How do we determine autonomy?  In an interesting book called Incomplete Minds, Terence Deacon makes the point that the planet’s various systems, be they meteorological, chemical, biological, physical, or otherwise, represent what he calls “autonomous complex systems” that are “inanimate but stable.”  In other words, as I understand it, the complexities of the systems that are woven into the globe are highly complex and largely autonomous.  Autonomous from what?  Well, they did not need anything else to be, nor do they need anything else to continue to be.  They will persist as they are, perhaps changing and adapting to the requirements of a passing moment but always remaining essentially the same.

     Surprisingly, much of Christian theology would agree with this.  After the Flood, according to the account in Genesis 8, God tells Noah that as long as the Earth remains, “Seed time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease.”  In other words, we can be assured that as long the world is here, its essential rhythms will continue.  Even if they experience upheaval, say, droughts, extraordinarily wicked hurricanes, or massive earthquakes, they will continue:  the sun will still rise every morning and set every evening.

     Moreover, on the face of it, these systems do indeed seem to be, as Deacon puts it, “self-organizing,” that is, they shift and weave according to the demands of the moment, yet always succeed in continuing on.  They need nothing else.  Granted, Deacon will readily admit that all of the planet’s systems are interrelated; none can function independently of the other.  Like the ancient Greek idea of Gaia, the interconnectedness of all things, so are the earth’s systems:  they are not absolutely autonomous.

     If this is so, then what is?  A companion question is, does anything, anything at all, need to be autonomous?  Several millennia ago, Aristotle averred that there must be an “Unmoved Mover,” a self-sustaining entity that sets all other things in motion.  Where else, he argued, would anything have come from?  Thinking in a similar vein, modern thermodynamics observes that matter cannot simply pop out of nothing.  Either way, there can be no present autonomy unless there existed a precedent that was completely autonomous.  Interdependency sustains, but it cannot create.  Can anything create itself?