The First Incarnation: Hope in Reality

A collegiate course in philosophy emphasizing material and mechanical foundations for the creation of the world shook Robert E. Ulanowicz’s youthful faith to its core. Having difficulty accepting a purely secular and meaningless worldview, Ulanowicz persisted in searching for clues to give meaning to the nature of the cosmos and the evolution of life as we know it. Reaching adulthood in the midst of his career in ecology, his work with networks of connected living processes convinced him that the importance of processes eclipses the subsidiary role that classical thermodynamics had assigned to them. Rather, Ulanowicz discovered what he considers the origins of phenomena that had been considered subjective and outside the purview of physics. The First Incarnation / Hope in Reality stands alone in that it introduces theoretical ecosystems’ results to enrich the dialogue between science and religion. In this work, Ulanowicz deconstructs the prevailing view among many scientists that all causality issues from below via the universal force laws of physics at micro-scales and propagates up the hierarchy of life. Though these laws are not violated, they lose their powers to determine outcomes at larger scales and can only constrain against impossible outcomes. Agency must be added to the foundations of evolutionary theory, and this reformation provides rationale for believers to regard agency as an action of a Creator. Ulanowicz is a graduate of the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and received his PhD in chemical engineering from The Johns Hopkins University. He spent his career as a theoretical ecologist at the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, specializing in ecological network analysis. Ulanowicz received the 2007 Ilya A Prigogine Medal for excellence in ecosystem dynamics and has published three books on the philosophy of ecosystem theory and 216 publications in refereed scientific journals (including twelve essays in journals on science and religion).