuing Creation has no sacred, immutable text. This book of Essays about Continuing Creation must be subject to continual revision as new knowledge and better reasoning come to light through the years. Our Path always encourages continual reading and questioning, just as science and scholarship do.

The old major religions present a way out of life, an escape to heaven, nirvana, a Jewish kingdom on Earth, and, during life, to monasteries and nunneries.  But the Path of Nature’s Continuing Creation presents a way into life.  Ours is a way forward in life, not a step to the side or a retreat to inactive stasis.

The Old Desert (Abrahamic) Religions seem to have too much Yang (the male principle).  The Old Asian Religions (Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism) seem to have too much Yin (the feminine principle).  The Way of Continuing Creation has a balanced mix of Yang and Yin. “First we meditate, then we act.”

The Old Religions are like plays. The forces of Nature and the traits of man are played by characters.  These religions can be insightful, entertaining, and motivating – just as the plays of Shakespeare can be.  As art, the stories of the old sacred texts can have multiple levels of meaning, appealing simultaneously to different aspects of human experience.

However, everyone watching a Shakespearean play knows that the action on stage is fictional, whereas far too many people who follow the Old Religions believe those stories to be literally true historical events.  In addition, when the Old Religions portray the forces of Nature and the Nature of humankind, they often get it wrong, because at the time the old sacred texts were written down, scientific knowledge – physics, chemistry, psychology – was virtually non-existent.

This book about Nature’s Creative Flow contains Essays on several well-known religions and philosophies.  At the risk of oversimplification, the following are a few of negative aspects of some of those religions. We will reserve the positive points, which are quite important, for reading in the Essays themselves.

Brief Negative Aspects of Some of the Old Religions

Judaism is too tribal, legalistic, and contractual. It is also crowded with mindlessly detailed rituals.

Christianity, as we discussed earlier, is too communal and too radically sharing.  It would spread wealth so wide that wealth can no longer be concentrated enough to achieve progress.  The Christian ideal of “Love thy Neighbor as Thyself” is inconsistent with human biology, because humans have evolved to love our families more than we do strangers.

“There have been many “messiahs” since Jesus, including electric power, the printing press, rule by law, the Declaration of Human rights, modern medicine, the computer and the internet (hopefully!), and for sure, great architecture.  All of those milestones have moved us closer to realizing an eventual “Kingdom” of Continuing Creation here on Earth.  More “messiahs” are to come, including better solar power, population control, nuclear fusion, and re-forestation of the Earth.”  — J.X. Mason

Hinduism is too fantastic — filled with hundreds of Gods and Goddesses, endless myths, and rituals, all of which seem to be equal to each other. 

Buddhism is too pessimistic (“all life is suffering”) and too passive (“sit, meditate, and transcend into nirvana”). Buddhists see suffering (or “dissatisfaction”) as a human analog to what physicists call entropy – the degree of disorder or randomness in a system.

“Today, Western Civilization has given us abundant energy, complex technology, democracy, and the rule of law. Today in the West, life is certainly not all suffering. And to live a life of meditative contemplation would be to abandon active participation in the processes of The Direction of Complexity and Beauty.”  — JXM

Taoism, of all the major Old Religions, is the most like Nature’s Way of Continuing Creation, but it lacks the scientific concepts that could give it the weight of evidence.

Note: For more depth and detail on the above religions, see our individual Essays and on Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, and in a section Judaism.

Humanism, while not a religion per se, is also flawed.  It does not address the needs of our planetary ecosystem, neglects Nature as the prime source of secular-spirituality, and neglects the role of technology.  We talk more about Humanism in our Essay, Forerunners to Our Path & Practice.

Humans Are Not at the Center of Continuing Creation.

Humans are not as special as we once thought they were. Until about 1960, people living in the Abrahamic tradition (Judaism, Christianity & Islam) believed they were the masters of the Earth. Today, most of us recognize that we are dependent on the interrelationships of nearly all plants and animals to sustain the biosphere that supports our existence. For practitioners of Nature’s Continuing Creation, “love” means deep and caring personal involvement with some person, place, activity, or thing.  If we do not love Earth’s plants and animals and their entwined relationships, we cannot love Nature’s Continuing Creation, because NCC is those things.  (See our Essay, “Love’s Role in Our Lives & Practice.”)

— We humans have good eyesight, but nothing like that of eagles.
— We can run for longer distances than any other animal, but we cannot fly.
— We have sympathy and empathy, but elephants and whales may have more.
— Our language is the most advanced, but whales, birds, and even trees also communicate.
— Our tool use is the most advanced, but chimpanzees and crows also use tools.
— We raise livestock and build cities, but so do certain species of ants.
— African lions hunt, but no species on Earth kills as many creatures as we do.
— Chimpanzees make war on each other, and so do ants, but human war matches their brutality.
— Without machines, we cannot echolocate, but bats, whales, and porpoises can.
— Human beings are unable to turn sunlight into food. Only Earth’s plant life can do that.

Are there things humans do that are unique? Yes:

• • We alone create machines that are themselves open thermodynamic systems (they run by burning fuels or on solar power),
  • We alone can create machines that communicate and process information.
  • We alone can create cultures far more advanced than those of other species.
  • We alone pollute the Earth.
  • We alone overconsume the Earth’s resources. While there may be enough acreage for everyone to have a home, there are not enough resources to supply everyone’s needs, and certainly not enough to provide everyone with a modern Euro-American middle-class lifestyle.
    

Nature’s Continuing Creation encompasses the universe. However, the Earth is the most tangible, encompassing creation that any of us experiences in our daily lives. Therefore, Planet Earth represents all the interacting Processes in Nature’s Continuing Creation in our lives.  Ancient myth and folklore have personified this reality in the person of Gaia, Mother Earth, or Mother Nature.  If human minds insist on anthropomorphizing the Processes of Continuing Creation into a person, Mother Nature would be our choice for the role.

Were the Processes of Creation Started by God?  

It is possible that a traditional Creator God designed and initiated the Initial Singularity, thereby creating the universe.  It is impossible to prove otherwise.  We can never prove that there is no single, active, creative intelligence, that there is no God, because we cannot prove or disprove something that is said to be outside all evidence, outside all frames of reference, outside even time and space. A proof would require us to have considered all areas and avenues of knowledge. We humans have not done that, and we may never be able to do it, even with computerized artificial intelligence.

It does appear that the four fundamental interactions or forces (gravity, the strong and the weak nuclear forces, and the electromagnetic force), the laws of physics, and the 92 natural elements are the same all over the universe. But this does not mean we have to imagine a super-person God, complete with a human-like personality, who stands outside and before the Initial Singularity (the “Big Bang”).

Why not just say that the laws of physics and the four fundamental interactions are themselves Nature’s Continuing Creation: The Growing, Organizing, Direction of Nature’s Processes?  Either way – by God or by The Organizing Direction – we have the mysterious miracle of creation.  Imagining a human-like God does not make it any less mysterious; it makes it needlessly more mysterious!

People who conclude that God must have set up the “clockwork” of the universe, wound it up, and set it running, are called Deists in the language of theology. They hold that after setting everything up and turning on the switch, God stepped back from “His” creation and has never interfered since; and He has certainly not stooped to interfere in the mundane lives of individual humans.  Many of our founding fathers were Deists, including Washington, Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson. Deism is a Forerunner of The Path of Continuing Creation.  (See our Essay, Forerunners to Our Path and Practice.)

What Else but “God” Could Set the Right Conditions for Life on Earth?

True, Earth is just the right distance from the Sun to permit us to enjoy flowable liquid water rather than static ice or chaotic super-heated steam.  Our planet is also well endowed with carbon. Carbon combines easily with many other elements, allowing all Earth’s plants and animals to be carbon-based life forms.

While it is true that Earth is indeed very fortunate, astronomers are discovering that there are billions of other “Suns,” with billions of other planets and moons orbiting them. While most of those satellites will not have advantageous orbits or the chemical resources conducive to life, quite a few of them probably are in the same “Goldilocks Zone” that Earth is in. ¹²

What Accounts for the Mysteries of Science, if not God? 

Virtually all the Old Religions describe God as “unknowable,” and “beyond human understanding.” The Path of Continuing Creation tentatively agrees…. The entire Growing, Organizing, Direction of the Cosmos may be unknowable and beyond human understanding, but a great deal of it is understandable.

Humans are unable to sense many aspects of reality. We cannot see ultraviolet light, although our instruments can detect it. We cannot see, touch, or hear gravity; we can only feel it. We can measure and manage both electricity and light, but we don’t really understand them. Sometimes, light appears to be composed of particles called photons, and at other times, it seems to behave like waves. However, while ocean waves require water to travel through, and sound waves need a medium (such as water, air, or even rock) to propagate, light can move freely through a vacuum.

One thing is for sure — we must conclude that plenty of mystery remains in The Processes of Continuing Creation.

We Travelers on Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation say that the universe’s four forces (such as the electromagnetic force that gives rise to electricity and light) are integral parts of Creation.  We do not need a God (especially one with a human-like appearance and a gray beard) to stand outside those forces and their mathematics.  In fact, we ourselves are also integral parts in and of Continuing Creation, here on Earth and even in the universe as a whole.

To illustrate, there are many things in modern Physics that seem self-contradictory and mysterious.  Here are a few of them:

• Our senses often fail us. We can’t see ultraviolet light or infrared, but other creatures can see those “colors,” and we can “see” them with the aid of our instruments.
• Light sometimes seems to be a wave and sometimes seems to be a stream of particles (photons). There are large bodies of accepted equations and experimental results “proving” each version.
• Most of us think of space as an empty vacuum, yet Einstein proved that gravity actually bends space.  This bent shape makes us fall inward toward the center of Earth when we trip over a tree root.
• In recent years, it has become widely accepted in physics that the matter we observe in the universe is only a small fraction of the total matter in the universe. The lion’s share is thought to be “dark” (invisible) matter. Dark matter is invisible because it does not interact with light or any other form of electromagnetism.
• Dark energy, pervasive throughout space, also causes virtual particles to appear and disappear.
• The electromagnetic force can manifest in several forms, including electric current, light, magnetism, and chemical energy.  But no one really knows what electricity is. Electrons do move through the wire, but they do not come out at the end of the wire and hit something to push the blades of a rotor and make it move.  Instead, they travel back around the wire to the source (e.g., a battery), from which they originated.  Meanwhile, the electric force is “carried” (or “conducted”) by fields that run along the outside surface of the wire. But no one can really explain what it means to “carry” or “conduct” a force.

Note:  For more information on the above points, see our Essay, “Mysteries of Modern Physics.”

Currently, neither God nor science fully explains all aspects of the phenomena we observe and experience.  But of the two, Continuing Creation clearly explains more of them than does God.  And with each passing year, the knowledge base within Continuing Creation deepens as scientific advances occur.

Old Religions exhort their followers to believe in God on faith.  But we Explorers in Nature’s Continuing Creation say just the opposite: take nothing on faith. Our Secular-Spiritual Path, our Practice of Creative Living, must be based on verifiable knowledge, and we must pursue verifiable knowledge where it does not yet exist.   

We Explorers in Nature’s Continuing Creation also maintain that it is beneficial if new mysteries continue to emerge. Without mystery, there is no adventure, and without adventure, there is no discovery.  Adventure and discovery are part of being human.

Besides, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is not really different from the old-fashioned Newtonian Physics we learned in high school.  When we scale back the terrific speeds and masses handled in Einstein’s equations down to the modest speeds and relatively short distances we humans live with here on Earth, Einstein’s equations simplify and become Newton’s equations.  In other words, Newton’s physics is a subset of Einstein’s physics.

Are Nature’s Processes Made of Mathematics?

Today, some writers are saying that “mathematics is the language of God (or of The Direction of Complexity and Beauty (DCB); or even that “Mathematics is God (or Mathematics is the DCB).” For example, see Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe; and Mario Livio’s Is God a Mathematician? 

We do know the following things about mathematics:

• Mathematics (“math”) is the language of science, particularly of physics.
• There are many branches of math, but they all relate to one another, as do the hubs and intersections of a three-dimensional web. (See the 11-minute mini-lecture and its entertaining video, “Map of Mathematics,” available online.
• Their interconnectedness leads some math professors to believe that the branches of math are discovered. But other experts say no, they are invented. Over the past few centuries, mathematicians have frequently developed new branches of mathematics that appear to have little or no practical application in the real world. Then, decades later, this branch of math will turn out to be exactly the right tool for describing some new branch of science.
• It is increasingly possible to represent just about everything, including 3D images, chess strategies, and robot movements, with computer code consisting of nothing but “zeros and ones.” The patterns of the 0’s and 1’s are a kind of logical mathematics.

As in the Sciences, there are also profound mysteries in mathematics.  For example,

• The Spiral Pattern shown on the Home Page of our website (continuingcreation.org) animates everything from galaxies to plant shoots, to snails, to staircases. Remarkably, this pattern originates from a simple sequence of numbers generated by basic addition.
• Another example involves the number Pi = 3.14159… Pi is the ratio of every circle’s Area to its radius (“r”), as in… “Area = pi times r-squared.”   Yet, for some as yet mysterious reason, the number pi, 3.14159…, turns up in all kinds of other things that have nothing to do with circles.
• There is a proven theorem in math that says that every system of math, no matter how complete and comprehensive it seems to be, always has one or more true things that cannot be proven to be true within that system itself. In other words, every math system has a “trapdoor” to some truth that lies outside that system.

We explore these and other topics in our Essay, “Mathematics Evolves in Nature’s Continuing Creation.”
See also our Essay, “Nature Creates Patterns of Information & Beauty.”

Consciousness: Nature’s Continuing Creation Wakes Up

Like intelligence and opposable thumbs, consciousness has evolved.  Formerly thought to be unique to humans, consciousness exists on a continuum throughout the animal kingdom.  The most we can say is that we humans are more conscious than all or almost all other mammals.

With the evolution of animal and especially human consciousness, Nature’s Continuing Creation can be said to “awaken” and become increasingly self-aware. From this point on, Continuing Creation, through its human agents, is increasingly able to plan and choose the further path of the Growing, Organizing, Direction itself.

Human consciousness includes all of the following things:

• An understanding of self
• An understanding of past and future
• An understanding that I have a “mind”
• An understanding that others have minds
• A partial ability to infer the intentions of others

Many futurists believe that we are on the threshold of “Electronic Consciousness” (usually called the “technological singularity”), when our net of computers, our world-wide-cloud, “wakes up” and achieves a consciousness of its own.  And then the net begins, perhaps, to reproduce and evolve on its own, quickly outdistancing the cognitive abilities of the human brain. Or, human brains may be joined to implanted computers.  In either case, beyond this point, the future could be completely unpredictable… and possibly disastrous for human beings, as portrayed in numerous works of science fiction, including Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Terminator” film series. ¹³ For more, see our Essay, Cyborgs, Transhumanism, & Immortality.

Human Morality 

Human Morality also evolves.  Morality grows out of cooperation.  For example, when single-cell bacteria stop competing and combine to make a multicellular organism.  Cooperation has produced symbiosis, herds, and insect hives.  New studies in biology reveal that even trees communicate with one another when a systemic threat emerges within their ecosystem.

Morality as we humans know it first developed among many species of mammals, long before Moses supposedly climbed Mount Sinai and received the Ten Commandments.  Since morality evolved to support human cooperation, morals predate all religions.  And so, all spiritual paths and secular-spiritual paths (including our own) have similar sets of moral principles.

Since the time of the earliest humans, the circle (range) of moral behavior has widened.  Morality was first applied within the family, then within the tribe, and subsequently within the nation.  Yet even today, there is still a great deal of tribal behavior – ethnic cleansing, segregation, caste systems.

Next, Jesus and Buddha called for universal love and radical sharing, and the Enlightenment and spread of democracy established a set of human rights.

However, despite the increased range of morality, it does not yet sufficiently extend out to include all the other living plants and creatures of Continuing Creation.

Our Essay, “Leading an Ethical, Moral Life,” presents the Moral Principles of the Practice of Nature’s Continuing Creation.

The morality of The Growing, Organizing, Direction of the Cosmos includes specific principles directed toward the preservation of Earth and its biosphere. Our morality encompasses three key areas: Continuing Creation, human welfare, and the welfare of the Earth.  We refer to these three connected directions as our Moral Triangle.

The Moral Triangle of Nature’s Continuing Creation

To be Moral within the Way of Nature’s Continuing Creation, humans must be concerned with a “Moral Triangle” composed of other people, other living things, and the creative systems of Nature’s Continuing Creation.

• The Natural Processes of Continuing Creation created both Earth and humanity.
• Earth sustains and supports both humanity and the Processes of Continuing Creation.
• Humanity provides self-awareness and care (foreseeing, analyzing, planning, deciding, and doing) for both Earth and Continuing Creation.
• Humans are Agents of Continuing Creation and for Continuing Creation.

(In fact, all living things are “agents” of Creation: plants perform photosynthesis, worms recycle the dead, birds build nests, and so on.)

We know that all three sides of the Moral Triangle work together, so all three should be given equal care.

If we fail to extend and balance the Moral Triangle, we could suffer hellish dystopian futures in the long run. Computerized machines (CMs) could surpass and repress humans, or humans could merge with CMs and lose their humanity, or wealthy bio-engineered humans with “superpowers” could repress poor “unimproved” humans, or humans and/or CMs could destroy the biosphere.  We discuss these scenarios in our two Essays, “Cyborgs, Transhumanism, & Immortality,“ and “Overpopulation Threatens Nature’s Creation.”

The Threat of Human Overpopulation

The size of our Secular-Spiritual Path’s Moral Triangle can grow best only if all three of its sides move outward in step with each other. Today, due to our rapidly growing population and excessive consumption, the human side of the triangle has been expanding too far and too fast.

We must emphasize the health of the environment, reverse the accelerating deaths of species, and curtail the human overpopulation that crowds the Earth.  The Path of Continuing Creation is pro-technology, but our technologies must be environmentally friendly, reducing our carbon footprint and other forms of pollution.

Maintaining an equilateral triangle requires constant trade-offs and ongoing improvements in technology.  Should a swamp be drained to feed the hungry, or left as a wetland to support populations of birds and insects?   Should we drive smaller cars, even if they are less safe?   Should we genetically modify mosquitoes so they can no longer host malaria bacteria?  Maybe…. but what would the unintended consequences be?  The difficult choices are pressing and endless.  For further discussion, see our Essay, “Overpopulation Threatens Nature’s Continuing Creation.” 

Problems with Humanism

The Weave of Continuing Creation supports nearly all the concepts and moral principles of Humanism. However, Humanists have traditionally concentrated their concern and care on the humanity side of the Moral Triangle and have given insufficient consideration to Earth’s biosphere and to the Growing, Organizing Direction.   

Humanism fails to explain that creativity is inherent in Nature’s Continuing Creation.  Humanism also fails to acknowledge that humans and human civilization are only part of Nature’s Ongoing Creation.

Humans cannot answer the question, “What is the purpose of my life?” without learning about the lives of stars, bacteria, plants, genetics, and evolution.  These are topics of science, not topics of “the humanities.” Said another way, “Man is not the measure of all things.”  Unless humans know and feel that they are part of a greater whole, we will always feel alone in the universe.

As Dr. Jonas Salk once said, “If all the insects disappeared, in 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all humans disappeared, in 50 years all life on Earth would flourish.”

Another weakness of Humanism is that it is overly optimistic about the “perfectibility” of humankind through education. It underestimates the biological strength of humanity’s evil, aggressive side.  Humanism also neglects the reality that the primary inculcation of values and morals takes place within the family. The important values we learn in elementary school, team sports, Scouting, and Campfire Girls come second.

The Path of Nature’s Continuing Creation plans to devote an Essay to the strengths and shortcomings of Humanism, just as it has done (or will do) for each of the world’s great religions.

Redemption in Our Practice

The Practice of Continuing Creation holds that people can achieve moral and secular-spiritual redemption. Good behavior later in life can make up for bad behavior earlier in life. The process of redemption requires admission of wrongs, turning to Continuing Creation and other people for help, change in behavior, change in attitude, apology, restitution, specific amends, and “living amends.”  “Living amends” include good and moral behavior in all three moral directions. This includes other people who want to recover and reform. Your Author, J.X. Mason, has himself lived most of his life on a Path of Redemption.

Human Virtues

Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation also includes the Essay, Leading a Virtuous & Honorable Life. Virtues are more voluntary and proactive than moral principles. As you might expect, our Essay places emphasis on the Virtues of creativity and productive work. These virtues are not emphasized in Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism.  As an example, consider the Virtue of Right Livelihood, which is one of the eight practices of Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path: ¹⁴

Example: The Virtue of Right Livelihood

Say you work in the field of finance. If you are a traditional banker, lending money to small and medium-sized businesses to help them grow, you are contributing to the Practice of Continuing Creation; you are a “pie-maker.’  You are aligned with Nature’s Continuing Creation. This is a Right Livelihood (as it would be called in Buddhism).

But if you work for a credit card company and your job is to create the obfuscating rules that first over-extend credit and then escalate the borrower’s interest rate beyond all reason, then you are not aligned with the Path of Continuing Creation.  You are not a “pie-maker,” you are a “pie-divider,” taking pie from poor borrowers and giving it to rich creditors.

Some might argue that it is up to the “invisible hand of market competition” to correct this situation. However, the Morality of Nature’s Continuing Creation suggests that the moral path is not always the path of unfettered markets.  Yes, the moral path is a matter of individual choice and individual responsibility. But The Book of Continuing Creation does not hold with “Buyer Beware.” Laws and Regulations must protect consumers.

About the Virtue of Love

In the Practice of Nature’s Continuing Creation, love means having deep and abiding care and concern for and involvement with one or more of these things: persons, plants and animals, our work, and our constructive activities.  When we have and express Love, we can at times enter a “flow state,” or what athletes call “the Zone,” where our being merges in a sense with the object of our positive involvement.

For Weavers of Continuing Creation, love is not the supreme virtue. The supreme virtue is furthering the balanced flowering of Continuing Creation.  However, love contributes significantly to that overarching virtue by creating and then building stronger, richer interpersonal relationships.

Love is not unique to human beings. Dogs love, elephants love, whales love.  In fact, almost all mammals love their young; many love their mates; and a number love their brothers and sisters. [Note] Animals of different species may also learn to love each other if they live in a protected environment. See “Animal Odd Couples,” the television series Nature, on PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/animal-odd-couples-full-episode/8009/. This fact does not lessen the importance and power of love in human life.

Love is the deepest form of interconnection and cooperation that humans can experience, because it involves not just intellect, but also emotion and great sharing of time, effort, and wealth.  Family love, in particular, harnesses our genetic drive to pass on our genes. Love makes it possible for human parents to fulfill their children’s needs during their uniquely long period of childhood dependency.

While the sharing of time and resources is limited, human love, in the form of empathy, kindness, and emotional connection, can flourish and grow over an entire lifetime.

Ants or computers may succeed the human race, but it’s unlikely that they would have the same capacity for love as humans… or as dogs, elephants, or whales.

The Way of Continuing Creation describes different levels of love, concern, and respect for different circles of human acquaintance, which is consistent with our biological Nature.  We naturally have more love for members of our immediate family than we do for our extended family, and so on.

True, a small minority of humans – including Jesus, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Gandhi — may elect and succeed in manifesting universal love.  But their lives should not be held up as the model for the rest of us.  If we all became Mother Teresa, no Thomas Edison would have invented the light bulb; no Jonas Salk would have discovered the polio vaccine; no team composed of Drs. Townes, Schawlow, Gould, Maiman, Javan, Bennett, & Herriott would have created the laser.

The Purpose & Meaning of Our Human Lives

The purpose of our human lives is Constructive and loving participation in Nature’s Continuing Creation. This includes preserving the Earth and its biosphere, enhancing the human condition, and progressing knowledge, culture, and technology.

Several Essays (and Journal Entries by J.X. Mason) talk about the purpose of our human lives.  Our Essay, Living a Fulfilled & Happy Life presents a number of routines and disciplines for achieving fulfillment, including our “Seven Steps of Daily Growth.”

Cultivating closer personal alignment with Continuing Natural Creation enriches our individual lives.

Individual humans also have the same fundamental purposes as the lowly bacterium – to be, to live over time, and to reproduce.  Every living thing, from the lowly single-cell bacterium to the human being, requires the same three basic things:  1) a boundary between itself and the outside environment, 2) a metabolism for the food that generates what engineers call a throughput of energy, and 3) a way to reproduce.

Do we humans have a purpose beyond survival?  If so, the easy answer is to say the Purpose of Life is to “Be Happy.”  But that’s too easy; too self-centered.

We can correctly say that our primary concern is for ourselves and our immediate families, as this concern is rooted in biology and the mammalian instinct to nurture children. The emotion of familial love is rightly very strong, and The Path of Continuing Creation champions family values. Of course, not everyone has biological or adopted children, and childless people can admirably devote love to their friends, their work, to causes, or to research and the arts.

Looking beyond our connection to family and friends, it is also clear that Continuing Natural Creation is manifest in human nature.  We are natural explorers, strivers, learners, builders, artists, and organizers. Therefore, the purpose of each individual human life includes contributing to Nature’s Continuing Creation by working, discovering, inventing, creating, building, sharing, learning, and loving. 

This concept is similar to (but not the same as) Catholic doctrine, which says that the purpose of life is to “Glorify God.” But today, we can actually describe what “glorifying” means.  It’s about actively contributing to the positive processes of Continuing Creation.  Co-Agents of Continuing Creation are motivated to contribute to the creative process of the universe by working, discovering, creating, and inventing.  Within our Way of Continuing Creation, this intense and positive involvement in life is how we define Love, in its broadest sense.

There are three human drives: the Selfish-Aggressive drive, the Selfless-Sharing Drive, and the Drive to Create and Build, which may be a combination of the first two drives. Selfishness is the evolutionary force of competition, and selflessness is the evolutionary force of cooperation. Continuing Creation and the process of Evolution have always contained all three.  Human nature also contains all three.

In their drive to accumulate and control, selfish-aggressive people can accumulate and build a great deal. People work hardest for themselves and their own families.

However, sometimes the Selfish Drive can lead to violence. Plants have been at war with insects for millions of years. Animals, including humans, have been at war with bacteria and viruses for millions of years. Human civilizations have been at war for tens of thousands of years, and at war with their criminal elements for just as long. In the future, humans may be at war with their own machines. Humans are already doing untold violence to the general biosphere.

On the other hand, people who share and cooperate with each other can also build a great deal. Cooperation can magnify the creative power of each person acting alone.

However, the Selfless Drive sometimes produces passivity, resignation, decline, and decay – as we saw during the communist rule over Russia and Eastern Europe in the first four decades after World War Two.

Here’s an example of both drives in action: On the one hand, patent protection (the Selfish Drive) can aid progress by motivating inventors to invent, while on the other hand, freely sharing scientific knowledge (the Selfless Drive) can advance global progress by stimulating others to make related discoveries.

The evolutionary Process of Continuing Creation has produced all three drives. We cannot say that Continuing Creation excludes aggression, suffering, or evil, because all of those do exist. The Processes of Continuing Natural Creation will continue to create by any method they can, with or without human cooperation.  However, the evolutionary and historical records show that a combination of the selfish and the selfless drives produces the most and fastest Continuing Creation.

Travelers on the Path of Continuing Creation understand that the one overall Direction of the Growing, Organizing, Direction of the Cosmos is not toward (a) aggressively competing and controlling, nor toward (b) selflessly sharing and loving, but toward (c) creatively building and progressing.

If humans kill themselves off in a nuclear or biological holocaust, it is likely that the Processes of Continuing Creation will evolve new species on Earth to occupy the ecological space we leave behind, using new and novel forces of both competition and cooperation.

Nature’s Way of Continuing Creation teaches that we Humans are part of the Earth, and its Ecology and Processes. While we have a serious obligation to preserve and sustain species and ecosystems, we also have the right to compete against species that might truly threaten us (e.g., plague bacteria/viruses), the right to keep our machines under human control, and the right to preserve our own existence and human values. We may try to achieve all this and fail, but we must try. And that effort must balance our care among all three interdependent sides of the Moral Triangle:  Progress – Earth – Humanity. 

Inspirational People in the History of Nature’s Continuing Creation

Most of the Major Old Religions are centered on a single inspirational person – Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Jesus Christ, or Muhammad.  Stephen Prothero calls these figures religious “exemplars,” and he also includes lesser-known saints, prophets, martyrs, and gurus.

We are all drawn to exemplars, heroes, and heroines because humans are social animals. The explosion of social media shows how fascinated we are with the lives of others. For the Path of Nature’s Continuing Creation to inspire most people, it must also present us with inspirational people. But not Jesus (too communal).  Not Buddha (too withdrawing). Not Socrates or Plato (too studious and too dependent on slaves). Not Einstein (he was too mean to his wife).

For Participants in Continuing Creation, a better hero from the ancient past might be the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (whom we quoted at the opening of our Introduction, and again just below); and also the unnamed Romans who invented the stone arch and the use of concrete mortar. 

“Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe, too, the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.”    — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations IV, 40.

The Way of Nature’s Continuing Creation is a characteristically American secular-spiritual path, emphasizing action, discovery, new knowledge, and progress.  It is a “can-do” path and practice.

We could list many other heroes and heroines from more modern times, including Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, Frank Lloyd Wright, Harriett Tubman, Leonardo Da Vinci, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Voltaire, E.O. Wilson, Lewis Thomas, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, James Clerk Maxwell, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Alan Turing, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Martin Luther King, John Muir,  Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Blackwell, Marie Currie, Helen Keller, Dorothy Hodgkin, Margaret Thatcher, Billie Jean King, Benazir Bhutto, Oprah Winfrey, Malala Yousafzai, Mary Barra, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Elon Musk.

Note: For a longer, and somewhat different list of inspirational people, see our Essay, “Gatherings, Sayings, Songs, & ‘Stars.’ “

Of course, we always need to know if the private lives of these people were as laudable as their public achievements have been. They may have cheated their siblings, abused their spouses, shamed and belittled their children, falsified their income tax returns, or cheated at golf.  

Every Participant in Continuing Creation should research and select his or her own personal exemplars, provided they are exemplars of the Way of Continuing Creation itself.  For more, see our Essay on Inspirational People.

Objective Truth vs “Relative Truth”

While proponents of the Old Religions slaughter each other, another kind of war is going on.  This is the war between fundamentalists who insist on believing in the absolute word of their own particular book, and modern questioning and critical thinking.

Too many educated liberals today follow the writings of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. They see the old primitive religions as cute, precious, and anthropologically interesting.  And they wistfully call for the adoption of some “modern” myths to provide poetic imagery.  No!  We should not go there. It is too dangerous because too many people are eager to believe in just about anything.

Note:  In the small city where author J.X. Mason currently lives, there are a number of intelligent men at a particular Protestant Church who believe not only in Jesus Christ, but also in alien visitations and the urban myth that the CIA was behind the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York City. 

Problems with Postmodernism

Underpinning this upswing in public gullibility is the “post-modern” idea that there is no objective truth; that whatever is in your mind is your truth, and all such truths are equally valid. According to the post-modernists, there is no Truth; there are only models that “portray” reality from different points of view. This is a potentially catastrophic idea.

Postmodernism holds that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs that are subject to change. It asserts that there is no absolute truth and that people’s perceptions of the world are subjective, emphasizing the roles of language, power relations, and motivations in shaping ideas and beliefs.

Practitioners of Nature’s Continuing Creation are objectivists. We hold that the conclusions of science and historical research are increasingly true across all cultures.  We reject the subjectivity of postmodern thought.

People have different opinions about various subjects, but not all opinions are equal. There are informed opinions and uninformed opinions, but facts are facts.  As the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.”

Many religious liberals believe that all religions are equally meaningful and equally good.  Therefore, we are all “citizens of the world.”  Really?  Nazism and the political orthodoxy of North Korea share many of the features of a religion.  Do we want to respect them as we would Presbyterianism or Buddhism?  Absolutely not.

To see how awful a near-future fundamentalist-Christian theocracy in the United States could be, read Margaret Atwood’s prize-winning 1986 science-fiction novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. The epilogue to Atwood’s novel takes place long after the theocracy has fallen.  In the epilogue, a group of university students are critically (and wittily) discussing the old regime. The contrast between the closed-mindedness of the old theocracy and the reasoned free expression of the new open society is stunning. ¹⁵

> Practitioners of Continuing Natural Creation do not adopt the postmodernist idea that “all myths are types of truth,” or that “all religions are okay.”
> We should not all join hands and sing “Kumbaya.”
> All religions are not equal, as we show in our Essays evaluating the major world religions.  — J.X. Mason

What Nature’s Continuing Creation Can Do in Individual Lives

> Finding Inner Peace

Christians seek inner peace through faith in Jesus and universal love, and outer peace through Brotherhood and Radical Sharing… followed by an eventual Last Judgment and Paradise for the Faithful.

Wahabi Muslims seek Inner peace through submission, and outer peace through an authoritarian world caliphate… followed by an eventual last judgment and paradise for the faithful and righteous.

Followers of Continuing Creation plan to attain inner peace, here and now on Earth, by Creative Contribution to the Growing, Organizing, Direction of Nature, and outer peace by helping create three things:

1. A restored, healthy biosphere on Earth – (a) principally by lowering birth rates such that the human population drops by 50% over 100 years, (b) by creating new clean-energy technologies, and by adopting sustainable lifestyles and patterns of consumption.
2. Advancement in science, technology, and culture such that everyone on Earth’s reduced population enjoys a high standard of living (comparable to Scandinavia today), including excellent and universal healthcare, nutrition, education, and life opportunities.  At the same time, the economy should become inherently sustainable and centered on the Earth.
3. The universal rule of law, the preservation of individual rights and freedoms, and equitable participatory government, free from war, crime, and corruption.

People on the Path of Continuing Creation have no fantasies of life after death.  However, we know that #2 and #3 above are not only attainable here on Earth, they are highly probable here on Earth…. If today’s exploding human infestation and pollution of the planet can be reversed.

> Developing Secular-Spirituality Based on Nature’s Continuing Creation

• Secular-Spirituality happens when we align our minds and emotions with Nature’s Continuing Creation.
• Secular-Spirituality happens when we have a transcendent awareness of The Whole.
• Secular-Spirituality happens when we feel deeply connected to all of Creation.

> Experiencing “Primal” Spirituality 

The secular-spiritual experience does not depend on practicing any religion or any particular spiritual path.  Primal Reverence or Primal Spirituality (whether religious or natural),  happens to virtually all humans.  It happens when we look at a beautiful sunrise, contemplate a flowing stream of water, listen to a symphony, or watch a happy baby playing with its mother’s fingers. When we see these things, we feel a surge of well-being, appreciation, and connectedness to all of Life… to Nature’s Continuing Creation. This “Primal Spirituality “is built into our minds by the process of mammalian evolution. (For more, see the last Essay in our book, “Primal Reverence,“ written by the Reverend Kendyl R. Gibbons.) 

“It is very difficult to explain this cosmic, religious feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims, as well as the sublimity and marvelous order that reveal themselves in both Nature and the world of thought.  He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.” — Albert Einstein ¹⁶

Primal, Nature-based spirituality is expanded and strengthened by scientific understanding. For example, we may view a magnificent tree in the forest. We stop to watch the light twinkle through its leaves and feel the wind move its branches. If we can go further and think about the water and nutrients rising up from the tree roots through the inner bark; or if we think about the miracle of photosynthesis in the leaves, storing the sun’s energy in the substance of the tree and exhaling oxygen for all animals to breath, then our experience and understanding are enriched through understanding.

The Whole is transcendent because the Whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When people have a Spiritual Experience, they are directly apprehending the Whole. They are transcending analysis (identification of parts; finding cause and effect) and experiencing synthesis. (In our Essay, Forerunners to Our Path & Practice, we discuss Transcendentalism, an American philosophical and spiritual movement of the mid-1800s, led in part by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.)

Ancient people had primal spiritual experiences. However, they lacked sufficient scientific understanding to comprehend and describe them. So, they created myths.  For many people today, having a supportive community around them helps to facilitate spiritual practice.  The danger in that is the tendency for religious leaders to demand conformity to beliefs that are not grounded in history, science, or reason.

However, for the vast majority of people, it is wrong to retreat into a life devoted to transcendence. The Path of Nature’s Continuing Creation says it is wrong to dwell in a transcendent state, as do the monks (Buddhist and Catholic), nuns, dervishes, and ascetics of many religions. The correct path is to practice secular-spiritual transcendence (and meditation) as a periodic recharging of the spirit, gathering strength for a more productive life in the active world of the Growing, Organizing, Direction of the Cosmos. For examples of integration between the practical and the transcendent, see Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974. — J.X. Mason

Living a Fulfilled and Happy Life 

Can God work in our individual lives? No. God-the-super-person does not exist, cannot receive prayers, grant favors, or establish plans for individual lives. However, Nature’s Continuing Creation: The Growing, Organizing, Direction of the Cosmos, can work in our individual lives… if we each align ourselves with it and then attend to our alignment. 

Humans who consciously align their lives with Nature’s Ongoing Creation can lead happy, constructive, and fulfilling lives.  We devote an Essay to this topic, called Leading a Fulfilled & Happy Life. It covers topics including “Right Livelihood,” “Mindfulness,” “Meditation,” “Acceptance & Commitment theory (ACT),” and it includes Continuing Creation’s “Seven Steps of Daily Growth.”

While our creative work cultivates our individual lives, at the same time, it can help increase knowledge, cure disease, eliminate world hunger, invent new technologies, discover eco-friendly energy sources, and eliminate war.

How do we align ourselves with Nature’s Continuing Creation?  How do we move into the central flow of Nature’s Continuing Creation?  Through one or more of three paths:  1) Learning and Critical Thinking, 2) Direct Apprehension, and 3) Constructive Action.

1. The First Path is through the path of Reasoned Study and Critical Thinking.

Travelers following the Path of Nature’s Continuing Creation pursue lifelong learning. We attend schools, we read substantive books, and we discuss issues with others.  We use the internet and Wikipedia. We watch documentary films and subscribe to serious newspapers and periodicals. We peruse essays on science, math, evolution, complexity, and world religions, large and small.  We are always open to new information and other perspectives, and we subject everything to thorough examination.

2. The Second Path is through Direct Apprehension – mindfulness, awareness, contemplation, & meditation.

The colors of the rainbow may be described by their different wavelengths, but the “yellowness” of yellow cannot be explained to someone who has never seen the color yellow.  The direct apprehension of yellowness is another instance of primal reverence.

“Perhaps for you, it is the stars at night, somewhere beyond the reach of our puny, interfering city lights, the whole sky filled with uncountable rays originating from trillions of light-years away… Or perhaps your taste runs to the deep forest, or the towering redwoods… or the suspense and drama of a thunderstorm… or even the first unfolding green of the garden, coming back to life after winter’s severity… Let me promise you: …None of that has anything to do with Jesus. Or Buddha… The primal experience of reverence in and for the natural world precedes theology of any variety. It is an organic human experience that requires no supernatural explanations…The visceral response of reverence is as real and as functional to the kind of creatures we are as our hunger, our fear, our sexual impulses, our protection of the young.”
             — The Reverend Dr.  Kendyl Gibbons, “Primal Reverence,” UU Worlds, Summer 2015.  Pp 22-30.

What About “Prayer” in the Practice of Continuing Creation?

The Practice of Nature’s Continuing Creation holds that “prayer” is actually a reflection and affirmation. Prayer can calm a person and reduce anxiety because reflection and affirmation have that power. However, instead of the word “pray,” a better description of what most Practitioners of Continuing Creation do is “reflect, envision, and affirm.”

Still, as long as we understand that “God” is not listening to our individual words, it is okay to experience or “communicate with” Nature’s Organizing Direction without feeling silly because Nature’s Continuing Creation is within us, and we are within Nature’s Continuing Creation. Humans evolved to hold conversations, and verbalizing our thoughts is a way to make them concrete in our own minds.  

Followers of Continuing Creation are not Supplicants. We are Participants. Rather than asking God to do things for a loved one, we envision good things for them. The visualization of a good event should help us take action or behave in a way that facilitates the good thing coming to pass.

In the Western world, God can be like an all-powerful parent, at times angry and at times loving.  Continuing Creation, on the other hand, is like a river.  It buoys us up, it floats us, and its current moves us forward if we are positioned correctly within it.  We must learn to avoid its rapids, but navigate them when necessary.  We must navigate to stay in the main channel, avoiding the rocks and sandbars that lie ahead.  And we accept that there may be storms and floods.

3. The Third Path is through Action – through productive and positive living.

Human beings are products of Nature’s Continuing Creation.  Human beings also have a major, historically unprecedented role in the furtherance of Continuing Creation. Therefore, the Growing, Organizing, Direction of the Cosmos is within us… And in the world around us.

The Order of Freemasons is a spiritual practice built around the craft of building structures.  Its symbols are the compass and square. The building of Stonehenge and the cathedrals of Europe were not done by slave labor; they were labors of love. The ethic of building is inherently anti-war, anti-crime, and anti-destruction.  (For more discussion of Freemasonry, see our Essay, Forerunners to Our Path & Practice.) Note: Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation has no organizational relationship with Freemasonry. Author J.X. Mason is not a Freemason (although his father was.) 

Dealing with Suffering & Evil on the Path of Continuing Creation

A major reason why religion evolved was to help people deal with suffering and evil.  Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation devotes an Essay to this subject called “Suffering and Evil – Causes and Responses.”

In that Essay, we conclude that a great deal of suffering results from the frequent competition between species and individuals in our ecosystems. Humans want to use their bodies and reproduce; cholera bacteria want to consume our bodies and reproduce.

Suffering also results from entropy – the general tendency for every system to eventually wear out.  We humans experience it in many ways, including arthritis in our joints.  Entropy is a very important concept, and we discuss it in several Essays in this Book.

Physical pain is the body’s alarm system, signaling that something is wrong.  Some animals, humans in particular, experience psychic pain because we are capable of remembering and planning.  We often spend a psychologically painful time regretting the past and worrying about the future.

Evil is not the same as suffering. Suffering can occur via impersonal forces, such as Earthquakes and hurricanes; whereas Evil requires an Evil-perceiver and almost always an “Evil-doer.”  Moreover, the “evildoer” is usually required to have evil intent.  In our Essays, we explore the various sources and types of evil and how best to counteract it.

Most of the world’s religions teach that we should deal with suffering by changing our attitude. To accomplish this, people are to “trust in God,” “practice acceptance,” “stop mental attachment,” and (often) to “wait for heaven.” None of these religions advocates practical action to solve suffering, because they all evolved before the scientific and industrial revolutions.

The Practice of Continuing Natural Creation, however, is a modern secular-spiritual practice and places great emphasis on preventing and curing suffering.  How? Through modern medicine, sanitation, nutrition, sturdy and warm shelter, safety, and security from attack.    

Dealing with Death

Another major reason for the evolution of religion is to help people deal with the deaths of loved ones and with the inevitability of their own death.  Death is often seen as “the final suffering.” Our Essay on this subject is Dealing with Death on Our Nature-based Path of Creating. 

Heaven is a fairy-tale land where there is no entropy and not even any change. The myth of Heaven is a mental fiction that religious people use to accommodate the fact of suffering during life and the fact of ultimate death. The myth of Hell is a threat used by the Old Middle Eastern Religions to motivate good behavior.

> Nature’s Path of Continuing Creation has bad news and good news:
> The bad news is: There is no evidence of life after death and no evidence of heaven or reincarnation.
> The good news is: There is no evidence of hell. 

In contrast to the Old Religions, the Path of Continuing Creation provides a number of real reasons to help humans deal with death. Here are some of them:

> Death is Creative Evolution’s way of clearing a path for progress, of taking out the old to make way for the new, for change achieved through biological and cultural evolution.

> If all our ancestors had not died, we would not be born; or if we were born, “we” would be some type of ape or small mammal because no mutation, and therefore no evolution, would have taken place to transform our ancestors, generation by generation, into human beings.

> Death makes room for new life and for new mutations within that life. Some of those mutations will be favored by Continuing Creation, just as mammals were favored over the dinosaurs; just as our human race was favored over our cousins, the Neanderthals.

> Since death is real, we must make our lives here on Earth as good, creative, and as full as we can.

> There is no evidence that Continuing Creation is placing all its bets on the human race. If all the mammals were to go extinct due to a giant meteor crashing into Earth, Earth’s insects could rise and evolve an intelligence equal to or surpassing or own.  And if all life on Earth were destroyed, the processes of Continuing Creation may have spurred other life forms on planets in other solar systems.

> At present, everyone ages and dies. In the future, however, human life is likely to be extended – possibly indefinitely. Cloning is a possible way to achieve this, as is the transfer of a person’s experience into a computer and then into an advanced robot. Perhaps such an embodiment could “live” in a favorable cyber-world that would be a kind of “Heaven.”

> Or we humans could “give birth” to technological “creatures” – machines that are intelligent, can replicate, and can evolve on their own (what some writers call the Second Singularity). Perhaps such machine-creatures would turn against us humans, as some science fiction writers have imagined. Although this would be disastrous for humankind, it would be consistent with the Processes of Nature’s Continuing Creation.

> In any case, the Direction of Continuing Creation toward increasing intelligence and sophistication seems clear, at least in our experience so far here on Earth.

Practicing and Celebrating the Way of Nature’s Continuing Creation

We hope that Practitioners of Continuing Creation will naturally congregate.  If so, we may want to establish a calendar of annual events and ceremonies marking important life stages, special symbols, and places.  For more, see our Essay, “Gatherings, Saying, Songs, & Stars.”

Ceremonies In Nature’s Flow of Continuing Creation

• Flower Communion to celebrate love, cooperation, and unity
• Maypole Ceremony to celebrate the rebirth of Spring.
• Tree-planting ceremony; Arbor Day.
• Spring equinox to celebrate flowering and rebirth — with bunnies, eggs, and chicks.
• Harvest Festivals at the Autumn Equinox celebrate the bounty of the growing season.
• Winter Solstice marks the passing of the shortest day. Celebrates conception, fertilization, sleep, and hibernation. Symbols are the lighted evergreen tree and the Yule log.
• Ceremonies celebrating building and creating. Cornerstones, ribbon-cuttings, fireworks.
• Graduation ceremonies celebrate learning.
• Annual Celebration(s) for the Inspirational People we listed earlier in this Overview.

Symbols Along the Path of Natural Continuing Creation

• The Golden Moebius Strip is the symbol for our book of Essays. It circles and enfolds; yet has only one side and one edge. It celebrates pattern & mathematics.
• The Mature Tree — the largest living thing on Earth. It conducts photosynthesis, supporting animal life on the planet.
• As a tree grows, it organizes.  And it has direction — up and outward.
• The ancient Taoist Yin-and-Yang Symbol — the dance of opposites that creates patterns.
• Water is the chemical basis and medium for all life on Earth, and it is also a symbol of purity.
• The Grand Canyon, the Everglades, the Alps, the Borneo jungle… all the beautiful creations of geologic and biological evolution.
• The whale is the largest mobile creature on Earth; it is a social animal with a complex language.
• Flowers are among the most beautiful things on Earth, and they are worthy of celebration.
• Earth’s Mineral crystals are also beautiful and worthy of celebration.
• Flowing streams of water represent the Flow of Nature’s Continuing Creation.
• Ecosystems are worthy of celebration with their interlocking creatures, soils, and habitats.
• The great Creations of cultural evolution – pyramids, cathedrals, Van Gogh’s art, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Federalist Papers…

…. All these, and more, are worthy of celebration.

________________________________               

— J.X. Mason.  ContinuingCreation.org

Footnotes:

1. Peter A. Corning, Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind, 2003, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-82547-4.  See also Peter A. Corning, Holistic Darwinism: Synergy, Cybernetics and the Bioeconomics of Evolution, 2005, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-11613-1.
2. Herbert F. Vetter, Is God Necessary? No! And Yes!, 2007, Harvard Square Library, p.105.
3. C. Rowe, “Playboy interview of Richard Dawkins,” August 20, 2012. Playboy Magazine, http://www.playboy.com/articles.
4. CERN, The Early Universe, https://home.cern/about/physics/early-universe).
5.  
6. To view timelines of the Big Bang and early Universe, see Wikipedia’s Chronology of the Universe.  ⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe.
7. Dr. Laurence C. Smith, “The Continuity Equations,” This Explains Everything, John Brockman, Editor, 2013, Edge Foundation, pp.  245-248.
8. Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, 2010, Little, Brown and Company p. 145.
9. Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, 1974, The Viking Press, p. 13.
10. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, 1986, W.W. Norton & Co. p. 14.
11. Jeanne Sahadi, “The Richest 10% hold 76% of the Wealth,” CNN Money, 8-18-16.  http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/18/pf/wealth-inequality/index.html.
12. Lao-Tzu, Tao Ted Ch’ing: A New English Version, Forward & Notes by S. Mitchell, 1988, Harper Row, p. 25.
13. Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 1961, Harper Torchbooks, p. 259.
14. Stuart Gary, “What is the Goldilocks Zone,” ABC Science, February 21, 2016, http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-02-22/goldilocks-zones-habitable-zone-astrobiology-exoplanets/6907836
15. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 2005, Penguin Group, pp 14-21.
16. Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation, 1998, Parallax Press and Broadway Books.
17. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1998, Anchor Books.
18. Albert Einstein, quoted in Newberg et al, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, 2001, Ballantine Books, pp.153-4.