The term “information” has become nearly omnipresent in modern biology (and medicine). One would probably not exaggerate if the famous saying of evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobhzhansky, that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” should nowadays be reframed as “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of information.” But are those two concepts, evolution and information, somehow internally related? And if so, how?

Information in evolution

In textbooks, newspapers, and even scientific papers, the meanings of the terms “evolution” and “information” are generally supposed to be well known, and they are rarely explained. And yet, there is no general consensus in science, or even in biology, about what they really mean. For instance, the preferred exemplar (in the Kuhnian sense) of evolution by natural selection is that of industrial melanism. In woodlands, where industrial pollution has killed the lichens and exposed the dark brown tree trunks, dark forms of the peppered moth – melanics – are supposedly better camouflaged against predation from birds than are the light gray forms that predominated before the Industrial Revolution. The observation by 1950 that darker forms had largely displaced lighter forms was thus taken as evidence for natural selection in action. This exemplar does indeed illustrate the effect of natural selection, but whether it shows evolution depends on your idea of evolution. Thus, if by the term “evolution” is meant something like “the origin of species,” then it is remarkable that no speciation has actually taken place here, and it is not obvious that any speciation would indeed occur in a case like this. So, populations do indeed change as a result of natural selection, but is this mechanism also behind speciation and evolution at large? The majority of biologists certainly feel assured that macroevolution – that is, evolution above the level of species – is in fact the tardy result of an infinitely ongoing microevolution (adaptation in populations), but there remains serious disagreement on this (Depew and Weber, 1995; Gould, 2002).

“I refute it thus!” Samuel Johnson famously dismissed Bishop George Berkeley's argument for the unreality of matter by kicking a large stone (Boswell, 1823). In the light of modern physics, however, Johnson's simple reasoning evaporates. Apparently solid matter is revealed, on closer inspection, to be almost all empty space, and the particles of which matter is composed are themselves ghostly patterns of quantum energy, mere excitations of invisible quantum fields, or possibly vibrating loops of string living in a ten-dimensional space–time (Greene, 1999). The history of physics is one of successive abstractions from daily experience and common sense, into a counterintuitive realm of mathematical forms and relationships, with a link to the stark sense data of human observation that is long and often tortuous. Yet at the end of the day, science is empirical, and our finest theories must be grounded, somehow, “in reality.” But where is reality? Is it in acts of observation of the world made by human and possibly non-human observers? In records stored in computer or laboratory notebooks? In some objective world “out there”? Or in a more abstract location?

The ground of reality

When a physicist performs an experiment, he or she interrogates nature and receives a response that, ultimately, is in the form of discrete bits of information (think of “yes” or “no” binary answers to specific questions), the discreteness implied by the underlying quantum nature of the universe (Zeilinger, 2004). Does reality then lie in the string of bits that come back from the set of all observations and experiments – a dry sequence of ones and zeros? Do these observations merely transfer really-existing bits of information from an external world reality to the minds of observers, or are the bits of information created by the very act of observation/experiment? And – the question to which this entire discussion is directed – are bits of “classical” information the only sort of information that count in the reality game, or does an altogether different form of information underpin reality? In short, where is the ontological ground on which our impression of a really-existing universe rests?

Up to modernity, the majority of Christian thinkers presupposed the world of creation to be composed of two parts: the material and the spiritual, existing alongside one another as independent yet interacting realms. In the traditional exegesis of Genesis 1, for example, the creation of light in Genesis 1:3 (“Let there be light”) was interpreted as a spiritual light for spiritual beings in a spiritual world (kosmos noētos), preceding the creation of the corporeal light of the sun in the empirical world (kosmos aisthētikos) in Genesis 1:14.

This two-stock universe lost its plausibility with the advent of classical physics in the seventeenth century, when nature came to be seen as a seamless unity. The scientific intuition of the oneness of the universe, however, was initially combined with a narrow interpretation of the nature of the material. As Isaac Newton (1642–1727) argued in his Opticks, matter is basically atomic: “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles”. According to Newton, these particles, formed in the beginning by God and held together by the mechanical laws of nature, serve the divine purpose of the universe while at the same time being embraced by God, who is ubiquitously at work ordering, shaping, and reshaping the universe. For Newton, mechanism and theism were two sides of the same coin. How else to explain the orderliness of the otherwise arraying particles? God, the creator of the world of matter and the author of the deterministic laws of nature, was continuously providing the collaboration and ends of all biological creatures:

It is no secret that we are in the midst of an information-processing revolution based on electronic computers and optical communication systems. This revolution has transformed work, education, and thought, and has affected the life of every person on Earth.

The information-processing revolutions

The effect of the digital revolution on humanity as a whole, however, pales when compared with the effect of the previous information-processing revolution: the invention of moveable type. The invention of the printing press was an information-processing revolution of the first magnitude. Moveable type allowed the information in each book, once accessible only to the few people who possessed the book's hand-copied text, to be accessible to thousands or millions of people. The resulting widespread literacy and dissemination of information completely transformed society. Access to the written word empowered individuals not only in their intellectual lives, but in their economic, legal, and religious lives as well.

The most important single issue in the conversation of theology with science is whether and how God acts in or influences the world. Here I shall ask whether the notion of information can help theologians address this question. It is well known that traditional philosophies and theologies intuited a universal “informational” principle running through all things. Their sense that “Mind,” “Wisdom,” or “Logos” inhabits and globally patterns the universe has been repeated in widely different ways time and again: in ancient Greek philosophy, the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Scriptures, Philo, early Christianity, Stoicism, Hegel, Whitehead, and others. But can the intuition that the universe is the bearer of an overarching meaning – of an informational principle actively present to the entire cosmic process – have any plausibility whatsoever in the age of science?

These days, after all, one must hesitate before connecting the Logos of theology immediately to patterns in nature. The life process as seen through the eyes of evolutionary biologists, to cite the main reason for such reluctance, scarcely seems to be the embodiment of any universal divine principle of meaning or wisdom. Contrary to the picture of cosmic order expressed in much religious thought, evolution involves seemingly endless experimentation with different “forms,” most of which are eventually discarded and replaced by those only accidentally suited to the demands of natural selection. The impersonal Darwinian proliferation of experimental life forms, only a few of which seem to be adaptive for any length of time, scarcely reflects anything like an underlying divine wisdom. The spontaneous origin of life, the apparent randomness of genetic variation that helps account for the diversity of life, and the accidents in natural history that render the trajectory of the whole life story unpredictable, make one wonder just how “informed” the natural world can be after all. Certainly evolution makes the hypothesis of divine design questionable. If anything, nature seems, at least on the surface, to be the product of what Richard Dawkins (1986) calls a “blind watchmaker.” How, then, can theology think coherently of a divine presence meaningfully operative amid the blind impersonality and aimless contingency manifested in science's new pictures of nature?

This chapter operates from a theological perspective – broadened, however, by information on the development of classical philosophy and metaphysics and some experience in the global science-and-theology discourse of the last 20 years. I ask the question: Can we imagine and penetrate the reality classical theology had in mind when it spoke of the ‘spiritual body’? And beyond that, can we convince non-theological mindsets that this concept not only makes sense in the orbit of religion, but that it has illuminating power beyond this realm because it is firmly rooted in a reality, and not just confined to one complex mode of discourse?

The preparation for this task requires a few sophisticated preliminary steps. First we have to differentiate ‘old-style’ and ‘new-style’ metaphysics as two possible frameworks for the approach. Second, we have to discern an understanding of creation in the light of Biblical creation accounts and in the light of ‘old-style’ metaphysics. Third, on the basis of the Biblical creation accounts, we see that the notion of a creator as a mere sustainer of the universe is spiritually not satisfying and salvific. Fourth, this will prepare us for an understanding of the role of the resurrection in divine creativity in general, and provide an understanding of the nature and the importance of the ‘spiritual body’ of Jesus Christ in particular. Fifth, we will try to comprehend the transformative power of this spiritual body and the involvement of human beings and other creatures in it. On this basis we want to engage non-theological academic thinkers by asking them whether the sustaining, rescuing, and ennobling interaction between God, creation, and spiritual information can find analogies in their realms of experience, and whether it can challenge reductionistic concepts of matter. This question will be guided by a metaphysical approach in the ‘new style’.

Theories of information that attempt to sort out problems concerning the status and efficacy of its content – as it is understood in thoughts, meanings, signs, intended actions, and so forth – have so far failed to resolve a crucial dilemma: how what is represented could possibly have physical consequences. The legacy of this has been played out in various skeptical paradigms that either conclude that content is fundamentally relativistic, holistic, and ungrounded, or else is merely epiphenomenal and ineffectual except for its arbitrary correlation with the physical properties of the signs that convey it. In this chapter I argue that the apparent conundrums that make this notion controversial arise because we begin our deliberations with the fallacious assumption that in order for the content of information to have any genuine real-world consequences it must have substantial properties, and so must correspond to something present in some form or other. By contrast, I will show that this assumption is invalid and is the ultimate origin of these absurd skeptical consequences.

The crucial property of content that must be taken into account is exactly the opposite: its absence. But how is it possible for a specific absence to have definite causal consequences? A crucial clue is provided by Claude Shannon's analysis of information in terms of constraint on the entropy (possible variety) of signs/signals (Shannon, 1948; Shannon and Weaver, 1949). In other words, the capa-city to convey information is dependent on a relationship to something that is specifically not produced. But such a change in the Shannon entropy of a physical medium is also necessarily a physical change, and this must be a product of extrinsic work. In addition, contra Shannon, even when there is no change in Shannon entropy where a change is possible, this can be informative because it indicates the absence of some specific form of extrinsic influence. Both conditions are determined with respect to a potential influence on the form of the semiotic medium that is extrinsic to it. These explicit extrinsic sources of potential signal constraint constitute the ground of the referential capacity by which information is defined.

Evolutionary natural history has generated “caring” – by elaborating, diversifying, conserving, and enriching such capacities. A first response might be to take care about that “caring”; the word is too anthropopathic. The framework one expects in contemporary biology is rather termed the evolution of “selfishness” (as if that word were not also anthropopathic). Selfishness, however, is but one form of caring; “caring” is the more inclusive term. Minimally, biologists must concede that organisms survive and live on, and that, over generations, they seek adapted fit. Or, if “seek” is still too anthropopathic, they are selected for their adapted fit. Maybe “select” is still too anthropopathic. Try computer language: the organic systems are “calculating.” Whatever the vocabulary, for all living beings some things “make a difference”; they do not survive unless they attend to these things.

At least after sentience arises, neural organisms, human or not, evidently “care.” Animals hunt and howl, find shelter, seek out their habitats and mates, feed their young, flee from threats, grow hungry, thirsty, hot, tired, excited, sleepy. They suffer injury and lick their wounds. Sooner or later every biologist must concede that “care” is there. Call these “interests” or “preferences” or whatever; if “caring” is too loaded a term, then call these animal “concerns.” Staying alive requires “self-defense.” Living things have “needs.” One of the hallmarks of life is that it can be “irritated.” Organisms have to be “operational.” Biology without “conservation” is death. Biology must be “pro-life.” If you dislike the connotations of “caring,” there are dozens of good biological terms that spiral around this term.

It is no longer a secret that inherited notions of matter and the material world have not been able to sustain the revolutionary developments of twentieth-century physics and biology. For centuries Isaac Newton's idea of matter as consisting of ‘solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, and movable particles’ reigned in combination with a strong view of laws of nature that were supposed to prescribe exactly, on the basis of the present physical situation, what was going to happen in the future. This complex of scientific materialism and mechanism was easily amalgamated with common-sense assumptions of solid matter as the bedrock of all reality. In the world view of classical materialism (having its heyday between 1650 and 1900), it was claimed that all physical systems are nothing but collections of inert particles slavishly complying with deterministic laws. Complex systems such as living organisms, societies, and human persons, could, according to this reductionist world view, ultimately be explained in terms of material components and their chemical interactions.

However, the emergence of thermodynamics around 1850 already began to cast doubt on the universal scope of determinism. Without initially questioning the inherited concepts of corpuscular matter and mechanism, it turned out that the physics of fluids and gases in thermodynamically open systems can be tackled, from a practical point of view, only by using statistical methods; the aim of tracking individual molecules had to be abandoned. In what has been aptly called The Probabilistic Revolution (Krüger, Daston, and Heidelberger, 1990), determinism became a matter of metaphysical belief rather than a scientifically substantiated position. By the 1870s a great physicist such as James Clerk Maxwell was already questioning the assumption of determinism by pointing to highly unstable systems in which infinitesimal variations in initial conditions lead to large and irreversible effects (later to become a central feature of chaos theory). It was not until the twentieth century, however, that the importance of non-equilibrium dissipative structures in thermodynamics led scientists such as Ilya Prigogine (1996) to formulate a more general attack on the assumptions of reversibility and scientific determinism.

The use of informational terms is widespread in molecular and developmental biology. The usage dates back to Weismann. In both protein synthesis and in later development, genes are symbols, in that there is no necessary connection between their form (sequence) and their effects. The sequence of a gene has been determined by past natural selection, because of the effects it produces. In biology, the use of informational terms implies intentionality, in that both the form of the signal, and the response to it, have evolved by selection. Where an engineer sees design, a biologist sees natural selection.

It is clear from these quotations that there is something to talk about. I shall be concerned only with the use of information concepts in genetics, evolution, and development, and not in neurobiology, which I am not competent to discuss.