This is a very concise (90 pages of text, and 50 pages of notes) explanation of the emerging field of complexity studies and philosophy, focused specifically on how our universe generates information, meaning, purpose, value, and values, through living systems. We suffered under antiscientific thinking in theocracies, then under deterministic and authoritarian models of progress in the 19th and 20th centuries, then under postmodernist nihilism after the World Wars. In recent decades, dozens of fantastic models, insights, and thinkers have begun to show us that life and its intelligence are a necessary and central product and purpose of the universe. This insight has huge implications for how we understand ourselves, each other, and life, for how to create better institutions, politics, and policy, for how to better see and promote societal progress, and for how to guard against the many forms of regress, beginning with ourselves and our families. I'm really looking forward to the remaining books in this series.

A few years ago I read a critique of scientific culture by Huston Smith in which Smith castigates scientific materialism for leaving out values, purpose, and meaning. Brendan Graham Dempsey tries to put values, purpose, and meaning back in, while staying true to the most recent scientific thinking about the emergence of complexity through natural processes. Dempsey's work leans on recent thinking by authors such as Gregg Henriques and Bobby Azarian about how energy self-organizes into emergent new levels of being. Meaning, in this framework, is essentially what complex systems (like animals or humans) seek in their environments for purposes of self- or species-perpetuation. In this analysis, meaning is not just subjective (an inner state) or objective (externally embodied), but rather more like the relationship between subject and object. This book is intended as the first volume of a longer series that will ground theological reflection in naturalistic processes. Religious traditionalists' will not be convinced by any of this. Religious traditionalists. are not the intended readership.

This book isn't for everyone . . . me included. How much does the average person need to know about the meaning of meaning?

Takes complex physics and applies it to the human condition in a way that makes sense.

This is basically a scientific argument for a post-nihilistic meaning. There is an emerging scientific and cultural paradigm that is revolutionizing our understanding of the universe, ourselves, and our place in the universe. Brendan is one of the many thinkers who are giving voice to this new paradigm. I'm really looking forward to the rest of this series.