Public Theology of Living Systems: Science and Religion

Introduction

The mathematical imagination behind the geometry of life resonates with the work of Coxeter, Conway, and Escher, whose explorations of symmetry, generativity, and multilayered spatial worlds offer a visual prefiguration of adjacency and emergence. Escher’s hyperbolic tessellations, continuous transformations, and multi-orientation architectures exemplify how patterned relations generate novel semantic structures—anticipating this book’s central question: how do living systems bring forth a form of life through pattern, adjacency, mutual illumination, and the construction of new relational orders?

These geometric imaginations are not merely analogies but structural anticipations of meaning-generation. The semantic theory of autopoiesis reframes life: not merely as biochemical self-production, but as what I call a life-field—a relational space in which organisms continually generate and exchange patterned meaning.

This creative capacity of life arises in several ways: through modular structures that can be recombined, through unexpected cross-connections (as in neural synapses), and through by-products of evolution that were not directly selected for—Gould and Lewontin’s “spandrels”—yet come to carry new meaning. Each of these amplifies what a living system can mean, not just what it can do.

Beyond these structural sources, cybernetic feedback loops show how meaning can exceed what a simple input-output model would predict—each recursive pass through the loop generates something more than the sum of its parts. Epigenetics adds a further dimension: it reveals life not as fixed by genetic code alone but as open, plastic, and historically situated, shaped by the organism’s own history of responses. Organisms are dynamic, context-responsive beings: their chromatin structures and gene-regulatory networks allow them to change—sometimes abruptly, as in cell differentiation or stress response—without losing what makes them the organisms they are. I call this identity-preserving innovation.

These biological patterns raise a theological question: how might God be understood to act within such an open, self-organizing world? I propose that divine concursus—God’s co-working with creation—be reinterpreted as co-constitution through what I call the Spirit’s eschatological attractor: a future-oriented pull toward flourishing, rather than a force that intervenes by breaking natural law. This is what I call a Sabbath ontology—one in which concursus offers a non-coercive horizon of possibility, not an interventionist force.

Taken together, these pillars articulate a new paradigm in the science–religion dialogue—one in which biological modularity, semantic surplus, and divine concursus converge within an ecological-cybernetic whole. The geometry of life thus provides a conceptual architecture for understanding how living systems maintain identity through interaction, generate innovation through recombination, and enact co-constituted worlds of justice, solidarity, and hope.

The Geometry of Life and Semantic Individuality

To fully capture this ecological-cybernetic whole, we must move beyond the reductionism of modern science that treats life as a fixed object, and return instead to the vivid, immediate site where life is actively embodied. The geometric imagination invoked earlier through Escher, Coxeter, and Conway belongs to this same site—an art of life’s own geometry, not the geometry that mathematizes life away.

In my approach to the geometry of life, I follow in the footsteps of Edmund Husserl, who took issue with Galilean science—the mathematical natural science that transformed the very idea of philosophy. Plato understood the real as participating in the ideal, but Galileo’s mathematization of nature reversed this relation by treating nature itself as a mathematical construct. In Galileo’s framework, the lived world becomes an abstract manifold shaped by mathematical formalization.

Against Galileo’s mathematization of nature, Husserl brings us back to the lifeworld, which is given in a subjectively relative manner through everyday sense-experience. In this lifeworld, we encounter bodies—rivers, mountains, buildings, the human body—not as mathematical abstractions but as the concrete content of experience.^[1]

If Galileo’s mathematization abstracts nature into an ideal manifold, Husserl restores geometry to lived experience. A phenomenology of geometry examines how bodily events relate to one another in lived experience. It explores how things appear as connected, belonging together, and mutually shaping one another within the dynamic field of embodied life.

If we work out our world and practice all cultural acquisition intersubjectively within a community—through methods of idealization and construction that have been historically transmitted—then we are geometers engaged in formulating, renewing, and explicating pattern, horizon and meaning. These structures are grasped and handled through our embodied operations, in speech and in writing.

My approach develops an autopoietic phenomenology inspired by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Francisco Varela—one that understands living systems as self‑producing structures whose meaning emerges through embodied experience.

A mathematical formulation need not remain a merely semiotic or abstract logic; rather, it can be used to express horizons and meaning through operations that articulate the deep structure of the lifeworld. Husserl’s caution remains important here: mathematical natural science can lose its original meaning when it becomes overly technical and detached from lived experience. He therefore strives to overcome its superficiality by returning to the lifeworld as the forgotten meaning-foundation of natural science.^[2]

For this reason, I extend the geometry of the lifeworld into a layered study of living systems—spanning biological processes, social interactions, cultural formations, and ecological relations. In doing so, I translate abstract mathematical operators into a bio‑semiological mode of expression for a semantic theory of individuality—inquiring back into how nature renders itself intelligible through its own patterned operations.

Because this living geometry is inherently fluid, it must map not only space but time. Here, Husserl’s temporal notation becomes a geometric expression of how patterns of meaning shift, fold, and migrate within the stream of consciousness. For Husserl, consciousness shapes time through ongoing shifts and transformations rather than through a fixed continuity. Time flows because experience continually differentiates itself, generating new contours of meaning.

Semantic individuality names a relatively stable pattern of meaning found in organisms, social groups, cultural forms, or ecological systems. Semantic individuation, by contrast, describes how these patterns change through ongoing interactions with their environments.

This differential movement is analogous to Husserl’s temporal geometry, in which retention, memory, reflection, and anticipation are constituted through transformations of difference.

The mathematician, Husserl notes, is normally not in a position to undertake such reflections on the geometry of life—reflections that concern the true knowledge of the world itself.

Such reflections demand a careful critique of the assumptions and inherited concepts that shape our understanding of the world. They also call for a reflective movement in which we clarify our experience and advance through well‑grounded insights.^[3]

Autopoiesis and Its New Trajectory

With this phenomenological groundwork in place, we can now trace how semantic autopoiesis unfolds within evolutionary and ecological lifelines. It unfolds within an evolutionary landscape shaped by anticipatory processes. The transition from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life—where previously independent organisms entered into symbiotic association—reveals how biological systems form higher‑order units of functional tessellation and innovate by integrating present conditions with future‑oriented possibilities.

Organisms often behave as though aspects of the future are already implicit in present conditions, adjusting development in anticipation of ecological states signaled by their environments.Across biological domains, anticipation emerges as a fundamental principle: developmental plasticity prepares organisms for ecological states not yet present, while epigenetic and environmental interactions adjust developmental trajectories toward likely future conditions.^{^[4]}

Living systems therefore do not operate as closed circuits but as future‑oriented processes embedded within stratified lifelines—biological, social, cultural, and ecological. When proleptic adjacency, resilience, co‑constitution, and deep developmental structures couple with these lifelines, they generate an amplified mode of innovation: a resilience constellation functioning as an attractor basin for meaningful forms of life.

Semantic Field, Modernity, and Cybernetic Modeling

The biological realism grounding semantic autopoiesis provides the conceptual foundation for Part I—Phenomenology, Embodied Biology, and Systems Theory. This section advances a public theology of science by critically engaging both the contributions and the limitations of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. Part I establishes the scientific and philosophical basis for a relational, emergent, and meaning‑generative account of life, preparing the ground for the theological, ecological, and political developments that follow.

In critical and constructive dialogue with Luhmann’s systems theory, I reinterpret the lifeworld through the lens of information, symbolism and meaning. Meaning is not a subsystem or a functional code; it is the ensemble integral of all lifeworld interactions. In this view, meaning is not an abstract property but the patterned emergence of relational processes distributed across biological, ecological, and social domains.

The world of autopoiesis that I engage is a living world, a term employed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in a distinctly poetic sense. Its concepts carry the rhythms of life, meaning, and enaction. The phenomenology that approaches the geometry of life does so because it concerns the world‑opening of the body‑subject. The geometry of life captures the dynamism of the attractor basin as the primordial field of meaning within embodied perception. Public theology, in turn, concerns itself with the emergence of meaning, resilience, and innovation within the life‑field.

Drawing on Maurice Merleau‑Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Francisco Varela’s theory of the embodied mind, I examine the debate between Habermas and Luhmann concerning communication at the interface of intersubjectivity and system. Linguistic suspension remains essential for analyzing systems‑level communication within a cybernetic framework, enabling critique of taken‑for‑granted ideologies and signified structures grounded in material interests, power, authority, and governance.

For the geometry of life, David Bohm’s philosophy of the implicate order offers a decisive way to conceptualize the lifeworld as an unfulfilled horizon of meaning. In Bohm’s view, the implicate order functions as a conceptual analogy drawn from quantum field theory for describing how patterns of matter and thought may share a common structural logic. The enfolding–unfolding dynamic resonates with quantum field theory, where Bohm proposes holomovement as a way of modeling a continuous, generative background process that stands in adjacency to the phenomenal world of the explicate order.^[5]

Bohm’s implicate order matters here because autopoiesis also describes life as an enfolding–unfolding horizon of patterned meaning. However, Bohm’s account of nonlocal active information is reinterpreted within an autopoietic phenomenology grounded in the embodied horizon of life, rather than in the determinism of hidden variables. This critique incorporates Carl F. von Weizsäcker’s Ur-theory of life information into semantic systems theory, thereby relocating active information to the embodied, epigenetic horizon of living systems.[6]

Bohm’s phenomenology of the implicate order enables a refinement of the discourse of linguistic intentionality by situating it within the unfulfilled horizon of the lifeworld. For Bohm, the correlation between meaning and intention appears in the incorporation of movement into linguistic structure by emphasizing the verb. His proposal highlights the relevance of each expression to a wider context.[7]

In this respect, Bohm’s vision resonates with Merleau‑Ponty’s theory of linguistic suspension, in which the semantic circle continually opens toward what is not yet said, not yet articulated, but already operative as a horizon of sense.

Linguistic intentionality thus becomes the movement through which the future spreads into the present, as latent semantic configurations unfold into speech, expression, and communicative form.

Thus, linguistic intentionality is not merely a matter of translation; it is the process through which human thought is reborn through cross‑generative resonance between languages. The lifeworld is a pre‑linguistic field of vital meaning‑generation, ecological interdependence, and biological intentionality—a field that entails its own constellation of epigenetic ontology.

Alongside Claude Lefort, a French phenomenologist, a semantic‑realist discourse of modernity understands modernity not as a chronological stage but as a reorganization of the cultural‑symbolic order that structures social life. Society is self‑instituting, aware of its intrinsic division and contingency—an autopoietic registry of meaning, conflict, and renewal. Civil society and democracy are therefore semantic conditions before they are political systems.^[8]

Within this autopoietic horizon, modernity appears not as a chronological stage but as a reorganization of narrative, democratic resilience and meaning. I incorporate Charles Taylor’s non‑totalizing reading of Hegel by treating recognition as embedded within patterned forms of life and by redeploying it creatively within the systemic configuration of semantic modernity—or alternative modernity.^[9] In this framework, recognition becomes a difference‑preserving operator within an autopoietic and semantic‑ecological field.

The innovative approach to AI stands in sharp contrast to platform capitalism—exemplified by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Amazon, and Airbnb—in which platforms have become monopolistic infrastructures that treat user data as an economic resource and mediate markets for profit generation.^[10]

Evolvability, Epigenetic Ontology, and the Anthropocene

Evolvability—or life’s biological intentionality—denotes the inherent capacity to preserve, transform, and innovate in the meaningful construction of its world. This relational modulation parallels human cultural evolution, linguistic communication, and the formation of social institutions, where meaning emerges through adjacency rather than the subsumption of difference.

This dynamic is rooted in the thermodynamics of open systems. Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures shows that self‑organization can produce new and coherent forms of life. When systems experience nonlinear fluctuations and move far from equilibrium, they generate rhythmic and organized patterns that give rise to emergence and novelty.^{^[11]}

Autopoiesis at the cellular level is embedded within chromatin mechanisms—such as DNA methylation—through which socio‑environmental factors modulate gene activity. This is the domain of social epigenetics, where changes in gene expression occur without altering the genetic code. Epigenetic ontology thus reveals how biological intentionality is shaped through patterns of adjacency rather than genetic determinism, situating the body within activity, lifestyle, society, and culture.

In the Anthropocene—a term popularized by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen—ecological futures do not arrive as distant horizons but as neighboring perturbations, proximate fields of possibility that reorganize present conditions before they fully materialize.

The Anthropocene is therefore not only a geological epoch but a zone of anticipation, where future ecological conditions begin to shape the present. These future pressures appear not as distant horizons but as nearby shifts and disruptions that reorganize current patterns of life. As Hamilton writes, the real question is “not whether human beings stand at the center of the world, but what kind of humans stand at the center of the world, and what the nature of that world” is.^[12]

Conclusion of Part I: Anticipatory Attunement

In the conceptual arc of Part I, the geometry of life extends an information theory of individuality into a phenomenology of living systems—one articulated through linguistic intentionality, adjacency, and the constellation‑like emergence of patterned meaning. The information‑theoretical concept of exbodiment, or the technological body, is re‑inscribed within a richer, multi‑layered ontology of life, while the geometric intelligence visible in Escher’s work becomes a generative pattern for understanding biological, cultural, and ecological lifelines.

Religion, Evolution, and Narrative Sociology

The phenomenology of autopoiesis, time constitution, and epigenetic ontology advances a model of relational and emergent life, foregrounding a cultural‑narrative account of human evolution in which ethical empathy, innovation, and narrative formation arise through ecological coupling and the patterned intentionality of living systems.

Part II examines religion, evolution, and narrative by exploring the intersection of sociology, cultural evolution, and the narrative constitution of meaning. Here I develop the significance of the organismic view of life—together with organismic evolution and variation—where evolvability becomes essential for affirming life’s intentionality, embodiment, and the emergence of religion through cultural narrative, as articulated by Robert Bellah. Narrative, for Bellah, is a form of poetic symbolization that shapes personal and collective identity and orients human action.

In studying religion within human evolution, Bellah draws on Kirschner and Gerhart’s idea that life develops through conserved core processes and flexible variation. Punctuated theory shows that deep structural shifts and bursts of diversification create new adaptive possibilities—suggesting that narrative, like life itself, emerges through patterned breaks and transitions.^[13]

Bellah’s incorporation of cybernetic insights allows religious symbols to be interpreted as dynamically generated within recursive systems of communication, providing a bridge to an autopoietic discourse of religion in which bricolage becomes a mode of world‑making.

Narrative sociology, operating within these finite provinces of meaning, enables a semantic relocation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games and Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms. Rather than treating them as sealed systems, narrative sociology situates them within a shared world of patterned proximity and boundary‑crossing, where meaning emerges from generative interplay across distinct regimes of sense.

Bellah’s sociology of narrative thus provides a crucial insight for reconfiguring Luhmann’s systems theory—rooted in autopoiesis—within a broader framework of narrative, meaning, and punctuated core processes. This integration opens a discourse on the deep structure of the lifeworld and its resilient, forward‑moving constellation. The doublet of biosociology and the genealogy of biopower engages epigenetic lifelines, resilience, semantic ecology, and divine concursus within higher‑order cybernetic observation, in which even alien life may be construed as a neighboring lifeline.

A Fourth‑Order Cybernetic Sociology and the Geometry of Meaning

Semantic patterns and epigenetic lifelines form the basic structures through which social reality takes shape in the Anthropocene. Genealogical connections work alongside these structures, linking ideas, interests, and power across different lifelines in ways that stabilize and deepen this shared world.

This framework remains open even to the adjacency of extraterrestrial life—not as speculative metaphysics, but as an expanded relational horizon through which living systems encounter neighboring forms of alterity.^{^[14]} Meaning is not a static property but a patterned field of resonance continually recomposed through structural coupling across biological, cultural, ecological, and symbolic strata.

Within this horizon, biosociology becomes central to analyzing the Anthropocene. It incorporates discourses of biopower and governance to examine how ideas, interests, and power are embedded through elective affinities within layered lifelines. These lifelines operate within an autopoietic–epigenetic matrix, reconfiguring social and cultural stratification as part of a larger ecological‑cybernetic whole.

Coarse-Graining and the Distributed Social Network

A cybernetic view of lifelines combines two complementary perspectives by using the idea of coarse‑graining. First, an information‑theoretic view of individuality shows how organisms propagate identity through time by compressing and transmitting traces of the past—moving from deep structure toward facilitated variation. Second, an ecological view of collective behavior explains how order emerges from networks of interaction, as seen in ant colonies where individuals respond to local signals rather than centralized control. Coarse‑grained signals—such as rapid antennal contact between outgoing and returning foragers—enable colonies to coordinate foraging, nest maintenance, and defense despite noise, irregularity, and constant change.^[15]

In such systems, each participant—whether an ant, a cell, or a neuron—acts as a node within a distributed network. Interaction modifies the environment, and the environment in turn shapes further interaction. Through this structural coupling, the system effectively “runs itself,” generating regular patterns from noisy micro‑fluctuations. This is how a colony can behave, as Deborah Gordon puts it, “like an orchestra playing a symphony without a score.”^{^[16]}

The Dual Dimensions of Emergent Pattern

In this view, a cybernetic framework understands living systems as modular, coarse‑grained networks that generate patterned forms of life. This establishes the foundation for a geometry of life, in which meaning emerges through multilevel interactions. If meaning condenses in time, revealing the conditions for individuality, then information must be understood as a structure in which traces of the past shape the present. Yet at the ecological scale, patterns of collective behavior arise synchronically from spatial networks of interaction, where surplus meanings circulate across modules layered throughout biological systems, society, culture, and ecology.

In Gordon’s model of ant interaction and collective behavior (IC), the encounter network can be interpreted through the lens of biosemiotics. Each antennal contact (A) constitutes a structural coupling between organisms, a process characteristic of all living systems. Within the colony, the pattern itself (P) becomes the meaning generated and circulated through these encounters. Interaction transfers information (I), and task allocation (TA) depends on interaction rates within a dynamical, decentralized network. Signals are integrated within physiological systems, and the modularity of the network shapes both the colony’s resilience and its speed of response to changing ecological conditions.^[17]

Formally, the interaction–modularity relation can be expressed in terms of conditional probability as:

where the emergent pattern depends on antennal contact , task‑allocation dynamics , and ecological inputs over time, all interpreted through the internal parameter.^[18]

To test for autopoietic maintenance of structural and functional integrity, the existence of a Markov blanket implies a partition of states into external, sensory, active, and internal states:

where the blanket mediates the flow of information between the colony’s internal organization and its ecological environment.^[19]

An ant’s reactions are not deterministic; its behavioral variability is stochastic and unpredictable at the rate of interaction. Thus, the colony’s organization emerges from distributed semiosis—local encounters generating global patterns of meaning.

Semantic Realism and the Individuation of Life

Krakauer’s idea of coarse‑graining describes how living systems simplify countless small differences into stable, larger‑scale patterns—from chromatin changes inside cells to the organization of life at cosmic scales. Coarse-graining enables the formation of Markov blankets, through which individuated entities emerge. Semantic realism shares with information individuality the idea that individuation requires a boundary of informational coherence, but it goes further by integrating autopoietic and phenomenological methods.

I foreground a semantic theory of individuality within the neurodynamic framework of intentionality and meaning developed by the American neuroscientist Walter Freeman. Meaning, in this view, emerges pre‑linguistically as a dynamic field of neural activity rather than as a theological, existential, or informational construct. It is generated within each of us through structural coupling with our shared world—through the actions, choices, and experiences that shape everyday life—while we learn to inhabit the lifeworld transmitted through tradition, education, and family. This shared world organizes assimilated meanings that become public knowledge to be represented, forming the basis for social, cultural, scientific, and political understanding.^[20]

A semantic theory of meaning first appears as a neural field within the living system and then develops into embodied empathy and parental care, as suggested by Frans de Waal’s co‑emergence hypothesis. The human mind is deeply entangled in symbolic culture, which grows out of the accumulated experiences of countless individuals across continents and millennia. Cultural evolution, therefore, is best understood as a process and structure of meaning‑making. Biosemiotics plays a crucial role in explaining how symbolic capacity contributes to the origin of religion, shaping its life‑meaning and anticipatory orientation through narrative and human experience.^[21]

The semantic theory of individuality does not collapse difference into unity nor fragment unity into isolated parts. Instead, it shows how living systems sustain identity through rupture, maintain coherence through variation, and generate novelty through adjacency. The life-field becomes a tessellated ensemble—stratified, distributed, and dynamically recomposed—where meaning arises from the interplay of modular architectures, anticipatory structures, and epigenetic openness.

Building on the cybernetic approach developed above, I situate religious and creation narratives within the dual structure of coarse graining, advancing a public theology of science that offers a philosophical and scientific reflection on living systems. Part III extends this semantic–biological framework into a public theology of science, examining how divine concursus, evolvability, and eschatological creation unfold within the contested terrain of modern evolutionary debates.

Divine Concursus, Living Systems, and Creation from Eschatology

Part III addresses Darwin’s dilemma and the polarized debate between intelligent design and neo‑Darwinian accounts. An analysis of chromatin biology breaks through intelligent design’s claim of irreducible complexity while exposing how creationist science misappropriates punctuated equilibrium. In response, a synthetic concept of autopoietic punctuated theory integrates dissipative structures with the ecological construction of multiple realities and the meaningful place of religion.

Natural biological history cannot be separated from social and cultural history. Public theology is therefore incomplete without serious engagement with scientific rationality, the innovation of life at higher levels, and the technological paradigm. A public theology of science is concerned with the regime of effective history in the lives of victims and those at the margins—lives neither buried nor silenced. It calls for ontological time to be rewritten in the present through reparative justice in light of the proleptic horizon. This kind of rewriting becomes possible through a form of remembering that critically examines texts and traditions, recovering what has been suppressed, distorted, or erased.

Prolepsis, in this philosophical conception, is not merely abstract anticipation but a reflective and creative horizon of meaning engaged with the unfulfilled horizon of the lifeworld constellation. The future nourishes the past, awakening anamnestic reasoning to serve as the platform for the resilience of those lives foreclosed and buried—thereby enabling an archaeological clarification of justice, truth, and meaning within the genealogy of the geometry of life.

This expresses the openness of the lifeworld, allowing kairos—the timely and qualitative moment—to be experienced not as a memory of the past but as the forward‑moving rhythm of what is coming into being.

While retention anchors us in memory, prolepsis draws us toward the possible—toward that which is not yet, but is already shaping the present as vivid presence, as proleptic proximity.

In this regard, Carl Peterson and Ted Peters provide an insightful bridge between Bohm’s ontology and theological eschatology, resonating with the biblical understanding of divine action as it unfolds within David Bohm’s implicate order and holomovement.^[22]

Given this, a public theology of science is deeply indebted to two great theologians Karl Barth and Ted Peters, despite their different theological trajectories. My aim is not to meditate on their work, but to reconfigure their most important insights within semantic realism through a transposition of divine concursus and prolepsis. This trajectory highlights the co‑constitution of a shared world as it emerges in systems biology and epigenetics. Within this horizon, cybernetic epistemology becomes crucial for advancing a concept of collaborating adjacency—the patterned relationality through which heterogeneous biological, ecological, and social processes become mutually enabling and illuminating.

Regulating the Anthropocene through Sabbath Ontology

Thus, the Anthropocene must be regulated through ecological adjacency—the recognition that future climatic, ecological, and biospheric conditions are already pressing upon the present through thresholds, feedback loops, and emergent proximities. Regulation cannot rely on distant projections alone; it must respond to the adjacent futures that are already perturbing autopoietic lifelines.

This challenge belongs to the ecological and cybernetic whole in which God acts through divine concursus and a Sabbath ontology, shaping the punctuated innovations of life. A Judeo‑Christian notion of the Sabbath is characteristic of creation ex eschaton, suggestingthat Sabbath and divine concursus underlie and enable the webs of life and their lifeworld, allowing living creatures to enjoy freedom, creativity, and to bring forth meaningful forms of life through their networks and adjacencies. At the eschaton, God’s final Sabbath (menuḥa, 1 Cor 15:28; Rev 21:4) becomes the ontological‑cosmic ground for a public theology of hope and final trust in God’s reparative justice and transformation.

Thus, the Anthropocene becomes an eschatological field rather than a geological label—a domain in which creation ex eschaton unfolds as God’s Sabbath ecology, enabling living systems to enact novelty, resilience, and reparative transformation. The ecological crisis of the Anthropocene cannot be reduced to problems of systems communication; it demands attention to shared lifelines, embodied relationality, and the interdependence of epigenetics and the biosphere, lest we lose the punctuated rhythm of divine ecology and its Sabbath ontology. No society can dispense with its autopoietic‑cybernetic lifelines stratified within the web of life, for these lifelines constitute the very conditions of ecological viability and bio‑sociological continuity.

In this way, the past becomes a living claim pressing in proximity upon the present, demanding that history be reinscribed as a semantic realm in which the voices of the vanquished are restored to visibility and moral weight. This project is not achronic but arises from the adjacent force of prolepsis, engaged with the unfulfilled horizon of the lifeworld constellation living within the vivid present. Ontological time thus embraces a temporality drawn from the prophetic, eschatological horizon, where the Spirit’s deposit opens the present to God’s future and draws creaturely life into the relational field of divine concursus.

The Final Thesis: The Geometry of Life and East Asian Culture

For the final thesis of the geometry of life and epigenetic ontology, I develop a public theology of science grounded in an epi‑poietic paradigm—one in which meaning is neither imposed from above nor reduced to functional adaptation, but arises through the patterned adjacency of lifelines, the modular architectures of living systems, and the anticipatory openness of embodied existence.

If life anticipates the future before the future arrives, patterned meaning arises in the adjacency between lifelines that underlie finite provinces of meaning across multiple levels of complexity. The lifeworld is a constellation of embodied resilience—an architecture of the geometry of life formed by an autopoietic and epigenetic matrix that is stratified, distributed, and continually recomposed.

Such a framework prepares the ground for the chapters that follow, where semantic autopoiesis, epigenetic ontology, cybernetic modeling, and divine concursus converge into a unified geometry of life.

On the other hand, within the context of East Asian thought, the geometry of life reaches its apex in the Neo‑Confucian tradition, which has long reflected on the structural coupling of qi and li. Zhang Zai (1020–1077) had already developed a field‑oriented ontology through his understanding of qi as filling the Great Vacuity, and autopoietic insights into living systems can be found phenomenologically and ecologically as well. Yet the geometric level at which life and meaning emerge—the structural dynamics of biological generation and the natural‑scientific modes of reasoning—did not fully develop, remaining instead within Daoist frameworks where li is diminished, yin–yang complementarity prevails, or various strands of qi‑philosophy dominate.

The geometry of life moves beyond these limitations by building a bridge between East Asia’s field‑oriented intuitions and contemporary quantum field theory and systems biology. This reflective horizon will be taken up again in the conclusion, while the main body of the book unfolds through natural science, phenomenology, sociology, and the public theology of science.

Taken together, these geometric intuitions mirror the recursive and modular structures that support individuality and emergent complexity. The geometry of life reinterprets these structures as patterns of meaning that span biological, semantic, theological, and ecological domains. The geometry of life begins with the integral of the lifeworld and culminates in patterned meaning and punctuated innovation as semantic information theory.

[1] Husserl, The Mathematization of Nature, 337–342, in The Essential Husserl, ed. Welton.

[2] Ibid., 353.

[3] Ibid., 360–362.

[4] West‑Eberhard, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, 610–615; Godfrey‑Smith, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, 78–84.

[5] Nichol, ed. The Essential David Bohm. 2-5.

[6] Carl F. von Weizsäcker, The Structure of Physics.

[7] Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 46.

[8] Claude Lefort, “The Question of Democracy,” 9–20, in The Political Forms of Modern Society, ed. and trans. J. B. Thompson.

[9] Taylor, Hegel, 566-571.

[10] Srnicek, Platform Capitalism.

[11] Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos.

[12] Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 43.