Joseph BRACKEN, S.J. Reciprocal Causality in an Event Filled World.  2022. Landham Maryland: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. 153 pages, $95. hardback, $45. ebook. ISBN 978-1-9787-0978-2. Reviewed by Winifred WHELAN, OSF.

Elizabeth Johnson explains that if you want to know something about God, “Ask the Beasts.”
Bracken answers, “Look at the cosmos, look at the human body and mind, look at the way the world works.” Human beings have to face facts: the world is no longer made up of “substances.” Quantum studies show that everything is alive, moving, changing, and temporary. Everything is connected, and if interconnected, reciprocal to everything else.  Bracken begins by explaining what is meant by reciprocal causality.

Every physical or spiritual entity must put forth energy in order to exist.  Also, it has to adapt itself to its environment which entails constraints. These two things are always in tension with one another.  Natural systems will put forth energy but will meet with constraints, space or time, perhaps.  Closed systems will try to put order into the system, but will also be constrained by the level of spontaneity of the original entity.  

Natural systems are open, they operate from the bottom up.  Their goal is to develop themselves as far as possible within the constraints of their environment.  Closed systems operate from the top down.  Machines are totally controlled.  They cannot change unless some person or circumstance changes them.  They can put forth energy but only if they are fueled.

Societies are also systems, either open or closed.  Open societies grow from the bottom up, and are constrained by the adaptations they have to make to their environment.  Closed societies are controlled by a higher authority: law, perhaps, or intelligence. Again, there is tension between these two. Both, however, are important.  An open society has the energy and spontaneity to grow, but it needs some sort of structure to keep it alive and healthy.  Successful organisms modify their environment so as to assist each other.  A successful society should be modeled on this concept of physical reality as an organic totality. The unity of body and mind symbolizes the dynamic relation between parts and wholes in the cosmic process. This is reciprocality at work.  

Bracken poses that “system” be a new paradigm for the understanding of reality. At the quantum level of existence,  there is a high degree of dynamic interaction between the closed and open systems. Completely inanimate constituents at the atomic level combine to produce a molecule with life-like properties which then indirectly share in the formal causality of which they are a part.  From then on, these entities do not exist in their own right, they are a part of the society or group to which they belong. There is a reciprocal causal relation that governs their ongoing interaction.

The question always arises, how inanimate components can produce something that is alive.
Bracken notes three possibilities: 1.  Life is the result of a strictly fortuitous set of circumstances (which might lead to chaos if not constrained), 2.  Life appeared in virtue of a predesigned plan on the part of an external agent (which lends itself to theological determinism and does not allow for secondary causality), and 3. Life has never been completely absent from the cosmic process. The third alternative lends itself to a creative balance between chaos and determinism. Everything in this world is intimately connected with everything else in a way that would be physically impossible in a world of unchanging individual things.

It is fairly well-known that religious beliefs have been based on scientific understandings of the time.  Belief about God is different now that we know the expansiveness of the universe. However, religion and science have always been in tension with one another.  When a new scientific theory proves to be correct, philosophers and theologians eventually find ways to incorporate the new science into their religious worldview.  Meanwhile the tension runs high and the sense of an inevitable conflict between religion and science will once again be rampant. Bracken suggests that “if contemporary science has changed and adapted new physical presuppositions about the nature of reality then Christian philosophers and theologians should take advantage of concepts and principles coming from contemporary natural science to rethink the Christian worldview in evolutionary terms.” There should be a level of appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of both disciplines.  The truth claims of both disciplines are provisional and open to revision. 

In the next section of the book, Bracken looks at the current environmental crisis through the lens of the systems approach.  For scientific information, he relies on Holmes Rolston, a philosopher of science at the University of Colorado. Rolston was a leader in the field of environmental ethics to recognize the responsibility of human beings for the survival and prosperity of the nonhuman world on this earth. The term “biocentrism” refers to an ethics of respect for life but with a focus on all living things, not just an ethics centered on humans.  All forms of life are interdependent on one another for their well-being and survival.  This means that attention should be given to the objective value of all life forms.  Each life form has value in itself, regardless of its value for humans. In the past, ethics has focused on human moral behavior.  Now, however, ethics has to be concerned with the overall health of the planet, home to several million species besides our own. Humans are the only species that can take responsibility for these issues.  We need to see the earth as the source of value, and therefore valu-able. 

In the next section of the book, Bracken extends his reciprocal causality/systems idea to the Divine and Human personhood.  Many individual entities become one corporate reality over and over again, whether that process is the reality of an atom or the reality of an entire universe or ecosystem. Thinking of “the one and the many,” the one is a corporate entity, the many are the individual components of that process.  A society is a “one” that has emerged out of the dynamic interrelation of its many sub societies at any given moment.  This understanding of society can resolve the paradox of the Trinity being the one God at the same time be three.  One can think of the divine persons in terms of interrelated activities rather than as coequal entities. The persons all create, redeem and sanctify.  These separate activities are really only one coming from a transcendent interpersonal community.  One might object that it was only the Son who became human, not the Father or the Spirit. But how did the Son become human if not through the conjoined activity of the Father and the Spirit?  The activity of the Trinity vis-à-vis the world is always triune.  They act as one. 

For Eberhard Jungel, "the way in which God is related to the world cannot be different from the way in which God is self related." But God is self-related in and through the perichoresis of the three divine persons vis-à-vis one another to be together one God.  The unity of God is not a simple unity but a differentiated unity. Here lies the threat of tritheism (three Gods in close relationship).  Karl Rahner maintained that the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity and the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity.  When we pray, however, we normally pray to one or the other persons of the Trinity. This again risks the idea of tritheism.  Bracken, drawing on his systems approach, suggests that we actually experience all three persons at the same time in every prayerful moment.  Within a systems-oriented approach to the divine doctrine of the Trinity the divine persons have no separate identity or existence apart from the other two persons. 

Aquinas and other classical metaphysicians conceived God as pure act with no potentiality to be anything other than what God is right now, but from a process or systems-oriented perspective that means God is "dead," no longer alive; nothing is happening. God as pure act has no future, no potentiality to change and develop in response to changing circumstances. What is seen as perfection within classical metaphysics is instead a liability within a systems- or process-oriented approach to reality.

            In Laudato Si’ Pope Francis states that intersubjectivity, a feeling for the other, is needed to complement the rational objectivity or means-end thinking, in dealing with other human beings, the world of nature, and ultimately God.  When human beings concentrate too much on the achievement of predetermined human goals, they often endanger the balance between natural development and what might happen if nature is allowed to take its course.  If these systems become imbalanced, the humanly contrived systems will likewise collapse. This is one of the main themes of Bracken’s book: there must not be too much emphasis on the rights of individuals vis-à-vis the groups to which they belong.

Bracken displays his wide range of familiarity with just about every philosopher who has dealt with the topic of science and religion. Some of Bracken's assertions may cause consternation among metaphysicians.  His theses about reciprocal causality reflect a postmodern skepticism toward the classical understanding of the world. However, his new worldview presents a vision of how science can open for us a model of  interconnectedness.  Take a look at how systems work.  There’s no answer to human and world problems without it.