Among those who study consciousness and evolutionary biology, there’s a question so basic and so unsolvable that it’s simply called “the hard problem.”¹ The hard problem is, in basic terms, how did the mind/soul/consciousness come to exist? When did creation as we know it start thinking about itself and how did that happen? 

Part of what makes this problem messy is the idea of radical emergence. Radical emergence is when something appears in a natural phenomenon that could not be created out of the elements that currently exist. This would be like if you put apples, cinnamon, and sugar in a pie crust, baked it, and a beef wellington came out. In the natural world, radical emergence is considered impossible. 

I would argue that radical emergence is maybe impossible in fields other than biology. Anytime I am talking to a leader about what is going on in their community, I am suspicious of things that seem to come “out of nowhere.” Did this volunteer really quit “out of nowhere?” Was this contentious meeting with Staff Parish really unforeseeable? Or more positively, did that child really randomly feel a call to ministry one day, or have you been preparing their heart for the Spirit’s prompting for a long time? 

Biologists argue that radical emergence is an illusion caused by scientists not taking the embryonic phases of a phenomenon seriously. If we think of consciousness as only possessed by those who can practice philosophy, then it does seem to come out of nowhere in the natural world. But because consciousness itself is too subjective to test, the working definition used by scientists of consciousness is usually based on cognition, the ability to demonstrably plan to meet a goal, instead of just responding to stimuli in the environment, and that complicates the question. 

Octopuses rip the tentacles off of man o’ war and wield them as weapons, elephants play pranks, crows hold funerals, and you would struggle to convince any dog owner that their pet is simply mechanistically responding to external stimuli.² As scientists traced this capacity to solve problems closer to the base of the evolutionary tree, they kept learning. It turns out you can teach a plant not to be afraid of being moved. And that trees on opposites of a forest can send danger signals to one another using underground mycelium networks. ³

So what seemed, at first, to be radical emergence, was actually a gradual evolution of more and more complicated cognition among living things. Once scientists were willing to look a little deeper, they could see where what they thought came “out of nowhere” was building for millennia. 

I wonder what we can learn from their experience. Where can we look for the signs of what is emerging in our communities, and be prepared for it? 

What anxiety can we address early to keep it from escalating? What problem can we take seriously now and address before it becomes a crisis? Additionally, what spark of connection and joy can we add kindling to? What relationships, spaces, and activities seem to have the Spirit’s presence on them, and how can you support them? 

Think about the last thing that happened in your context “out of nowhere,” for the better or worse. Once you’ve identified it, think through all the little hints that you may not have had the space to notice, or which you thought probably weren’t much of anything. This might have been a sharply-worded email that you didn’t respond to, or a comment you overheard after you asked a group to move classrooms. It might have been the cautious question of a young person, or a new group of people sitting in the pews. What were the hints that something was emerging? 

None of this is meant to shame us for what we didn’t know, but to point towards ways that we can reframe all the little things we notice as not just noise, but potentially building blocks towards some greater phenomenon that we are wise to notice in its infancy. Anyone who has kept a journal or diary and has looked back over it has probably had the experience of being awed at how things we might have called a surprise were actually hinted at for a long time now that we knew how the story turned out. 

When we pay attention, we can spot the non-radical emergence of problems and stress points, but also new relationships, ideas, and movements of God in a way that reminds us of the beauty of the Spirit’s work around us. 

Let us know what God is beginning to work in your community, and if you want someone to help you reflect on whatever is emerging, give us a call and we’d love to connect with you.

1. Post inspired by this article. ↩︎
2. More on Octopus intelligence. ↩︎
3. The plant thing blew my mind but its real. Read this article. ↩︎