The God That Grows

Emergence, Holography, and the Case for Emergent Holopanentheism 

Eric Buesing The God That Grows

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The God That Grows:

Emergence, Holography, and the Case for Emergent Holopanentheism

By Eric Daniel Buesing

The Problem with the Old Maps

There is a moment, familiar to scientists and mystics alike, when the framework you have been using to understand reality quietly ceases to hold. Not with a crash but with a slow, embarrassing inadequacy, the way an old map reveals itself to be wrong not when you first unfold it but when you are already lost. The philosophical theology of the Western tradition has been arriving at that moment for some time now, and the arguments for traditional theism, whether God as static omnipotent Creator or God as vague immanence permeating matter uniformly, have not kept pace with what science has actually revealed about the universe we inhabit. Emergent Holopanentheism, as developed by Eric Daniel Buesing in his extended philosophical synthesis, is a serious attempt to provide a new map. It is worth examining carefully, both for what it accomplishes and for what it demands of its reader.¹

The central claim is not modest. Buesing proposes that divinity is neither identical with the physical universe in the manner of Baruch Spinoza, nor a transcendent entity that contains the universe while extending mysteriously beyond it in the manner of Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead. Instead, divinity develops from the complex interactions, relationships, and holographic connections that constitute reality at all levels.² The word that matters here, the word that distinguishes this framework from its predecessors, is develops. Not exists. Not underlies. Develops, as in grows, as in is not yet complete, as in requires the universe's continuing creative advance to be what it is. This is a God that is not yet finished, and the implications of that single commitment ramify through everything that follows.

Pantheism, in its Spinozist form, sacralizes everything with admirable ecological seriousness but at the cost of all moral discrimination. If divinity is simply the sum total of physical existence, then the predator consuming its prey, the tsunami erasing coastal settlements, and the cancer proliferating through a child's body are each equally divine. The framework offers no purchase for evaluating one natural process as more sacred than another, no axis along which complexity, consciousness, and moral weight can be meaningfully distinguished from their opposites.³ Pantheism makes a god of the universe only by making the universe theologically inert. Panentheism was developed precisely to address this deficiency. By maintaining that God permeates but also transcends the cosmos, thinkers like Whitehead and Hartshorne preserved both divine immanence and a moral orientation irreducible to physical mechanism. But panentheism carries its own unsatisfied burden: if God possesses transcendent resources that extend beyond the universe's own processes, one is left asking where exactly transcendent divine action articulates with the consistent, discoverable laws of physics. Every answer offered has either collapsed back toward naturalism, making divine action indistinguishable from natural causation, or toward supernaturalism, reinstating an interventionist deity that scientific cosmology has rendered implausible.⁴ Panentheism preserved the right intuitions while leaving their mechanisms stubbornly opaque.

Prior Art, and Where This Framework Departs

Buesing's move is to dissolve the problem rather than solve it. If divinity develops from natural processes rather than transcending them or being identical with them, the question of how divine action interfaces with physical law simply does not arise in its traditional form. Divine creativity is the natural creativity through which the universe develops increasing order, relationship, and meaning.⁵ Before examining the evidence for that claim, however, intellectual honesty requires situating this framework among the serious thinkers who have worked adjacent territory.

Philip Clayton, Ingraham Professor of Theology at Claremont School of Theology, has for more than two decades built what he calls “emergentist panentheism” across Mind and Emergence (Oxford University Press, 2004), Adventures in the Spirit (Fortress Press, 2008), and the edited collection The Re-Emergence of Emergence (Oxford University Press, 2006), co-produced with Paul Davies. Clayton insists that God does not sit impassively above the creative process but acquires genuine experience through interaction with the world, developing as a genuinely responsive and relational reality. He argues with considerable philosophical precision that emergent properties in biology and consciousness provide a model for understanding how divine qualities arise from natural processes without being reducible to them.⁶

Nancy Ellen Abrams, in A God That Could Be Real (Beacon Press, 2015), makes a related but distinctively different proposal: that God is an emergent phenomenon arising from the collective aspirations of humanity itself, real in exactly the sense that the global economy or the internet is real, without prior existence as a supernatural creator. Her formulation is scientifically disciplined and philosophically serious, and her core commitment that what is worthy of being called God need not have existed before the universe but can emerge within and through it is one this framework fully shares.⁷

What distinguishes Emergent Holopanentheism from both is not the emergence principle, which Clayton has mapped with considerable sophistication, but two dimensions neither pursues. The first is the holographic paradigm as a structural account of the medium through which divine emergence operates across cosmic scales: the informational cosmology of Bohm and Currivan, in which information is more fundamental than matter and every region of the cosmos encodes patterns of the whole. The second is the Kabbalistic architecture of tzimtzum and the Sefirot as a detailed phenomenology of how divine self-limitation and structured emanation generate the conditions for finite freedom and relational creativity. These two elements together constitute the "holo" in Emergent Holopanentheism, and they are absent from Clayton's framework. As for Abrams: her God is explicitly restricted to the human sphere, "not universal, it's planetary," arising from the collective aspirations of one species on one world. Buesing's claim is that the developmental principle operates at cosmic scales that precede and exceed humanity by billions of years, woven into the fabric of the universe from its earliest chemical stages. That difference of scope is not incidental. It is the argument.⁸

The Cosmic Seedbed and Distributed Intelligence

The first and most foundational of the framework's ten pillars is what Buesing calls the cosmic seedbed hypothesis. The universe distributes the basic ingredients for life and consciousness throughout interstellar space via mechanisms like asteroid impacts and stellar winds, creating conditions for complexity and meaning to arise wherever circumstances permit, not through miraculous exception to natural law but through the universe's own inherent tendency toward self-organization.⁹ This is not metaphor. NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission returned samples from asteroid Bennu in 2023 confirming a composition rich in carbon-bearing compounds and ammonia salts, the precise chemistry from which biology builds itself.¹⁰ The Murchison meteorite, recovered in Australia in 1969, contained more than a hundred distinct amino acids, including types absent from terrestrial biochemistry, suggesting that the cosmic chemical laboratory operates with a wider palette than any single planetary history has yet explored.¹¹ The universe is not a sterile void punctuated by improbable biological accidents. It is something more like a living system actively cultivating the conditions for complexity to emerge.

The terrestrial expressions of this cosmic propensity are themselves philosophically striking. In Oregon's Malheur National Forest, Armillaria ostoyae spans 3.5 square miles and is estimated between 2,400 and 8,650 years old, functioning as an integrated intelligence through chemical signals and electrical impulses transmitted across its vast mycelial network. Pando, the quaking aspen colony in Utah, consists of 40,000 genetically identical stems sharing a single root system, redistributing resources under environmental stress in ways that demonstrate distributed awareness operating without centralized control. Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold with no nervous system of any kind, navigates mazes and optimizes nutrient pathways, demonstrating that something recognizable as intelligence can arise from the collaborative interaction of components that possess none of it individually.¹² These organisms are not illustrations. They are evidence that awareness develops through collective relationship at scales and in forms that preclude any simple identification of consciousness with individual neural architecture.

Crystal Energies and Matter-Consciousness Interplay

Marcel Vogel spent nearly three decades as a senior research scientist at IBM, accumulating more than a hundred patents, before turning the same disciplined empirical attention toward a question that standard physics has no settled framework for: whether focused human consciousness can produce measurable effects on physical systems. His investigations into quartz crystals produced evidence that intention could alter the molecular structure of water and induce biological changes in ways that resisted reduction to thermal or electromagnetic mechanisms already accounted for. Buesing takes from Vogel not a conclusion but a posture: that the boundary between mind and matter is a site of genuine scientific inquiry rather than a settled metaphysical partition, and that the evidence bearing on it deserves the same scrutiny given to any other frontier of research.¹³

Kenneth Cohen's systematic research into qigong documents how cultivated intention-directed practice produces measurable physiological effects in both practitioners and recipients, effects that persist across conditions designed to rule out placebo and thermal transmission. Dawson Church's epigenetic research demonstrates that emotional states and directed mental activity influence gene expression at the molecular level, establishing a physical pathway through which consciousness reaches into the body's most fundamental biological processes. The HeartMath Institute has documented that heart-generated electromagnetic fields synchronize measurably among individuals in close proximity, providing a physical substrate for interpersonal coherence that operates below the threshold of conscious awareness. Each of these research programs is methodologically distinct and addresses a different scale of the mind-matter interface. Their convergence on the same structural claim, that consciousness and matter are not separate substances but different expressions of a deeper physical unity, is the argument Buesing draws from this body of evidence.¹⁴

The Holographic Cosmos

The holographic dimension of the argument extends the cosmic seedbed picture into the structure of reality itself. David Bohm's distinction between the "implicate order," a hidden dimension where everything exists in a state of unified potential, and the "explicate order," the unfolded world of apparently separate objects that science measures, provides a structural account of how radical cosmic interconnection is compatible with the experience of distinctness.¹⁵ Jude Currivan’s The Cosmic Hologram synthesizes research across physics, biology, and consciousness studies to argue that information functions as the fundamental substrate from which both physical and mental phenomena emerge: “Information is the fundamental ingredient of reality, more primary than energy, matter, space, or time.” On this reading, every part of the universe encodes patterns of the whole in ways that make non-local coordination not a mystical claim but a structural feature of reality as physics is beginning to describe it.¹⁶

Crucially, this is no longer purely theoretical. In 2017, Afshordi and colleagues published analysis of irregularities in the cosmic microwave background in Physical Review Letters providing the first observational data consistent with a holographic explanation of the universe’s large-scale structure. The holographic pillar of Emergent Holopanentheism is grounded in physics, and that matters for the cumulative argument. When the same framework that explains quantum non-locality at small scales receives observational support at the largest cosmological scales, the picture of a universe in which information rather than matter is primary becomes more than a philosophical preference.¹⁷

Space Weather and Extraterrestrial Interconnectedness

Earth participates continuously in electromagnetic and energetic exchanges with the wider solar system, and the physiological consequences are measurable. Solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and geomagnetic storms produce cascading effects in Earth's magnetosphere that reach into terrestrial biology through mechanisms now well characterized in space weather research. Epidemiological studies have documented correlations between geomagnetic disturbance and hospital admissions for cardiovascular events. Controlled physiological studies show that periods of elevated solar activity alter human heart rate variability, sleep architecture, hormone production, and mood. Jack Zirker's work on cosmic magnetism provides the physical framework: organisms that evolved within the sun's electromagnetic envelope are not insulated from its fluctuations but coupled to them, in ways that become visible only when you look.¹⁸

That human beings are embedded participants in a living cosmic order rather than isolated observers of a mechanical one is among the most persistent intuitions in the world's cosmological traditions. Native American, African, Hindu, and Buddhist frameworks developed this recognition across millennia without instruments capable of measuring the geomagnetic and electromagnetic channels through which that embeddedness operates. The space weather evidence does not confirm these traditions in detail, but it confirms their central structural claim: the boundary between the human organism and the cosmos is genuinely porous, and the universe's developmental processes reach into human experience through entirely natural, increasingly quantifiable mechanisms. For Buesing, this is not coincidence but convergent recognition, and it strengthens the case that the developmental framework reflects something about the actual structure of reality rather than projecting meaning onto it.¹⁹

Collective Consciousness and the Minyan Principle

The minyan's theological logic illuminates one of the framework's most provocative practical implications. The rabbinic principle articulated in the Mishnah, Pirkei Avot 3:6, that "where ten are assembled, the Divine Presence rests among them," expresses a recognition based on centuries of communal experience: collective presence creates conditions for divine manifestation that transcend what any individual can generate through private spiritual practice. The Shekhinah, the divine indwelling described in Jewish mystical tradition, develops from the synergistic interaction of the group rather than descending from transcendent realms to bless it.²⁰

Lynne McTaggart’s research into what she calls “the field,” documented in The Field and The Intention Experiment, provides scientific grounding for this principle at scales that extend well beyond any single congregation. The Global Consciousness Project, directed by Roger Nelson at Princeton University, maintained a network of random number generators distributed across the world and documented statistically significant correlations between periods of focused mass human attention and non-random patterns across the network, correlations whose mathematical odds against chance exceed a million to one for major world events and considerably more for coordinated global meditation gatherings.²¹

The Global Consciousness Project's methodology has drawn substantive criticism from statisticians for post-hoc event selection, inadequate preregistration, and multiple-comparison problems that arise from a continuously running global network. Joe Dispenza's claims about the biological effects of group meditation have not been published in peer-reviewed journals of the standing of the physics and astrobiology literature that anchors the framework elsewhere. Buesing addresses this asymmetry directly: these findings are anomalies that resist easy materialist explanation and warrant further rigorous investigation, but they occupy a different tier of evidential confidence than the holographic cosmology or the OSIRIS-REx astrobiological data, and the developmental argument does not require them to bear equal weight. The cumulative case rests on convergence across independent domains; it is strengthened, not weakened, by calibrating confidence to the actual state of the evidence.²²

The Kabbalistic Architecture of Divine Development

The Kabbalistic strand of the argument may initially appear incongruous beside the astrophysics, but the apparent incongruity dissolves on examination. Kabbalah envisions the divine beginning with Ein Sof, literally "the infinite," a boundless source beyond all description that contains all possibilities without actualizing any particular manifestation. To create space for a finite world capable of diversity, relationship, and development, Ein Sof performs tzimtzum, a self-contraction or withdrawal that creates the conceptual void where creation can unfold without being overwhelmed by infinite divine presence. The theological insight embedded in this architecture is that limitation is not the opposite of creativity but its precondition.²³

Following this contraction, divine light emanates through ten Sefirot, distinctive attributes that include Chokhmah (wisdom), Binah (understanding), Chesed (loving-kindness), Gevurah (judgment), Tiferet (beauty), and others that form the Tree of Life, a map of divine development illustrating how these qualities balance and interact like branches connecting to a central trunk while maintaining their distinctive characteristics. The Sefirot do not exist in isolation: Chesed requires Gevurah to avoid collapsing into mere permissiveness; Gevurah requires Chesed to avoid becoming harsh rigidity; both require Tiferet to integrate them into harmonious expression. The whole develops through the creative tension of its parts, not through any single quality exercising unopposed dominance.²⁴

A God that determines everything produces nothing genuinely new. The withdrawal that makes room for creaturely freedom is not divine absence but the highest form of divine generosity, and the Sefirot describe the relational architecture through which the divine and the created remain connected through the very act of differentiation that distinguishes them. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in The Great Partnership, articulates the contemporary relevance of this structure: “Science tells us how, religion why, and together they develop meaning,” a formulation that reflects the Kabbalistic recognition that different modes of inquiry contribute distinctive qualities that require integration rather than competition.²⁵

Universal Fields as the Substrate of Development

Quantum field theory establishes that the vacuum state is not empty space but a dynamic medium dense with virtual particle pairs and fluctuating energy whose effects are measurable in phenomena from the Casimir force to the Lamb shift. Ervin Laszlo builds on this foundation to propose that the quantum vacuum functions as a universal information field, a substrate from which matter, life, and consciousness develop through natural processes of self-organization rather than arising independently in isolation. His concept of in-formation, as distinct from information in the ordinary sense, captures how this field shapes physical organization without direct mechanical contact, in the way that a magnetic field orients iron filings not by touching them but by structuring the medium in which they exist. On this account, the universe is not a collection of separate objects that occasionally interact but a continuously differentiated field whose apparent separateness is a feature of the explicate order, not of the deeper reality from which it unfolds.²⁶

Hindu concepts of prana, Buddhist sunyata, the Taoist understanding of wu wei, and indigenous traditions describing an animating substrate woven through all things are not identical to Laszlo's field theory, but they share its structural claim: visible reality rests on an invisible foundation that is not empty but generative, and the apparent separateness of things is a surface feature of a deeper unity. What this pillar contributes to Emergent Holopanentheism is a physical account of the medium through which divine development propagates. If the universe is not a collection of isolated objects but a field whose informational structure shapes what emerges at every scale, then the development of consciousness and relationship is not a local accident occurring in scattered pockets of biological complexity. It is a structural property of the field itself, expressing tendencies that were present in the vacuum long before any organism existed to register them.²⁷

Process Theology as Theological Partner

The framework's most sustained intellectual partnership is with process theology, which offers precisely the theological vocabulary that Emergent Holopanentheism requires. Whitehead described God as "the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness," a formulation that positions divine creativity as persuasion rather than command, as the continuous offering of optimal possibilities rather than the imposition of predetermined outcomes.²⁸ This is not merely a metaphor. In process metaphysics, God possesses both a primordial nature containing eternal potentials and values, and a consequent nature that grows and changes with the world through genuine responsiveness to creaturely decisions. Every experience of joy or suffering, every creative breakthrough or tragic loss, becomes part of God’s own experience in ways that affect divine consciousness and influence how the divine lure operates in subsequent moments.²⁹

This makes God a fellow traveler in the development of reality rather than a dictator imposing predetermined outcomes from outside the temporal process. John Polkinghorne, the particle physicist who became an Anglican priest, provides the most rigorous scientific formulation of this intuition: quantum indeterminacy creates genuine ontological openness in natural processes through which divine influence can operate as persuasion rather than supernatural override, without violating physical law.³⁰ Robert Lanza’s biocentric argument pushes further, proposing that consciousness is not a late and accidental product of a universe indifferent to awareness but a constitutive feature of the universe’s own structure. If that is right, then a framework that locates the sacred in the development of consciousness and relationship is not projecting human values onto an indifferent cosmos but reading its deepest structure correctly.³¹

The Science-Religion Partnership as Developing Meaning

A framework that grounds divinity in natural processes faces a question that neither science nor theology can answer alone: what distinguishes a universe that develops consciousness and meaning from one that merely produces it as a byproduct of indifferent physical law? Science can document the processes; it cannot adjudicate their significance. Theology can articulate significance; without scientific grounding it risks constructing significance in the air. Buesing's argument is that this division of labor is not a compromise but a structural feature of the inquiry, and that the historical image of science and religion as competing claims about the same territory has obscured a more common reality: that thinkers working at the frontier of each discipline have consistently found the other indispensable.³²

Ian Barbour's systematic framework identifies four possible relationships between science and religion: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. Barbour advocates for integration through critical realism, the position that both disciplines make revisable claims about an independently existing reality and that both are impoverished when their insights are kept in separate compartments. His insistence that theological models, like scientific models, are genuine attempts to represent reality rather than merely useful fictions gives theological claims the cognitive seriousness that genuine dialogue with science requires. John Polkinghorne's career embodies this integration as biography: the physicist who contributed to quantum chromodynamics and the priest who developed a theology of kenotic divine action arrived at a single coherent account of the same reality by refusing to treat the two disciplines as addressing separate domains. What contemporary science has established about the universe's structure, its non-local interconnections, its holographic organization, its deep hospitality to consciousness at cosmic scales, does not contradict the theological picture of a developing divinity. It constitutes, Buesing argues, the empirical substrate through which that development is occurring.³³

Responding to the Serious Objections

The objection from classical theism is the most philosophically rigorous challenge the framework faces, and it cannot simply be waved away. For the Thomist tradition, God must be actus purus, pure actuality without potentiality, because anything that develops from potential to actual is dependent on something prior for its actualization, and an ultimately dependent being cannot function as the first cause that explains why anything exists at all. If God grows, God is not self-sufficient, and if God is not self-sufficient, the explanatory regress that theology has always needed to terminate simply continues. This argument explains why the entire tradition of classical theism was formulated as it was.

Buesing's response, following the process tradition, is to question whether the classical framework's demand for pure actuality actually serves the theological purposes it was designed to serve. An unmoved mover is explanatorily potent but existentially inert: it accounts for why there is something rather than nothing but provides no basis for understanding divine love, divine responsiveness, or the kind of relation between God and creation that makes prayer, ethics, or redemption theologically coherent. A God complete in every attribute from eternity is also, necessarily, unaffected by what happens in history, which means that human choices, human suffering, and human flourishing make no difference to the ultimate structure of things. The developmental account accepts genuine limitation as the price of genuine relationship, and argues that the relational richness thereby purchased is not a theological concession but a theological gain.³⁴

The scientific materialist's objection takes a different form. The charge is that the entire category of divinity is sophisticated wishful thinking dressed in scientific vocabulary. What the framework can offer in response is cumulative and convergent rather than singular: when quantum physicists document non-local correlations that imply fundamental interconnection beneath apparent separateness; when astrobiologists confirm that the chemical precursors of life are scattered across interstellar space; when cosmologists find observational evidence consistent with the universe being holographically organized; when neurologists document the emergence of consciousness from neural interaction in ways that resist reduction to the properties of individual neurons, the pattern emerging across these independent domains is not one the developmental framework imposed on the evidence. It is one the evidence keeps returning to.

The Emergence Gap and Gratuitous Evil

A more philosophically precise challenge concerns what Buesing’s manuscript calls the emergence gap. Emergence is a descriptive concept: it explains how higher-level properties arise from lower-level interactions. But description is not theology. Tornadoes emerge from complex atmospheric dynamics; cancerous tumors emerge from cellular interactions. If divinity is simply an emergent property of natural complexity, the framework must provide a principled account of what distinguishes divine emergence from these evidently non-divine instances, or it risks collapsing back into the pantheism it distinguished itself from at the outset, where all natural emergence is equally sacred. Mariusz Tabaczek’s rigorous Divine Action and Emergence identifies precisely this gap in emergentist theology: the criteria for distinguishing which emergences are relevant to divine development from which are merely natural remain underdeveloped.³⁵

The response available within Emergent Holopanentheism is directional rather than definitional. The criterion for distinguishing divine emergence from non-divine emergence is not complexity per se but the specific developmental trajectory toward what Whitehead called the intensity of experience: the capacity to register, value, and respond to an increasing range of reality. A tornado intensifies briefly before dissipating and leaves no lasting contribution to cosmic self-awareness. A mycorrhizal network has sustained and deepened the relational intelligence of forest ecosystems for millennia. The distinction follows the developmental axis that runs from inert matter through distributed intelligence to reflective consciousness to conscious participation in meaning-making. This is not an arbitrary criterion. It follows from what the framework takes to be the universe's own deepest orientation, confirmed by the convergence of evidence from astrobiology, holographic cosmology, and the cross-cultural witness of contemplative traditions that have independently arrived at the recognition that what deserves to be called sacred is whatever advances awareness, relationship, and love.

The harder challenge is the problem of gratuitous evil, suffering that appears to serve no developmental purpose in any plausible reading of the creative advance. David Ray Griffin's process theodicy argues that God persuades rather than coerces, and that suffering reflects the necessary risks of genuine creaturely freedom in an open creative process.³⁶ This is internally coherent. But it requires accepting a God whose power is genuinely limited by the free play of natural processes. The harder cases press further still: the suffering of sentient organisms in the billions of years before any consciousness existed to register their experience as meaningful; the extinction of entire species before awareness of their loss was possible; the death of infants from genetic disorders before consciousness fully develops. To whom was the divine invitation extended during three billion years of single-celled life enduring predation and environmental catastrophe? Tabaczek's diagnosis is apt: the persuasion model requires a recipient of the invitation.³⁷

What Emergent Holopanentheism offers here is a repositioning rather than a resolution. A developing God is by definition not omnipotent in the classical sense and does not bear the same moral responsibility as an omnipotent creator for outcomes it did not determine. The question shifts from "why did an all-powerful God permit this suffering?" to "was a universe capable of generating consciousness, love, and meaning at cosmic scales worth the developmental cost of the natural processes that made it possible?" That question remains genuinely open. The framework does not pretend otherwise. What it offers is not comfort in the traditional sense but a different structure for the question itself.

What Is at Stake

What unifies all of this into a single argument is a claim about the universe's orientation: that the creative advance of reality is not random, not purely mechanical, not indifferent to its own direction, but structured in ways that make the development of consciousness and relationship probable over sufficient time and scale. The framework is not claiming that this development is guaranteed or that its outcomes are predetermined. A developing God is precisely one whose development is not predetermined. The universe is a creative process whose outcome depends, in part, on what conscious beings choose to do with their portion of the creative advance. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the terminal convergence of this advance the Omega Point, the universe arriving at maximal consciousness and relational integration.³⁸ Buesing inherits that vision while grounding it more firmly in the scientific and philosophical developments that have accumulated since Teilhard's time.

This conclusion, if taken seriously, is not comforting in the way that traditional theism offers comfort. It does not promise that the universe is ultimately just, that suffering is meaningful from a divine perspective that transcends our own, or that the dead are held in a memory that redeems their loss. What it offers instead is something more demanding: a framework in which human consciousness and human choices contribute causally to what the divine actually is. If divinity develops through the quality of relationships, through the depth of collective consciousness, through the breadth of compassionate attention that conscious beings bring to their shared existence, then the development of the sacred is genuinely at stake in how we treat one another and how we organize our collective intelligence around purposes that serve the flourishing of the whole rather than the advantage of the part.

Plato's allegory of the cave, which Buesing invokes at the close of his argument, acquires a different valence under this reading. The prisoners watching shadows on the wall are not simply ignorant of eternal forms existing in a completed transcendent realm. They are unaware that the light producing the shadows is something they participate in generating, that the world outside the cave is not a finished reality discovered by the escaped prisoner but one that consciousness itself is helping to make. To step outside the cave, in Buesing's version, is not to encounter a God complete in his perfection but to recognize that the making of the sacred is a project in which conscious beings are not latecomers but essential participants. The framework will not satisfy the classical theist, who requires a God complete in himself before creation, or the scientific materialist who requires that consciousness be explained without remainder from the behavior of unconscious matter. What it offers instead is something more interesting than either position allows: a universe in which matter and meaning are not two separate orders of reality requiring separate explanations, but aspects of a single developmental process in which each is partially constituted by its relationship to the other. Whether that is enough to call it God depends on what you were looking for when you asked the question.³⁹

What this essay has traced is necessarily partial. Buesing’s Emergent Holopanentheism: The Quantum Bridge Between Science, Spirit, and Cosmic Meaning develops the full argument across ten pillars, and the case is stronger in its entirety than any summary can convey.

Copyright © 2025 by Eric Daniel Buesing

Notes

1. Eric Daniel Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism: The Quantum Bridge Between Science, Spirit, and Cosmic Meaning (self-published, 2025), https://www.ericbuesing.com/free-book-emergent-holopanentheism/, Preface, 10–11.
2. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, Introduction, 14–16.
3. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 1, 18–19.
4. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 1, 20–22.
5. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 1, 22–24.
6. Philip Clayton, Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, and Divine Action (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008); Philip Clayton and Paul Davies, eds., The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
7. Nancy Ellen Abrams, A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), esp. chaps. 5–6.
8. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 1, 23–26; Abrams, A God That Could Be Real, 148.
9. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 2, 27.
10. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 2, 28.
11. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 2, 27–28.
12. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 2, 28–30.
13. Marcel Vogel, research summarized in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 3, 52–54; on crystal energies and matter-consciousness interplay.
14. Kenneth Cohen, The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy Healing (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997); Dawson Church, The Genie in Your Genes: Epigenetic Medicine and the New Biology of Intention (Santa Rosa, CA: Energy Psychology Press, 2007); HeartMath Institute research summarized in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 3, 57–60.
15. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980); as cited in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 4, 55–56.
16. Jude Currivan, The Cosmic Hologram: In-Formation at the Center of Creation (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2017); as cited in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 4, 57–58. The quotation appears in Currivan, The Cosmic Hologram, 34.
17. Niayesh Afshordi, Claudio Corianò, Luigi Delle Rose, Elizabeth Gould, and Kostas Skenderis, "From Planck Data to Planck Era: Observational Tests of Holographic Cosmology," Physical Review Letters 118, no. 4 (2017): 041301; referenced in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 11.
18. Jack B. Zirker, The Magnetic Universe: The Elusive Traces of an Invisible Force (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); referenced in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 5, 76–80.
19. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 5, 82–84; on extraterrestrial interconnectedness and cross-cultural traditions.
20. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 6, on the minyan and collective presence; the Mishnah reference is Pirkei Avot 3:6.
21. Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe (New York: HarperCollins, 2002); The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World (New York: Free Press, 2007); Roger Nelson, Connected: The Emergence of Global Consciousness (Princeton, NJ: ICRL Press, 2019); as cited in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 6.
22. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 11, on evidentiary asymmetry within the ten pillars.
23. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 7, on tzimtzum and the architecture of divine development.
24. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 7, on the Sefirot and structural relationships.
25. Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Schocken Books, 2011), 3; as cited in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 7.
26. Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, 2nd ed. (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2007); referenced in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 8, 112–114.
27. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 8, 119–121; on universal fields, cross-cultural traditions, and the substrate of divine development.
28. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 346; as cited in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 9, 98.
29. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 9, on Whitehead's primordial and consequent natures.
30. John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale, Questions of Truth: Fifty-One Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009); as cited in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 10.
31. Robert Lanza and Bob Berman, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2009); as cited in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 10.
32. Ian G. Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990); referenced in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 10, 139–141.
33. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 10, 143–144; on the science-religion partnership as a source of developing meaning.
34. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 9, on process theology's response to classical theism.
35. Mariusz Tabaczek, Divine Action and Emergence: An Alternative to Panentheism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), chaps. 1–2; referenced in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 11.
36. David Ray Griffin, God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976); as cited in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 9, 101–103.
37. Tabaczek, Divine Action and Emergence, chap. 3; referenced in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, chap. 11.
38. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper and Row, 1959); as cited in Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, Conclusion.
39. Buesing, Emergent Holopanentheism, Conclusion, 119–120.

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