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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Four Roads to the Sacred

Ken Wilber, Brendan Graham Dempsey, John Vervaeke, and Religious Naturalism

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Introduction: The search for a post-secular spirituality

The contemporary search for a new spirituality has produced several intellectual movements that deserve to be examined together. Although they differ in philosophical orientation, terminology, and ambition, they share a common dissatisfaction with what they regard as the limitations of conventional secular naturalism. Ken Wilber, Brendan Graham Dempsey, John Vervaeke, and the Religious Naturalist Association represent four different approaches to this problem. Wilber offers an evolutionary metaphysics in which Spirit manifests through increasingly complex forms of existence. Dempsey explores metamodern spirituality and the possibility of reconstructing theology after modernity and postmodernity. Vervaeke develops a naturalistic account of meaning, wisdom, and human flourishing, drawing on cognitive science and ancient philosophical traditions. Religious naturalists seek to recover the existential, ethical, and communal dimensions of religion without accepting supernaturalism.

These projects should not be treated as interchangeable. In fact, their differences are philosophically significant. Some are more committed to scientific naturalism than others; some retain explicitly theological language; others attempt to explain religious experience through cognitive science and cultural evolution.

Nevertheless, they converge on an important question:

Can we recover the depth, meaning, and transformative possibilities of religion without reintroducing the metaphysical assumptions that modern scientific inquiry has called into question?

My interest here is not to dismiss these projects simply because they employ spiritual language. Rather, it is to examine what they actually claim, how their arguments differ, and whether their proposed synthesis of science and spirituality succeeds.

The danger is that the search for a post-secular worldview can become an exercise in rehabilitating traditional religious intuitions through contemporary philosophical and scientific vocabulary.

To understand whether that is happening, we need to look at each approach separately.

1. Ken Wilber: Evolution as the unfolding of Spirit

Integral theory, the Great Nest of Being, involution and evolution, Eros, and Spirit-in-action.

Wilber represents perhaps the most ambitious attempt to integrate spirituality into an evolutionary worldview. His project is not simply to make room for religious experience within science. He proposes an overarching metaphysical framework in which physical, biological, psychological, cultural, and spiritual development are different dimensions of one unfolding Kosmos.

His central idea is that evolution is driven by Eros, an intrinsic impulse toward greater complexity, consciousness, and depth. Matter gives rise to life, life to mind, mind to soul, and soul to Spirit. Each successive level transcends and includes the preceding ones.

This evolutionary process is paired with involution: Spirit has already descended or enfolded itself into the lower levels of existence, making their eventual evolutionary development possible.

Wilber therefore does not regard evolution as an entirely contingent natural process. It is the return, or rediscovery, of a spiritual reality that was already present in potential.

There is an attractive philosophical vision here. Wilber recognizes that evolutionary history involves the emergence of genuinely new levels of organization, and he insists that a comprehensive worldview should not reduce consciousness, culture, and values to descriptions of physical processes alone.

But his explanation introduces a substantial metaphysical commitment.

Why should the emergence of more complex forms of organization be interpreted as the unfolding of Spirit? Why should evolutionary novelty require an antecedent spiritual reality? And what independent evidence establishes Eros as an actual causal force?

These questions are particularly important because Wilber sometimes presents Eros as something comparable to the fundamental forces of physics.

The problem is not that evolution produces complexity. It demonstrably does so in certain circumstances. The problem is the additional claim that this development expresses an intrinsic cosmic impulse toward higher spiritual realization.

That claim goes beyond evolutionary biology and established complexity science.

Wilber's position is therefore better described as evolutionary metaphysical spirituality than as naturalism in the strict scientific sense. His universe is natural only in the expanded integral sense that includes subtle and causal dimensions of existence.

This distinction matters. Calling his project naturalistic does not resolve the question of whether those additional dimensions exist.

2. Brendan Graham Dempsey: A metamodern reconstruction of God

Metamodernism, developmental spirituality, participatory cosmology, and the DEPTH model.

Dempsey's approach is particularly interesting because it attempts to retain something that Wilber's system also preserves: the reality of the divine.

His March 2026 paper, "Towards a Metamodern Theology: The DEPTH Model," proposes a developmental, emergent, participatory theology of harmonization. The ambition is to move beyond the opposition between traditional theism and modern or postmodern criticism of religion.

Traditional theology tends to regard God as transcendent, eternal, and immutable. Modern and postmodern approaches, by contrast, have emphasized the historical development of religious ideas and the cultural construction of divine representations.

Dempsey proposes a synthesis. God is immanent and mutable, but also ontologically real. In other words, God is not simply an idea invented by human beings. The divine emerges through complex historical and collective processes and acquires objective causal significance.

This is a more interesting proposal than simply declaring that the universe is spiritual.

Dempsey recognizes that religious concepts develop historically, and that collective human activity can generate emergent realities that cannot be reduced to individual beliefs. Social institutions, cultural systems, and shared symbolic structures can indeed acquire causal powers.

But the crucial question is whether this establishes the reality of God.

Suppose a society develops a powerful collective conception of the divine. That conception influences its institutions, moral practices, architecture, political organization, and individual psychology. It becomes an objectively consequential social reality.

Does this mean God has emerged?

Not necessarily.

It establishes that religious representations can become causally powerful features of human culture. It does not establish that their divine referent exists independently of the collective processes that produce and sustain them.

This is where Dempsey's argument needs further clarification.

There is also a developmental dimension to his proposal. The evolution of religious representations is interpreted as a movement toward increasingly complex, inclusive, and harmonizing forms of divinity.

Here we encounter a familiar difficulty. Historical development does not necessarily constitute moral or spiritual progress. Religious systems can become more complex while remaining oppressive, authoritarian, or destructive.

Dempsey acknowledges some of these tensions, but his framework still needs a convincing account of how developmental complexity translates into genuine normative improvement.

His DEPTH model is thus an attempt to naturalize theology without abandoning theological realism. Whether it succeeds depends on whether the emergent God is more than a sophisticated description of collective human meaning-making.

3. John Vervaeke: Spiritual transformation without supernaturalism

Relevance realization, the four ways of knowing, wisdom cultivation, and the meaning crisis.

Vervaeke takes a somewhat different route.

His starting point is not the need to establish a spiritual dimension of the universe. It is the contemporary crisis of meaning.

In his extensive lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, he examines why modern people increasingly experience alienation, fragmentation, loss of belonging, and an inability to connect their lives to meaningful cultural narratives.

His approach draws on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, philosophy, Buddhism, and the history of religion.

A central concept is relevance realization: the cognitive process through which living organisms determine what matters in their interaction with the world.

Human intelligence is not simply the processing of information or the possession of true beliefs. It also involves embodied skills, perspectives, and forms of participation that shape how we encounter reality.

Vervaeke distinguishes four interconnected ways of knowing:

• Propositional knowing: knowing that something is the case.
• Procedural knowing: knowing how to do something.
• Perspectival knowing: knowing from a particular point of view.
• Participatory knowing: knowing through one's active involvement in the world.

This broader understanding of cognition provides an important foundation for his approach to spirituality.

He argues that the meaning crisis cannot be solved simply by giving people more information or persuading them to adopt a particular worldview. What is needed is a transformation of how people relate to themselves, others, and the world.

This requires what he calls an ecology of practices: interconnected activities such as meditation, contemplation, dialogue, philosophical reflection, and communal engagement.

His proposal for a "religion that is not a religion" is particularly relevant. It seeks to recover the transformative and communal functions of religion without requiring adherence to a traditional supernatural theology.

Of the four approaches considered here, Vervaeke's is arguably the most promising from a scientific-naturalistic perspective.

He does not need to posit a cosmic Eros or an objectively existing divine reality to explain why spiritual practices can transform human experience.

His approach also has an advantage over some versions of evolutionary spirituality: it focuses on identifiable cognitive and social processes rather than inferring cosmic intentions from the history of complexity.

Nevertheless, questions remain.

Can relevance realization adequately explain the full range of religious experience? How should we distinguish genuinely transformative practices from those that produce delusion, group conformity, or charismatic dependency? And what are the social and political conditions necessary for meaningful human flourishing?

There is also a danger of overemphasizing individual transformation while underestimating institutional and structural problems.

A society experiencing alienation and loss of meaning may need better communities and practices, but it may also need economic security, democratic participation, reduced inequality, and functioning public institutions.

Spiritual transformation cannot substitute for social reform.

Still, Vervaeke offers something important: a way of investigating spirituality through the natural capacities of human beings rather than through speculative claims about the metaphysical structure of the cosmos.

4. The Religious Naturalist Association: Nature as the central story

Evolutionary cosmology, ecological belonging, reverence for nature, and naturalistic religious practice.

The Religious Naturalist Association offers a substantially different approach.

Its starting point is that scientific inquiry has provided humanity with a remarkable new central story: the history of the universe, the emergence of life, biological evolution, and the development of human civilization.

This evolutionary narrative can replace traditional religious creation stories without necessarily eliminating the religious functions those stories performed.

Religious naturalists explore the existential, ethical, and spiritual implications of this scientific account.

Their central commitments include naturalism, the evolutionary story as a shared framework, ecological interconnectedness, and the development of appropriate human responses to the natural world.

Importantly, the Association distinguishes between the scientific account itself and the religious responses people develop in relation to it. The latter are not supposed to be predetermined by the evolutionary narrative. They emerge through reflection, experience, art, philosophy, and communal exploration.

This is a considerably more modest position than Wilber's metaphysical system or Dempsey's emergent theology.

The universe does not have to be regarded as a manifestation of Spirit. Evolution does not need an additional cosmic force. Human beings can develop reverence, gratitude, ecological responsibility, and existential meaning in response to what science reveals.

There is, however, an important philosophical complication.

Some religious naturalists want to go beyond this relatively modest position. John Bishop and Ken Perszyk, in their 2025 Cambridge University Press publication Religious Naturalism, argue for what they call expansive naturalism.

They propose an inherent integrative cosmic purpose that can support ecological morality and human fulfilment while retaining the natural world as the only concrete reality.

This is a much stronger proposition.

It attempts to locate something resembling purpose within nature itself, rather than treating purpose exclusively as a human construction.

But the question immediately arises: what does an inherent integrative cosmic purpose actually mean?

Is it a demonstrable property of natural processes, a philosophical interpretation of evolutionary history, or a normative commitment that human beings bring to their understanding of nature?

These possibilities need to be distinguished.

The Religious Naturalist Association's more modest approach has the advantage of avoiding this metaphysical ambiguity. It can develop a religious sensibility toward nature without having to demonstrate that the universe possesses an intrinsic purpose.

Its challenge is different: can this approach generate sufficiently rich narratives, rituals, practices, and communities to satisfy the existential needs that traditionally motivated religious participation?

That is a practical and cultural question, not primarily a metaphysical one.

5. Four approaches, four different understandings of transcendence

Having examined these four approaches, we can now identify their most important differences.

They all want to recover dimensions of human existence that they believe have been neglected by conventional secular worldviews. But they disagree about where the missing depth is to be found.

For Wilber, transcendence is ultimately grounded in Spirit itself. The evolutionary process is an unfolding of a spiritual reality that precedes and exceeds its physical manifestations.

For Dempsey, transcendence is reconstructed through the emergence of increasingly complex forms of collective meaning-making. God becomes a developmental, participatory reality that evolves through human history and culture.

For Vervaeke, transcendence is primarily a transformation of human cognition and existence. We can move beyond ordinary egocentric perspectives through practices that cultivate wisdom, insight, and more adequate relationships with the world.

For religious naturalists, transcendence can be understood as an expanded appreciation of our place in nature. We become capable of experiencing the universe, life, and ecological interdependence in ways that fundamentally transform our values and priorities.

These are not merely different vocabularies for the same phenomenon.

Wilber makes a metaphysical claim about the ultimate structure of reality. Dempsey makes a theological claim about the emergent reality of God. Vervaeke develops a cognitive and existential account of human transformation. Religious naturalists explore the existential and ethical implications of a scientific understanding of nature.

It would therefore be misleading to put all four under the same heading of spiritual naturalism without qualification.

In particular, Vervaeke's approach should not be confused with the more metaphysically ambitious projects of Wilber and Dempsey. His emphasis on participatory knowing does not automatically imply that the universe possesses an underlying spiritual consciousness.

Similarly, the Religious Naturalist Association's commitment to science-based naturalism should not be conflated with every philosophical proposal advanced in the wider religious-naturalist literature.

6. The common temptation: turning emergence into purpose

Despite these differences, there is an important intellectual tendency that connects several of these projects.

It is the tendency to interpret the emergence of complexity as evidence of an underlying direction toward greater integration, consciousness, or spiritual significance.

This tendency is particularly pronounced in Wilber and Dempsey, although versions of it also appear in expansive religious naturalism.

The argument often proceeds through a sequence of observations.

The universe has developed increasingly complex structures. Life has emerged from nonliving matter. Consciousness has emerged through biological evolution. Human beings have developed language, culture, science, morality, and increasingly sophisticated forms of collective organization.

These developments are then interpreted as evidence of an overarching evolutionary movement toward greater depth and integration.

But there is a logical gap here.

The emergence of a phenomenon does not establish that the universe was directed toward producing it.

Evolutionary history is full of branching processes, contingent developments, extinctions, failed adaptations, and local increases and decreases in complexity. There is no universal progression toward ever-higher forms of organization.

Nor is there a scientifically established hierarchy in which every later development is necessarily more valuable than its predecessors.

The emergence of human consciousness is extraordinary, but it does not follow that the universe has been striving toward it for billions of years.

This distinction is essential because otherwise evolutionary science becomes a vehicle for rehabilitating teleological assumptions that modern biology has largely abandoned.

The concept of emergence is especially vulnerable to this misuse.

Emergence describes how new properties and organizational patterns arise through interactions among components. It does not automatically explain why those properties should be interpreted as manifestations of Spirit, God, or cosmic purpose.

A genuinely naturalistic spirituality should be able to appreciate emergence without turning it into metaphysical destiny.

7. The problem of the sacred: discovered or constructed?

A second common question concerns the status of the sacred.

Is sacredness something we discover in nature, or something we create through our relationship with nature?

Wilber tends toward the first answer. Spirit is already present in the Kosmos, and spiritual development involves recognizing and realizing this deeper reality.

Dempsey takes an intermediate position. The divine is not simply a subjective invention, but neither is it an immutable supernatural entity. It emerges through collective historical and cultural processes and acquires a form of objective reality.

Vervaeke approaches the question through human cognition and participation. The experience of meaning and significance arises through the transformation of our relationship with the world.

Religious naturalists generally place greater emphasis on the human response to the natural world, although some proponents argue for a stronger intrinsic cosmic purpose.

My preference is for a distinction that these approaches do not always maintain clearly enough.

There are objective features of nature that can justify profound appreciation and moral concern. The evolutionary interconnectedness of life is not merely a subjective feeling. Ecological interdependence is a real feature of the world. Human beings really are dependent on biological systems that existed long before our appearance.

But the experience of these realities as sacred involves human interpretation and evaluation.

This does not make sacredness meaningless or arbitrary. Human values can be rationally discussed, critically examined, and defended.

It simply means that we should be cautious about projecting our experiences onto the universe and then treating the resulting projection as a discovery about its ultimate nature.

A forest can be sacred to a community without requiring the existence of a metaphysical property called sacredness.

And the fact that a human experience is natural does not make it less profound.

8. Are we witnessing a new religion or a new humanism?

There is another question that deserves attention: what exactly are these movements trying to create?

Are they developing a new form of religion, a new philosophy of life, or an expanded secular humanism?

Wilber's integral spirituality is clearly religious in its metaphysical commitments, even when it incorporates scientific and philosophical material.

Dempsey is explicitly interested in reconstructing theology, although his conception of God differs from traditional theism.

Vervaeke is more interested in developing a practical framework for wisdom and human transformation, without requiring a conventional religious identity.

The Religious Naturalist Association is interested in recovering the religious potential of a science-based worldview.

These differences have practical consequences.

Religion traditionally provides more than an explanation of the universe. It supplies narratives, rituals, communities, moral expectations, and ways of dealing with birth, death, suffering, and uncertainty.

A naturalistic worldview can accommodate all these functions, but it does not follow that it must reproduce them under the heading of religion.

Secular humanism already provides a framework for discussing meaning, ethics, education, human dignity, and collective responsibility without assuming a cosmic purpose.

What might be gained by adding the language of the sacred?

Possibly a richer emotional and existential vocabulary. A stronger sense of reverence for life and nature. More opportunities for ritual and communal celebration.

But what might be lost?

Conceptual clarity, intellectual modesty, and the ability to distinguish empirical discoveries from metaphysical speculation.

This is the trade-off that contemporary spiritual naturalists need to address.

9. A possible synthesis: naturalism without metaphysical inflation

Of the four approaches, I find Vervaeke's emphasis on human transformation and the Religious Naturalist Association's commitment to scientific naturalism particularly promising.

They offer complementary resources.

Vervaeke helps explain how meaning, wisdom, and transformation can emerge through embodied cognition, participatory knowing, and structured practices.

Religious naturalism provides a larger evolutionary and ecological context within which these human activities can be understood.

Together, they suggest a possible alternative to the metaphysical ambitions of evolutionary spirituality.

We could develop a naturalistic philosophy of life that incorporates scientific cosmology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, ecological ethics, contemplative practice, and cultural creativity.

Such a worldview would not need to assume that the universe has a spiritual destination.

It could recognize that human beings are products of evolution who have acquired extraordinary capacities for understanding, caring, cooperating, and transforming their environments.

It could also recognize that these capacities are not automatically directed toward good outcomes. Human intelligence can serve wisdom, but it can also serve manipulation and destruction. Cultural complexity can produce moral progress, but it can also generate new forms of domination.

Consequently, spiritual development should not be equated with evolutionary advancement, technological sophistication, or increasing complexity.

It should be evaluated through more concrete criteria: greater self-understanding, intellectual honesty, compassion, ecological responsibility, freedom from dogmatism, and the ability to recognize and correct self-deception.

This would also give transcendence a more defensible meaning.

Transcendence need not mean accessing a higher metaphysical dimension. It can mean moving beyond the limitations of one's habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.

That is already a considerable achievement.

Conclusion: The future of spirituality after metaphysics

The four approaches examined here reveal an important development in contemporary intellectual culture.

The decline of traditional religious authority has not eliminated the human search for meaning, transcendence, and existential orientation. On the contrary, it has encouraged new attempts to reconstruct these dimensions of life within a scientifically informed worldview.

Wilber, Dempsey, Vervaeke, and religious naturalists are responding to this challenge in different ways.

Wilber offers an ambitious evolutionary metaphysics in which Spirit is the ultimate reality behind cosmic development. Dempsey attempts to reconstruct God as an emergent, participatory, and historically developing reality. Vervaeke explores how human beings can overcome the meaning crisis through cognitive transformation and wisdom practices. Religious naturalists seek to develop a spiritual and ethical response to the evolutionary story of nature.

Their differences should be preserved rather than glossed over.

In particular, we should resist the tendency to describe every attempt to recover meaning as part of one emerging spiritual paradigm. Some projects are substantially naturalistic; others retain theological or metaphysical commitments that require independent justification.

My principal reservation concerns the recurrent tendency to interpret evolution as evidence of cosmic purpose.

The fact that nature has produced consciousness does not establish that consciousness was its destination. The fact that human beings experience awe and transcendence does not establish that the universe itself possesses a spiritual dimension. And the fact that collective religious beliefs can become objectively consequential does not establish the independent existence of the divine.

These distinctions do not impoverish spirituality. They make it intellectually more responsible.

Perhaps the most interesting possibility is that we do not need to choose between a disenchanted scientific worldview and a newly invented cosmic religion.

We can develop a naturalistic humanism that takes seriously the existential dimensions of human existence, the transformative potential of contemplative practices, the ethical implications of evolutionary knowledge, and the extraordinary interconnectedness of life.

We can cultivate reverence without supernaturalism, transcendence without otherworldliness, and meaning without cosmic guarantees.

The universe does not have to be sacred in order for our relationship with it to become sacred.

And human beings do not need to imagine themselves as participants in a predetermined cosmic spiritual evolution to recognize that they have acquired an extraordinary responsibility: to understand the natural world, to care for its inhabitants, and to create forms of life worthy of the possibilities evolution has made available to us.

Perhaps that is the real promise of a spirituality after metaphysics.