‘Order Out of Chaos: Possibilities for Transformation’, the title of the 33rd annual Mystics and Scientists conference proved apt in unexpected ways right from the start. I was at this conference, organized by the Scientific and Medical Network (SMN) and held at the University of Winchester in Southern England. But chaos intervened in the form of the erupting Icelandic volcano which grounded all air flight in Northern Europe, with the result that some speakers couldn’t physically get to the conference. Some joked that it was the revenge of Gaia to stop us flying and protect the planet. But video links were set up and order quickly restored.

SMN, in its aim to forge a creative understanding of the complementary roles of mystical and scientific approaches to reality, could be said to be the UK equivalent of IONS; both were founded in 1973, and I had listened to Marilyn Schlitz, head of IONS, say as much, in a presentation organized by the SMN in London, only a week previously. SMN conferences are friendly informal affairs, and there’s plenty of time to chat with the very erudite crowd they attract; all on first names terms, you find out later that Jim or Bill you’ve been chatting with over tea, is some famous cosmologist or physicist.

What especially drew me here was the evolutionary dimension as represented by speakers Simon Conway Morris and Stuart Kauffman, who bring quite different approaches to the subject of evolutionary emergence, and provoked many more questions than they answered.

Stuart Kaufman, a biocomplexity theorist, speaks with such conviction and passion that he sounds like a believer, though he states right away that he doesn’t believe in a supernatural God. Marveling at the almost infinite complexity of self organization in biological organisms, which makes prediction impossible, he asserts that there is no law which can describe the becoming of the biosphere. We don’t know what will happen and we don’t know what can happen in the evolution of the biosphere. In its place we have endless, ceaseless creativity which has brought forth everything. And he’s happy to call this creativity ‘God’, in the sense of a natural God. He exclaims that we need a new Enlightenment: we need Einstein and Shakespeare in the same room!

Then Simon Conway Morris lays out a powerfully convincing picture of evolutionary convergence at a profound level throughout creation, all delivered with a razor sharp English wit. He argues that evolution is predictable and that human beings are inevitable in our universe, the expected result of evolutionary patterns deeply embedded in the structure of the universe. Humans inevitable? – sounds extremely deterministic to me. And yet he’s clearly no materialistic ‘genetic fundamentalist’ who say we are all puppets of our genes. His view as an evolutionary paleobiologist is deeper and more mysterious, as he’s pointing to the nature of the underlying structure of the universe which makes evolution happen the way it has and does. It was news to me that apparently birds evolved at least twice, maybe four times, and the camera eye which we humans have, has evolved separately in squid and even jellyfish. Convergence is common and occurs at molecular levels too.

Did I really hear him say ‘Evolution is a search engine for the universe to become self aware’? I’m almost doubting this as I write , but I noted it down at the time, since it was such a striking phrase. It sends me into a contemplation just considering this! Speaking to Simon afterwards, it’s clear he holds a spiritual perspective and he believes there is an intelligence in the universe which is an increasingly emergent quality and that genes can’t possibly explain everything.

I’m left with a fascinating creative tension between the two views: evolution is predictable and evolution cannot possibly be predicted.