I am not sure whether Michael Levin fully recognizes the metaphysical implications of his radical position (who among us can?!). He is affirming that as yet unactualized patterns in Platonic morphospace have some kind of autonomous efficacy to shape biological development and evolution. From a process-relational point of view, such a position either succumbs to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness by granting abstractions efficient causal power, or it tacitly presupposes something like Whitehead’s divine function without acknowledging it. Whitehead is clear that eternal objects (his version of Platonic forms) have no efficient causal power of their own; they operate only as formal and final causes, ie, as persuasive lures imbued with value via God’s primordial conceptual prehension, which finite actual occasions then prehend as an objective aim implicit in their past cosmic environment. Whitehead bites the bullet and explicitly acknowledges a divine function, an initial Eros that grants unactualized forms or pure potentials a graduated intensive relevance in relation to each particular occasion. Without acknowledging such a function, we are left with an unexplained agency lurking within abstract forms.

I am not sure which is worse for one’s academic or scientific credibility: positing immaterial forms with un-evolved intelligent agency (un-evolved because, as eternal, they have no evolutionary history), or acknowledging that the axiological ordering of the forms is initially enacted by divine yearning. Whitehead’s re-imagination of divine power in terms of aesthetic persuasion avoids the reification of pure potentials into autonomously efficacious causal agents while preserving their role as formal and final causes. Mike, for his part, does not seem overly concerned with how unorthodox his position is, but I suspect he hasn’t fully thought through the deeper metaphysical commitments it entails—which is no fault of his! This is precisely why transdisciplinary dialogue between scientists and philosophers is so important and valuable. Natural science has gotten as far as its classical mechanistic metaphysics can take it; Mike Levin’s stunning (from the materialist point of view) empirical findings are part of a wealth of evidence demanding a major metaphysical overhaul.

What is especially novel about Whitehead’s approach to God (a view perhaps first articulated by Schelling in his late positive philosophy) is that God is not the ultimate principle per se but a contingent development within a deeper reality: Creativity, or in Schelling’s terms, the Ungrund, the dark abyss that precedes divine self-consciousness. What is initially a kind of chaos—pure generativity, undirected becoming—accidentally becomes the ground of all rationality. God does not simply exist in eternal stasis; God becomes. God is not a finished being but a living, self-revealing process that freely emerges from an unconscious abyss in an act of kenotic revelation. This process is initially contingent and not determined in advance: God is not simply a necessary being but a free becoming. This is the only way for divine love to be real, which is to say, relational. An unmoved and impassive Creator could not truly know the passion of love.

In other words, Whitehead admits God is an accident of Creativity that only becomes necessary after the fact. Thus, what is initially an ultimate irrationality is consequently the ground of all reasons. As he puts it in Science and the Modern World (p. 178): “No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.”

This is where Whitehead and Schelling both break decisively from metaphysical orthodoxy: reality is not merely rational, but also free, creative. The world is not the deterministic unfolding of an already completed divine plan, but an open-ended process in which God is no longer the Creator but the Relator, luring creation toward greater intensity of experience in Whitehead’s terms, or striving toward self-revelation through historical embodiment in Schelling’s.

I am in complete agreement with Mike Levin that biology needs a new account of the status of form and agency, both in ontogenesis and in phylogenesis. Materialistic and reductionistic paradigms emphasizing bottom-up “genetic information” have proven woefully inadequate. But if Mike wants to attribute causal efficacy and intelligent agency to bare patterns in morphospace, he should be prepared to answer the deeper question: is he willing to posit some ground of the axiological and mathematical ordering of that space of potential—whether Whitehead and Schelling’s panentheistic vision (or what may better be termed a “pan-gen-theistic” vision, with gen- meaning “genesis” or “creative becoming”), or something else entirely? If something else, what? How and why do bare forms, pure potentials, gain agency?