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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).

A Skeptical Take on Whiteheadian/Wilberian “Creativity”

Frank Visser / Grok

Here is the unvarnished, no-punches-pulled critique that a tough-minded empiricist, evolutionary biologist, or analytic philosopher would level at the entire edifice of “cosmic creativity” as presented by Whitehead and (especially) by Wilber's Eros-driven version of it.

1. It's teleology wearing a halloween mask

Both systems insist they have transcended old-school creationism and final-cause teleology, yet they smuggle purpose right back in:

Whitehead: every actual occasion is “lured” by the best possible aim supplied by God's primordial nature.

Wilber: the entire Kosmos is pulled forward by Eros/Spirit-in-action toward ever-higher wholes (Omega, Supermind, etc.).

Strip away the fancy vocabulary and you are left with the claim that the universe has an inherent direction toward greater complexity, beauty, intensity, and (ultimately) consciousness/divinity.

That is textbook teleology.

The only difference from Paley's watchmaker or Teilhard's Omega Point is that the guiding force is now immanent rather than transcendent. But immanent teleology is still teleology, and teleology has been evicted from respectable science since Darwin. Modern evolutionary theory explains the appearance of direction perfectly well with variation + selection + time + contingency. Adding an invisible cosmic lure is an unnecessary epicycle.

2. The “lure” is unfalsifiable and therefore scientifically meaningless

Show me a single repeatable experiment that can detect the presence or absence of God's “initial aim” in an electron, a bacterium, or a human decision. You can't.

Every outcome—whether an organism takes the “higher” path or the destructive one—can be retroactively declared “the best possibility given the circumstances.” That makes the theory compatible with literally everything and therefore explanatory of nothing. It is the perfect Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for theodicy and for cosmology.

3. The combination problem never actually went away

Whitehead claims he dissolves it by having higher-order occasions “inherit” and “integrate” lower ones.

Critics (e.g., David Chalmers, Gregg Rosenberg in newer work) reply: that is just re-describing the problem, not solving it.

You still need to explain how a trillion proto-experiences with their own subjective aims suddenly surrender their micro-freedom and line up to form the single, unified stream of my experience right now. Whitehead's “societies” and “dominant occasions” are hand-wavy placeholders, not mechanisms.

4. The data do not show a cosmic drive toward complexity or consciousness

This is the killer empirical point.

Most of the universe (99.999999…%) is dark energy, dark matter, black holes, and plasma that will never support life or mind.

On Earth, biomass is still overwhelmingly bacterial; multicellular life is a late, fragile sideshow.

Of the ~10⁹ species that have ever lived, >99% are extinct.

Entropy is increasing; the cosmos is heading toward heat death or rip, not toward Supermind.

Wilber's “overall tendency of the universe is to produce higher wholes” is simply false if you look at the actual numbers. Whitehead's softer claim that the universe is biased toward intensity/beauty fares no better: beauty and intensity are anthropocentric projections. A supernova is intense, but it is not trying to write symphonies.

5. It's anthropic bias dressed up as metaphysics

The reason the story feels so compelling is that we are the descendants of the 0.0001% of lineages that happened to get more complex. Of course the survivors see a “drive” toward mind—we are the jackpot winners looking back at the lottery and declaring it was rigged in our favor.

That is the weak anthropic principle, not evidence of cosmic Eros.

6. Wilber's version is far worse

Whitehead at least tries to stay within a speculative but coherent scheme. Wilber adds:

A linear hierarchy of development that is provably false (many traditional societies are more psychologically healthy than modern ones on standard metrics).

The claim that evolution is “Spirit trying to wake up”—a pre-Darwinian, quasi-Hegelian fantasy with zero evidential support.

A theodicy that blames victims for being on a “lower level” (the “mean green meme” nonsense used to dismiss legitimate critique).

In short, Wilber took Whitehead's already speculative scheme and turned the teleological dial from 7 to 11.

Bottom line - the skeptical verdict

Whiteheadian/Wilberian creativity is the most sophisticated and poetically beautiful form of vitalism ever devised, but it is vitalism nonetheless. It rests on three moves that science and rigorous philosophy have rejected for good reasons:

• Reintroducing final causation through the back door.
• Positing unobservable, unfalsifiable mental lures/forces.
• Reading contingent, anthropically filtered outcomes as evidence of cosmic purpose.

You can admire the aesthetic grandeur of the system (many of us do), but if you care about empirical warrant and explanatory parsimony, the honest conclusion is:

The universe looks exactly the way we would expect it to look if blind, undirected physical processes plus selection were the whole story.

All the rest is mythology for philosophers who can't bear a cosmos without meaning built into its bones.

That is the steel-manned skeptical reading. Take it or leave it—but that's what the hard-headed critics (Visser, Dawkins, Sean Carroll, Sabine Hossenfelder, etc.) actually think when they bother to engage this stuff at all.