What Might an Emergent Higher Power Be Like?

A few days ago, in an online discussion about grief, God and belief, writer Shelly Hickman wrote a sentence that stayed with me. After describing how her idea of God had changed, she said she now thought less in terms of a personal God who hears and responds, and more of “a creative energy or intelligence that we may be able to tap into if we only knew how, but has no personal relationship with us.”

That seems to me a useful sentence. Not because it proves anything, but because it separates two ideas that are often joined together. The first is the idea that there may be some form of higher order, intelligence or creative process beyond the individual human mind. The second is the idea that this higher order must have a personal relationship with us.

Traditional religion often assumes both. God exists and knows you. God hears you, loves you, judges you, forgives you, and may intervene in your life. Atheism often rejects the whole package. There is no such being, so there is no higher intelligence, no larger purpose, and no order above us except the movement of matter and energy.

But perhaps there is a third possibility. A higher power, if the phrase is still useful, may be real without being personal. It may be something we participate in rather than something that listens to us. It may shape us without knowing us. It may be available in some sense, but not obedient to prayer, wish or moral demand.

That is not theology in the usual sense. It is closer to a question about emergence.

The Problem with Imagining God as a Person

Human beings naturally imagine higher powers in personal terms. We are social mammals. We understand the world through agency, looking for intention, care, threat, approval and blame. When something matters to us, we instinctively ask who is behind it.

So it is not surprising that our gods often resemble enlarged humans. They have preferences, rules, emotions and favourites. They become angry, issue instructions, reward loyalty and punish disobedience. Even when they are described as beyond comprehension, they often behave in stories like powerful people.

That may tell us more about human cognition than about reality.

If a higher form of order or intelligence were emerging from life itself, there would be no reason to assume it would resemble a person. A colony is not a large ant. A brain is not a large neuron. A culture is not a large citizen. Higher levels of organisation do not simply enlarge the parts below them. They produce new properties.

That is the point of emergence.

What Emergence Suggests

Emergence occurs when interacting parts produce a higher-level pattern or capacity that no individual part possesses on its own. A single neuron does not think. A brain does. A single ant does not understand colony-level behaviour. The colony, however, regulates itself, allocates labour, responds to threats and solves problems. A single human does not create language, law, science, money or religion. These are produced by many humans interacting over time.

Once we accept emergence at lower levels, it becomes harder to insist that it must stop at the human mind. It may stop there, of course. There is no guarantee that anything higher exists. But there is also no obvious reason to assume that human intelligence is the upper limit of organised intelligence.

This is where Biogenics becomes useful. It does not begin by asking what life means. It begins by asking what life does. Across scales, living systems must perform three basic functions. They must produce and sustain themselves. They must organise themselves into coherent structures. They must correct themselves when they drift, fail, or encounter new conditions.

In Biogenics, these are self-production, self-organisation and self-correction.

A living system that cannot produce itself ceases to exist. A system that cannot organise itself dissolves into noise. A system that cannot correct itself becomes rigid, delusional, or dead. Life persists by keeping these three processes in play.

The interesting question is what happens when these processes operate at ever-larger scales.

The Higher Level Is Hard to See from Below

There is an uncomfortable feature of emergence. The lower level helps produce the higher level, but it does not necessarily understand it. A neuron participates in thought without knowing what thought is. A gut bacterium contributes to an organism's life without knowing there is an organism. An individual citizen contributes to a culture without understanding the full logic of that culture.

This is not because the parts are stupid. It is because they operate at the wrong scale. Their information is local. Their behaviour is local. The higher-level pattern is distributed across relationships, feedback loops, history, memory and the environment.

I have called this emergent ignorance. The idea is simple enough. When higher levels of organisation emerge, the parts below them may be structurally unable to see what they are helping to create.

This should make us cautious. We may be asking the wrong kind of question when we ask whether a higher power exists. We may be looking for a face, a voice or an intention because those are the forms of intelligence we recognise. But if a higher order emerged from biological, cultural, ecological or technological systems, it might not present itself in any of those forms.

It may not be hidden. It may simply be too large, too slow, too distributed or too unlike us to recognise.

A Higher Power Without a Personal Relationship

The most confronting aspect of Hickman’s sentence is the idea that such a power “has no personal relationship with us.” That contradicts a deep human need. We want the universe to know what has happened to us. We want our losses to be registered somewhere. We want our love, grief, courage and private suffering to matter beyond the small circle of people who witnessed them.

A personal God answers that need. A personal God says: you are seen, your pain is not lost, and your life matters to the deepest structure of reality. That idea carries enormous emotional power, and I would not dismiss it lightly.

But emergence points in a different direction. The higher level may matter profoundly to the lower level without having a personal relationship with it. My body does not have a personal relationship with each cell. A forest does not have a personal relationship with each leaf. A culture does not have a personal relationship with each person.

Yet these higher-level systems are real. They shape the conditions in which their parts live. They sustain, constrain, repair, consume and outlast them.

So if there is an emergent higher power, it may not love us as a parent loves a child. It may not hear us as one person hears another. It may not intervene in response to our distress. It may not even possess anything we would recognise as intention.

That does not make it unreal. It makes it different from the thing we were hoping for.

Could We Tap Into It?

The other half of Hickman’s sentence is more hopeful. She suggests that this creative energy or intelligence may be something “we may be able to tap into if we only knew how”.

A biogenic interpretation would keep this practical. To tap into a larger living order may mean learning to align with the processes that keep living systems viable. That means supporting self-production: growth, repair, creation, renewal, and the capacity to keep generating life rather than merely consuming it.

It means supporting self-organisation: relationships, boundaries, institutions and roles that sustain complexity without collapse. It means supporting self-correction: feedback, truth-telling, adaptation, apology, repair and the willingness to update when reality refuses to align with our theories.

This is not mystical. It is systems logic.

A person is more aligned with life when they help living systems become more capable, coherent and corrigible. A family is more aligned when it can nurture, organise and repair itself. An institution is more aligned when it can pursue its purpose without becoming rigid, extractive or self-deceiving. A civilisation is more aligned when it can sustain the conditions for life rather than burn them through for short-term advantage.

If there is a higher emergent order, perhaps we do not access it by pleading with it. We access it by participating in the processes that make it possible.

Not Proof, but a Better Question

There is an obvious objection. Is this just a way of smuggling God back in through systems theory?

It could become that if handled carelessly. Humans are very good at turning useful ideas into comforting idols. We can quietly turn “life has emergent properties” into “the universe wants me to be happy.” That would be a mistake.

Nature is not sentimental. Life includes cancer, predation, extinction, parasitism, error and collapse. Any account of higher order that ignores these facts is not serious.

So the claim should remain modest. I am not arguing that God exists, that consciousness survives death, or that the universe has a plan. I am suggesting that emergence allows us to ask a different question: could higher levels of intelligence or order arise from life itself, and could we be participating in them without fully understanding them?

That question seems worth asking.

Where This Leaves Us

A higher power, if one exists, may not be a being. It may be a process. It may not be outside nature. It may arise from nature. It may not know us personally. Yet it may still shape the conditions of our existence.

This is less comforting than the old idea of God. It does not promise reunion with the dead, guarantee justice, or tell us that suffering is part of a plan.

But it may be a more biologically plausible way to think about higher order. It allows awe without requiring supernatural machinery. It allows meaning without pretending the universe is a parent. It allows humility without abandoning reason.

Most importantly, it changes the practical question.

Instead of asking, “Does a higher power care about me?” we might ask, “Am I participating well in the living systems that sustain me?”

Am I producing what is life-giving? Am I helping organise what would otherwise fragment? Am I correcting what is false, harmful or no longer adaptive?

Those questions do not require certainty about God. They simply ask us to take life seriously as a layered, emergent process.

A higher power, if one exists, may not be waiting above us with a face and a plan. It may be emerging around us and through us, in the long struggle of life to keep producing, organising and correcting itself.

We may not be loved by it. We may not be known by it. But we may still belong to it.

And perhaps learning how to belong intelligently is what “tapping into it” really means.