Physics, Information, and Meaning
How Nature Creates Complexity, Purpose, and Values
- Science & Faith
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Published: 2026
FritzSearch.com earns a commission on purchases made through Bookshop.org links.
Publisher's Description
What is the essence of life? Human experience can be viewed as a series of choices, purposive activities, and emotional states. Even our most trivial actions are prompted by some goal. Our experience also includes emotions—joy, sadness, pleasure, anxiety, and so on. Even boredom is a type of emotion. But what is the meaning of all this? Those who know anything about science are likely familiar with the idea that reality is based ultimately on particles and physical forces. Modern scientific worldviews seem to offer no explanation for decisions, goals, feelings, and meanings. This book argues against the materialistic-mechanistic-reductionistic response to science. Physics itself—especially special relativity and quantum mechanics—can be interpreted in ways that support, rather than negate, humanity’s experience of choices, values, and meanings. The process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and others is introduced as a useful tool. However, Whitehead’s thought is presented not as a preexisting philosophy that is imported to the interpretation of science, but as a set of ideas that Whitehead derived from his own knowledge of relativity and quantum theory. The book’s final two chapters offer ideas about religion that are compatible with the worldview that has been described.
Endorsements (5)
“For those who see the physical universe as a clue to greater questions of meaning, and deeper concerns of value, this book is a sober and reliable guide to nature, writ large.”
“Drawing on physics, special relativity, quantum mechanics, information theory, process philosophy, and religious naturalism, [Conner] shows how values and meaning emerge from the physical world itself and exposes the delusion of any simplistic divide between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ dimensions of reality.”
“[Conner] demonstrates that all of reality consists of a non-material wholistic dynamic process. He then uses this metaphysics—along with feminist and liberation theologies and process philosophy—to support his definition of God as the ‘total causal matrix’ in which all of nature, including human beings, exists.”
“David Conner presents us with a new philosophy of nature. Influenced by A. N. Whitehead, Conner goes far beyond Whitehead in depicting the contemporary, naturalistic roots of ‘meaning.’”
“This book is a tour de force—and a must-read for anyone interested in nonsupernaturalistic interpretations of religion and nonreductionistic accounts of science.”
See something wrong on this page? Report a problem