Introduction
The mathematical imagination behind The Geometry of Life resonates with the work of three figures: H. S. M. Coxeter, who formalized the geometry of symmetry and reflection; John Horton Conway, whose generative rules revealed how complex, lifelike patterns emerge from simple structures; and M. C. Escher, who visualized hyperbolic tessellations, continuous transformations, and multilayered spatial worlds. Together, they offer a mathematical and visual prefiguration of the adjacency, emergence, and layered meaning that this book seeks to articulate.
The conceptual architecture of the geometry of life also echoes the visual logic found in Escher’s work. In Circle Limit, patterns generate themselves across a hyperbolic field—an image of the self‑emergence of meaning, adjacency, and tessellation. In Metamorphosis, forms flow into one another through continuous transformation—evoking lifelines, transposition, and the synaptic flow of meaning. In Relativity, multiple orientations of space coexist within a single frame—suggesting layered temporality, mutual illumination, and a nexus of multilayered horizons.
Semantic autopoiesis interprets life not merely as biochemical self‑production but as the generativity of meaning. This generativity arises through modular architectures, synaptic crossings, and spandrel‑like by‑products that amplify and redistribute semantic possibility. From this episteme emerges a public theology of science grounded in an epistemology of semantic realism.
Cybernetic feedback loops are essential to this process, enabling systems to generate surplus meaning through recursive operations embedded within modular architectures.
Epigenetic ontology highlights life as open, plastic, and historically as well as socially situated. Organisms are not passive products of genetic determinism but dynamic, context‑responsive beings whose chromatin architectures, regulatory networks, and modular subsystems enable identity‑preserving rupture.
Divine concursus is reinterpreted as co‑constitution through the Spirit’s deposit as an eschatological attractor rather than as a natural‑law‑breaking intervention. God’s presence participates in the emergent creativity of living systems, enabling the semantic, relational, and modular openness through which life generates novelty, resilience, and reparative possibility.
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 to illuminate how living systems maintain identity through innovation, generate meaning through recombination, and enact co‑constituted worlds of justice, solidarity, and hope.
Phenomenology: 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.
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. For Plato, the real had a more or less perfect methexis in the ideal; but with Galileo’s mathematization of nature, nature itself becomes idealized under the guidance of the new mathematics. Nature is no longer the lived world but a mathematical manifold.
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]
A phenomenology of geometry is therefore concerned with the types of relatedness between bodily occurrences, understanding them as moments of everyday experiential intuition into the character of “belonging together” and mutual binding within the bodily network of 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 meaning. These structures are grasped and handled through our embodied operations, in speech and in writing.
With this in mind, my concern is with an autopoietic phenomenology in the tradition of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Francisco Varela. 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.
In fact, Husserl warns that the meaning of mathematical natural science becomes emptied through technization. He therefore strives to overcome its superficiality by returning to the lifeworld as the forgotten meaning-foundation of natural science.[2]
Accordingly, I widen the geometry of the lifeworld into a multi-tiered investigation of living systems across biological, social, cultural, and ecological spheres. In doing so, I translate abstract mathematical operators into a dynamic semantic theory of individuality—inquiring back into how nature renders itself intelligible.
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. Consciousness constitutes time not through static continuity, but through differential transformation; it is the movement of difference that generates the very flow of time.
If semantic individuality is a stabilized configuration of meaning—whether in organisms, social entities, cultural patterns, or ecological unities—then semantic individuation refers to the differential movement between meaning and environment through structural coupling. 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. These require an immanent and responsible critique of prejudices, obscurities, and sedimented conceptual systems taken for granted, as well as an emancipatory movement grounded in apodictic steps forward and in the self-interpretation of experience.[3]
Semantic Autopoiesis and Its New Trajectory
Semantic autopoiesis unfolds within an evolutionary landscape shaped by anticipatory processes. The transition from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life—an event in which previously independent organisms entered into symbiotic association—illustrates how biological systems form higher‑order units of functional tessellation. Such transitions reveal a deeper evolutionary dynamic: life persists and innovates by integrating present conditions with future‑oriented adaptive possibilities.
Organisms frequently behave as though aspects of the future are already implicit in present conditions, adjusting development in anticipation of ecological states signaled by current environments.[4]
Within this framework, tessellating refers to the fitting together of genetic, developmental, behavioral, and cultural elements into coherent, gap‑free configurations. Tessellating prolepsis designates the anticipatory dimension of adaptation: organisms rely on internal generative models—rooted in developmental structures, facilitated variation, and cultural scaffolding—to innovate rapidly under stress.
Across multiple biological domains, anticipation emerges as a fundamental principle. Developmental plasticity, as Mary Jane West‑Eberhard shows, functions as an anticipatory mechanism that prepares organisms for ecological states not yet present. [5] Niche construction likewise engineers future environments, scaffolding developmental pathways for forthcoming conditions.[6]
Jablonka and Lamb demonstrate that epigenetic and environmental interactions enable organisms to adjust developmental trajectories in ways that anticipate likely future states, generating adaptive preparedness for near‑future environments.[7]
These insights reconfigure autopoiesis within the anticipatory horizon of epi‑poiesis. Living systems do not operate as closed circuits but as future‑oriented processes embedded within stratified lifelines—biological, social, cultural, and ecological. The lifeworld constellation arises in adjacency with these epigenetically patterned lifelines, forming a multidimensional architecture in which meaning, resilience, and emergence co‑constitute one another.
When proleptic adjacency, resilience, co‑constitution, and deep developmental structures couple with these lifelines, they generate an amplified mode of emergence—a resilience constellation that functions as an attractor basin. This constellation enables the lifeworld to arise as a meaningful form of life across multiple realities and levels of complexity. Such an architecture grounds a metatheory of semantic autopoiesis oriented toward epi‑poiesis. Within this horizon, meaning and truth appear as embodied forms of emergence rather than metaphysical abstractions.
Semantic Ecology, 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 meaning. Meaning is not a subsystem or a functional code; it is the ensemble integral of all lifeworld interactions. This can be expressed in the fundamental equation of the geometry of life:
This equation states that meaning is the ensemble integral of lifeworld interactions. This formulation clarifies how meaning arises from patterned relations—linking life, information, emergence, networks, and even divine concursus within a single generative structure. Within this living manifold, meaning ceases to be an abstraction; it becomes partially tessellated, woven like constellations across a stellar 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.
Linguistic suspension breaks through systems‑language as a fixed and irreversible discourse carried by non‑intersubjectivity and authority‑based decision. At the same time, it offers an alternative to the ideal speech situation, which often undermines adjacency with the plurality of language‑games stratified across culture, society, religion, race, and gender.
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. From this perspective, the lifeworld is not, as in Habermas, a background of language, culture, or tradition, but 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]
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.
Within the paradigm of semantic modernity, I take a cybernetic insight and transform it into a theological reflection on AI at the level of second‑order observation, avoiding anthropomorphism, metaphysical inflation, and category collapse. AI is placed in adjacency—next to human agency, not inside it; next to meaning‑making, not as its source. This yields a theology of second‑order observation in which AI remains cybernetic, assisting human beings in bringing forth meaningful forms of life.
This semantic 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. Platform capitalism fundamentally transforms the structure of capitalism through algorithmic management, behavioral prediction, and data extraction, reorganizing social life into a cybernetic economy of surveillance, optimization, and automated decision‑making.[10]
Within this alternative modernity, David Krakauer’s concept of exbodiment becomes crucial for analyzing cybernetic AI against the backdrop of platform capitalism. The externalization of the human mind—its outsourcing into engineered matter—allows technical instruments to function not as replacements, but as computational collaborators, reshaping human thought through a two-way feedback loop.
Today, the individual confronts an exbodied image of the self constructed by social media, while navigating cultural pressures through a disembodied mind. Within this tension, utilitarian rationality—driven by instrumental optimization—is challenged by a deeper question: how can these technical instruments of exbodiment be re-engineered to serve and enhance value-rationality within our embodied culture?
Amediation of adjacency—a difference‑preserving mediation—rethinks modernity beyond the traditional focus on embodiment. It calls for an alternative modernity that reconceives exbodiment as a socio‑technical field shaped by scientific and technological rationality, and as a domain in which linguistic intentionality generates new patterns of meaning, relation, and cultural formation.
Evolvability, Epigenetic Ontology, and the Anthropocene
Evolvability—or life’s biological intentionality—can be understood as the inherent capacity to preserve, transform, and innovate in the meaningful construction of its world. This capacity for relational modulation finds a parallel in human cultural evolution, linguistic communication, and the formation of social institutions, where meaning emerges through patterns of adjacency rather than through the subsumption of difference. This living modulation is fundamentally rooted in the thermodynamics of open systems. Ilya Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures remains essential for understanding how self organization generates emergence and novelty. In biological systems, nonlinearity, instability, and fluctuations are indispensable for explaining creativity and the appearance of new forms. Under far from equilibrium conditions, chemical clocks arise—reactions that display coherent, rhythmic behavior through self organizing processes, revealing how life’s temporal patterns are generated through dynamic openness rather than deterministic closure.[11]
Autopoiesis at the cellular level is embedded within chromatin mechanisms—such as DNA methylation—through which socio-environmental factors modulate gene activity. This dimension is central to social epigenetics, which investigates changes in organisms arising from modifications in gene expression without altering the underlying genetic code. Epigenetic ontology is therefore essential for understanding the body in relation to individual activity, lifestyle, society, and culture, revealing how biological intentionality is shaped through patterns of adjacency rather than genetic determinism.
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. These adjacent thresholds activate the same anticipatory dynamics found in evolvability and epigenetic plasticity, where organisms adjust development in response to signals of likely future states. In this sense, the Anthropocene is not merely a geological epoch but an anticipatory field in which future conditions press into the present through nonlinear proximities and relational modulation.
This anticipatory field sets the stage for understanding how living and social systems respond to nonlinear pressures. In this context, at the core of social ecological resilience lies the capacity to adapt—reorganizing internal structures in response to stress—and to transform—shifting into new configurations when existing structures can no longer sustain viability. These capacities enable social ecological systems to persist through nonlinear change without losing defining identity, embodying a difference preserving dynamism that resonates with the epigenetic and ecological patterns of life.[12]
Thus, social ecological resilience—understood through its stratified epigenetic lifelines—allows us to redefine the Anthropocene not as a descriptive domain governed by linear prediction but as a field of adjacent prolepsis and lifeworld constellation. The Anthropocene marks the anthropocentric reconfiguration of the biosphere—a transformation driven by the unprecedented mass of human bodies, domesticated animals, and the expanding technosphere—which represents the runaway macro-scale manifestation of human exbodiment. This produces an epipoietic, distorted coupling that is unilateral and aggressive: lifelines become stratified across society, culture, and ecology in a degenerative rather than co constitutional manner, generating a boomerang effect in which biospheric disruption returns to colonize and erode the lifeworld constellation. This episteme reframes the Anthropocene as a breakdown of co constitution within ecologically stratified lifelines—a temporal field of degenerative adjacency, layered in asymmetrical and extractive relations rather than a merely geological designation.
When the point of irreversible damage was reached—damage born of human forces—it became clear that 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.[13]
Against this backdrop, epigenetic resilience within stratified lifelines becomes a barometer of how the systemic boomerang effect undermines the lifeworld constellation and precipitates mutual collapse. Adjacent prolepsis names the ontology of living systems that emerges within structured proximity to future states, awakening adaptive plasticity, epigenetic resilience, and the capacity to respond before critical thresholds are crossed. It describes a mode of anticipatory attunement in which living systems sense, prefigure, and metabolize future conditions, enabling identity preserving transformation rather than degenerative drift.
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 meaning. The information theoretical concept of exbodiment 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 emergence.
Religion, Evolution, and Narrative Sociology
The phenomenology of autopoiesis, time constitution, and epigenetic ontology advances an innovative model of relational, generative, and emergent life. This framework foregrounds a cultural‑narrative approach to human evolution, in which autopoietic innovation unfolds within 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.
Bellah emphasizes narrative as a form of poetic symbolization arising from the coherence of a story as a whole. Human beings are inherently narrative creatures, with the “telling self” at the core of human identity. Narrative is the primary medium through which humans make sense of their lives, shaping personal and collective identities that influence politics, society, and culture.
For the sociological study of religion in human evolution, Bellah draws on the insights of Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, who highlight the deep structure of conserved core processes alongside diverse networks and linkages that facilitate variation. Punctuated theory underscores the significance of deep structure and the diversification of an organism’s adaptation, conservation, and development—revealing how narrative, like life itself, emerges through patterned discontinuities and generative thresholds.[14]
Bellah’s sociology of religion is deeply shaped by Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology, especially his analysis of multiple realities and the suspension of the natural attitude. Bellah extends Schutz by incorporating a cybernetic understanding of religion, allowing religious symbols to be interpreted as dynamically generated within recursive systems of communication. This move provides a crucial bridge to an autopoietic discourse of religion: the narrative construction of reality becomes a systemic, embodied, and post‑structural process in which bricolage functions as a mode of world‑making.
Although time advances irreversibly, autopoietic systems enact this temporal flow through recursive, self‑referential cycles that modulate past, present, and future. Biological temporality is therefore neither linear nor merely sequential; it emerges through embodiment, networked communication, and enactive engagement with the environment. This yields a philosophical account of time grounded in relational and emergent modes of thought.
I call this emergent temporality ontological time: the time through which a living system enacts its world, generates meaning, and orients itself toward a future that is not yet given but continually coming into being. This ontological constitution of time as the vivid present is indebted to Schutz’s account of multiple realities and finite provinces of meaning—an insight foundational for Bellah’s sociology of religion.
Within this framework, a sociology of multiple realities reconceives finite provinces of meaning as generative sites of meaning production. These provinces do not remain isolated; they operate in adjacency with other regimes of meaning within a proleptic arc. Such adjacency breaks through the stronghold of the incommensurable that has dominated the postmodern condition.
This sociological reconfiguration can be understood, by analogy, through the synaptic crossings of the neural living system. A synapse functions as a semantic hub where information is amplified, enriched, and transmitted to neighboring cells. In a similar way, finite provinces of meaning become semantic synapses—sites where meaning is intensified, transposed, and opened toward new configurations.
Autopoiesis, in this sense, is always structurally coupled with its neighboring domains through synaptic crossings. Yet it preserves its difference, maintaining identity while remaining open to adjacency, resonance, and emergent meaning.
Narrative sociology, operating within finite provinces of meaning, enables a semantic relocation of Wittgenstein’s language games and Kuhn’s incommensurable paradigms. Rather than treating these theoretical positions as isolated or mutually sealed systems, narrative sociology situates them within a shared world of adjacency and a tessellated ensemble structured by the intentional arc. Meaning emerges not from separation but from patterned proximity, boundary‑crossing, and the generative interplay of distinct regimes of sense.
Bellah’s incorporation of the punctuated theory of cellular life enriches a sociology of narrative by linking multiple realities and diverse meaning provinces to patterned processes of synaptic crossing—transposition, hyperbolic tessellations, continuous transformations, and multilayered spatial worlds in mutual illumination. Together, these elements offer a mathematical and visual prefiguration of adjacency, emergence, and layered meaning that weave cultural narrative and semantic modernity.
Bellah’s sociology of narrative provides a crucial insight that allows me to reconfigure the system theory of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann—rooted in the biological concept of autopoiesis—within a broader framework of narrative, meaning, and the punctuated theory of core conserved processes and facilitated variation. This integration opens a discourse on the deep structure of the lifeworld and its resilient, forward‑moving constellation.
Influenced by Bellah’s cybernetic model of religion, I refine his synthesis of Weber’s method of meaningful action and Durkheim’s conception of collective representations—mediated through Geertz’s cultural system of symbols—by developing a dual articulation of semantic realism. This dual articulation unfolds through an external analysis of tessellating nearness and synaptic crossing, and through a genealogical analysis of multiple realities via elective affinities embedded within cultural stratification and ecological‑epigenetic lifelines.
Semantic realism therefore requires a double movement: tessellated mosaic patterns as external synaptic contact, and elective affinity as internal genealogical analysis of system operations, self‑reference, and meaning production—including the pathologies of the iron cage within a cybernetics‑of‑cybernetics perspective.
This doublet—bio‑sociology and the genealogy of biopower—extends into the biosphere of the Anthropocene, engaging epigenetic lifelines, resilience, semantic ecology, and divine concursus within the proleptic arc of fourth‑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 tessellation and epigenetic lifelines form the primary architecture through which social reality takes shape within the Anthropocene lifeworld. Genealogical elective affinities operate alongside these structures, linking ideas, interests, and power across layered lifelines in ways that deepen and stabilize this co‑constituted 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. Meaning, in this sense, is not a static property but a patterned field of resonance continually recomposed through structural coupling across biological, cultural, ecological, and symbolic strata.[15]
Within this horizon, bio‑sociology becomes central to analyzing the Anthropocene. It incorporates discourses of biopower and governance to explore 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
My cybernetic account of lifelines brings together two complementary perspectives through the lens 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. [16]
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.” [17]
The Dual Dimensions of Emergent Meaning
A cybernetic framework of lifelines therefore treats living systems as modular, coarse‑grained networks that bring forth meaningful forms of life. This provides 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 level, meaning also emerges synchronically from spatial networks of interaction, where surplus meanings circulate across modules layered throughout biological systems, society, culture, and ecology.
Thus, the geometry of life and meaning encompasses both:
• temporal emergence—evolution, information flow, and the formation of individuality through epigenesis, and • network emergence—embodied subjectivity arising through adjacency, stratification, and tessellation within distributed interactional orders.
In my engagement with two renowned scientists and biologists, I transpose information mathematics into a semantic operator: through structural coupling, Krakauer’s formalism becomes the generative geometry of meaning itself. Mathematics—once confined to external description—undergoes a punctuated metamorphosis into the semantic geometry of life, fulfilling the phenomenological demand to return science to the lifeworld.
Semantic Realism and the Individuation of Life
Krakauer’s coarse-graining is a universal law of life: from chromatin remodeling to cosmic-scale organization, life can exist only by compressing micro-differences into stable macro-patterns. 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 lifeworld organizes assimilated meanings that become public knowledge to be represented, forming the basis for social, cultural, scientific, and political understanding.[18]
Here, representation is Kantian in the sense that it is grounded in embodied experience and the limits of human cognition, not in Barbour’s logical‑positivist model of individualistic representation and correspondence.
In the emergentist approach, 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.[19]
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 lifeworld becomes a tessellated ensemble—stratified, distributed, and dynamically recomposed—where meaning arises from the interplay of modular architectures, anticipatory structures, and epigenetic openness. Within this ensemble, semantic realism affirms that truth is neither merely representational nor purely constructed, but emerges through embodied participation in the relational fields of life.
Divine Concursus, Living Systems, and Creation from the Eschatological Whole
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 addresses Darwin’s dilemma and the polarized debate between intelligent design and neo‑Darwinian accounts of divine action. 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 emergence 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. Such rewriting is made possible by anamnestic reason, which—through an archaeological analysis of discourse and documents—recovers 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 life emergence and 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.
It constitutes the open‑endedness of the lifeworld, allowing the melody of kairos—the opportune and qualitative moment—to be heard not as recollection of what has passed but as the forward‑pulling 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.
Given this, a public theology of science is deeply indebted to two great theologians—and my teachers—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 problematic belongs to the ecological‑cybernetic whole from which God creates through divine concursus and a Sabbath ontology in the punctuated innovation of life. 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 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 Ultimate Conclusion: The Semantic Operator of Individuality
For the final thesis of the geometry of life and epigenetic ontology, I therefore develop a public theology of science grounded in an epi‑poietic paradigm—one in which meaning is not imposed from above nor reduced to functional adaptation, but emerges through the patterned adjacency of lifelines, the modular architectures of living systems, and the anticipatory openness of embodied existence. Life unfolds through stratified biological, cultural, ecological, and theological processes that remain structurally coupled yet irreducibly plural. These processes form the semantic and ontological conditions under which living systems generate novelty, preserve identity, and enact worlds of justice, solidarity, and hope.
If life anticipates the future before the future arrives, meaning emerges in the adjacency between lifelines underlying finite provinces of meaning at multiple levels of complexity. The lifeworld is a constellation of embodied resilience—an architecture of emergence shaped by an autopoietic and epigenetic matrix that is stratified, distributed, and continually recomposed. This geometric configuration provides the metatheoretical grounding for understanding life emergence as a dynamic interplay of prolepsis, resilience, recognition, and co‑constitution.
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. This geometry reveals how living systems generate meaning, sustain identity through rupture, and orient themselves toward futures already pressing upon the present in patterned proximity. It is within this anticipatory field—this tessellated horizon of emergence—that a public theology of science takes shape.
Taken together, these geometric intuitions parallel the recursive, modular, and information‑theoretic architectures essential to individuality and emergent complexity—architectures that a geometry of life reinterprets as semantic, biological, theological, and ecological patterns of meaning. In this way, I extend an information theory of individuality into a semantic ecology and open a new phenomenology of life.
The geometry of life begins with the integral of the lifeworld—and it concludes with meaning as the semantic operator of individuality.
[1] Husserl, The Mathematization of Nature, 337–342.
[2] Ibid., 353.
[3] Ibid., 360–362.
[4] Godfrey‑Smith, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, 78–84.
[5] West‑Eberhard, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, 610–615
[6] John Odling‑Smee et al. Niche Construction, 186-190.
[7] Jablonka et al. Evolution in Four Dimensions, 155–160. 206-210.
[8] Claude Lefort, “The Question of Democracy,” pp. 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] Walker et al. Resilience Thinking, 61–78.
[13] Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 43.
[14] Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 65-75.
[15] Peters, UFO: God’s Chariot?
[16] Gordon, Ant Encounters, 48-49.
[17] Ibid., 47.
[18] Freeman, How Brains Make Up Their Minds, 15.
[19] Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 69, 101.