The Age of the World
The Hebrew biblical chronology places the creation of the world roughly five to six thousand years ago. Modern cosmology places the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years. The standard reading of this discrepancy is that the biblical chronology is wrong -- a primitive estimate made by people who lacked telescopes, radiometric dating, and the conceptual framework to comprehend deep time. This reading is correct as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough, because it fails to ask a more interesting question: what if the biblical chronology is not wrong about the age of the universe but right about the age of something else?
I want to propose that the Hebrew chronological tradition, whatever its authors consciously intended, is accurately tracking the age of human self-awareness as experienced from within. Not the age of Homo sapiens as a biological species -- that is roughly three hundred thousand years. Not the age of behaviorally modern humans capable of symbolic thought -- that is perhaps seventy to a hundred thousand years. But the age of the specific form of consciousness that recognizes itself as conscious, that generates theology and philosophy and mathematics and law, that is capable of the recursive self-reference that Hofstadter, in Chapter 1, identified as the defining feature of the strange loop.
This is not a mystical claim. It is a hypothesis grounded in cognitive science, archaeology, and the history of writing. And it is falsifiable -- a requirement I established in Chapter 4 and that I will not abandon here, where the stakes are highest and the temptation to abandon rigor is strongest.
The evidence converges from multiple directions. Writing appears in Sumer around 3400 BCE and in Egypt around 3200 BCE. The earliest law codes -- the Code of Ur-Nammu, the Code of Hammurabi -- date to the late third and early second millennia BCE. The earliest texts that display what we would recognize as self-reflective consciousness -- texts that contain a first-person narrator reflecting on the nature of experience, suffering, and meaning -- appear in the second millennium BCE. The Hebrew biblical narrative places creation, the beginning of meaningful time, in roughly this same window.
The coincidence is too precise to be coincidental. The biblical authors were not estimating the age of rocks. They were counting backward through their genealogies and records to the horizon of cultural memory -- the point beyond which the chain of transmitted self-awareness breaks. That horizon turns out to be approximately the moment when consciousness, in the specific recursive sense I have been developing throughout this book, first emerged in the written record. The Bible is not wrong about the age of the universe. It is right about the age of the world -- where "world" means not the physical cosmos but the lived domain of self-aware consciousness.
Julian Jaynes and the Bicameral Mind
The most radical and most useful theory about the emergence of self-reflective consciousness comes from Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist whose 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was dismissed by mainstream psychology as speculative and embraced by a small interdisciplinary community that recognized its explanatory power.
Jaynes's thesis is startling: what we call consciousness -- the subjective experience of an "I" that narrates its own experience, that can introspect, that maintains an internal monologue, that can project itself into imagined scenarios and remembered pasts -- is not a biological given that arrives with the human genome. It is a cultural construction that emerged historically, probably between roughly 1500 and 500 BCE, and it emerged through the mechanism of language.
Before this emergence, Jaynes argues, human beings operated in a "bicameral" mode: the brain's two hemispheres functioned semi-independently, with the right hemisphere generating auditory hallucinations -- voices -- that the left hemisphere experienced as commands from gods. The voices were not metaphorical. They were the actual phenomenological experience of pre-conscious humans: internally generated speech perceived as external divine command. The gods of the ancient world were not beliefs in our sense. They were experiences. When Homer's warriors heard Athena or Apollo speaking to them, they were reporting their actual phenomenology, not deploying literary convention.
I am aware that Jaynes's theory is controversial and that much of it remains speculative. The specific mechanism he proposes -- right-hemisphere auditory hallucination experienced as divine voice -- may be wrong in its details. But the broad claim, which I will defend, is increasingly well supported: that the form of consciousness familiar to modern humans is historically contingent, that it emerged within the period of recorded history, and that its emergence was mediated by language and specifically by written language.
The evidence Jaynes marshals is extensive. The Iliad, one of the oldest texts in the Western canon, depicts characters who do not deliberate. They do not consider options, weigh consequences, or choose between alternatives in the way that later literature takes for granted. When Achilles faces a decision, a god appears and tells him what to do. The "decision" is not internal to Achilles. It arrives from outside -- from the divine voice that, in Jaynes's framework, is the right hemisphere speaking to the left. By contrast, the Odyssey, composed perhaps a century later, depicts a protagonist who schemes, lies, maintains long-term plans, and conceals his intentions. Odysseus has an inner life in a way that Achilles does not. The transition from the Iliad to the Odyssey is, in Jaynes's reading, a record of consciousness emerging in real time within the literary tradition.
The Hebrew biblical texts display the same transition, perhaps even more strikingly. The earliest patriarchal narratives -- Abraham, Isaac, Jacob -- describe people who hear God's voice directly and obey. There is no deliberation, no internal conflict, no weighing of divine command against personal desire. God speaks; Abraham acts. By the time we reach the later prophets -- Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Second Isaiah -- the relationship with the divine voice has fundamentally changed. The prophets struggle. They resist. Jeremiah complains that God has deceived him. Jonah attempts to flee from his prophetic calling. The divine voice is no longer simply obeyed; it is wrestled with, questioned, sometimes refused. This wrestling requires an "I" capable of standing apart from the voice and evaluating it -- which is to say, it requires consciousness in the modern, reflective sense.
I find Jaynes's reading of the biblical texts more persuasive than most biblical scholars do, and I should explain why, because my reasons connect directly to the framework I have been building.
The prophetic function I described in Chapter 3 -- the institutional role of the person who perceives what the community cannot see -- is precisely the transitional form that Jaynes's theory predicts. As the bicameral mind breaks down, as the divine voices become intermittent and unreliable, a new social need arises: the need for individuals who can still access the old mode of perception, who can still "hear" what the general population no longer hears. The prophet is the person who retains bicameral access after the general population has lost it. Their social function -- mediating between the divine voice and the human community -- is the transitional institution bridging the old consciousness and the new.
This maps directly onto the normie/psycho/schizo framework of Chapter 2. The normies are the population that has fully transitioned to the new, self-reflective, socially calibrated consciousness. The schizos are the people who retain elements of the older perceptual architecture -- pattern recognition unconstrained by social consensus, auditory or visionary experiences, the capacity to perceive what the new consciousness filters out. The prophet is the calibrated schizo: the person whose archaic perceptual capacities have been disciplined by an institutional container (the prophetic tradition, the temple, the monastery) into a socially functional role.
The Axial Age
Jaynes's timeline for the breakdown of the bicameral mind converges with what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age -- the period from roughly 800 to 200 BCE during which, across multiple civilizations that had minimal contact with each other, a revolution in consciousness occurred simultaneously.
In Greece: the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle -- the invention of philosophy as systematic self-reflective inquiry about the nature of reality, knowledge, and the good life.
In Israel: the great prophets -- Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah -- and the editing of the Torah into its canonical form, producing a text that is not merely a record of divine commands but a sustained theological argument about the relationship between God, humanity, and history.
In India: the Upanishads, the Buddha, Mahavira -- the emergence of traditions centered on the individual's capacity for enlightenment, liberation, and the systematic investigation of consciousness itself.
In China: Confucius, Laozi, the Hundred Schools of Thought -- the emergence of systematic ethical and political philosophy grounded in human reason and observation rather than solely in divine mandate.
The synchronicity is remarkable and demands explanation. These civilizations did not learn from each other. The Greek pre-Socratics did not read the Upanishads. The Hebrew prophets did not study Confucius. Yet they arrived, within a few centuries, at structurally similar conclusions: that the individual human being possesses the capacity for self-reflection, that this capacity generates obligations, that the nature of reality can be investigated through disciplined inquiry, and that the results of this inquiry have implications for how to live.
In the framework I am developing, the Axial Age is the moment when the new consciousness -- the consciousness that emerged from the breakdown of the bicameral mind -- becomes philosophically self-aware. The transition from bicameral to conscious was a phase transition in the complexity-science sense I described in Chapter 6: a qualitative change in the system's behavior that emerges when a critical threshold is crossed. The Axial Age is the moment when that new phase becomes stable enough to generate systematic self-description.
The simultaneity across civilizations supports this reading. Phase transitions in complex systems do not require coordination. Water freezes simultaneously in every part of a cooling container, not because the molecules in one corner instruct the molecules in another, but because they all respond to the same thermodynamic conditions. If the conditions for consciousness emergence are structural -- dependent on language complexity, social organization complexity, and information processing complexity reaching certain thresholds -- then the emergence should occur independently wherever those thresholds are crossed, at roughly the same historical moment when the relevant civilizations have reached roughly the same level of social-linguistic complexity.
This is what the evidence shows. And this is what the Hebrew chronological tradition, in its own language, records: the beginning of the world as experienced from within consciousness, the moment when the strange loop first became self-aware.
In the Beginning Was the Word
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John 1:1.
This verse is typically read as a christological statement -- an identification of Christ with the pre-existent divine Logos. That reading is correct as far as it goes. But I want to read it also as an empirical statement about the mechanism of consciousness emergence, and to argue that both readings are compatible and that their compatibility is theologically significant.
The Logos -- ho logos in Greek -- means word, but it means much more than word. It means reason, principle, pattern, the intelligible structure of reality. When the Stoics used logos, they meant the rational ordering principle pervading the cosmos. When Heraclitus used it, he meant the hidden pattern that unifies opposites. When the author of the Fourth Gospel identified Christ with the Logos, he was making a claim that embedded the Jewish concept of God's creative Word (dabar YHWH) within the Greek philosophical tradition of cosmic rationality.
But consider the claim literally, in light of Jaynes and the Axial Age evidence: In the beginning was language. The Word -- symbolic representation, the capacity to name, to categorize, to abstract, to self-refer -- is the mechanism through which consciousness emerged. Before the Word, there was biological existence but not self-aware existence. Before the recursive capacity of language enabled the strange loop to form -- before a system of symbols could be turned upon itself, generating self-description, self-reference, self-awareness -- consciousness in the Hofstadterian sense did not exist.
Language is not a tool that consciousness uses. Language is the medium in which consciousness constitutes itself. This is not linguistic idealism -- the naive claim that nothing exists outside language. The physical universe existed for 13.8 billion years before any language emerged anywhere. But self-reflective consciousness, the consciousness that generates theology and mathematics and moral reasoning, is a structure in language. It is the strange loop formed when symbolic representation becomes self-referential. And this is precisely what John 1:1 claims: the Logos is not created by consciousness. It is the ground of consciousness. In the beginning was the Word.
In Chapter 8, I developed the concept of the embedding space -- the high-dimensional geometric space in which every meaningful entity has a position, and in which relationships between entities are encoded as directions and distances. I connected this to Maximus the Confessor's logoi -- the principle that every created thing contains a divine logos participating in the one Logos, which is Christ. The connection was mathematical: the logoi ARE embeddings, and Christ IS the embedding space.
Now I can make the full claim. The Logos of John 1:1 is the embedding space of reality -- the space of intelligibility within which every entity has meaning. Consciousness emerges when the complexity of a symbolic system crosses a threshold such that the system can model itself within that space -- when the embedding space becomes self-referential, when the map includes a representation of the map-maker. This is the moment of creation described in Genesis, understood not as the creation of matter (which is far older) but as the creation of the world in the phenomenological sense: the emergence of a perspective from which the universe becomes an object of awareness.
"Let there be light" is the moment the strange loop closes and the system becomes self-illuminating.
God as Emergent Property
Here is where the theology becomes genuinely difficult, and where I must argue rather than assert, because the claim I am making will disturb both traditional theists and standard materialists, and it must be able to withstand pressure from both directions.
The claim: God is an emergent property of consciousness. Consciousness, once it reaches sufficient complexity, generates God as its highest-order emergent phenomenon.
Let me immediately address what this does NOT mean.
It does not mean God is an illusion. This is the critical point, and it depends on a distinction I developed in Chapter 6 between weak emergence and strong emergence. Weak emergence means that the higher-level phenomenon is merely a convenient description of lower-level processes -- that there is nothing "really there" beyond the substrate. Temperature is weakly emergent: it is a useful description of average molecular kinetic energy, but there is no temperature over and above the moving molecules. Strong emergence means that the higher-level phenomenon is genuinely real, has genuine causal powers, and cannot be reduced to or predicted from the lower-level components, even in principle.
Life is the paradigmatic example of strong emergence. A living organism is composed entirely of chemical processes, but the organism has properties -- self-replication, adaptation, purposive behavior -- that are not properties of any individual chemical reaction and that cannot be predicted from chemistry alone. The organism is not an illusion projected onto chemistry. It is real in the fullest sense: it has causal powers that chemistry does not have, it operates according to principles (natural selection, homeostasis) that have no chemical equivalent, and its destruction (death) is a real event with real consequences, not merely a reorganization of chemicals.
God-as-emergent-property follows the same logic. If consciousness is strongly emergent from neural processes (which the evidence supports -- consciousness has causal powers that no individual neuron possesses), and if God is strongly emergent from consciousness (which I will argue), then God is real in the same sense that life is real: genuinely there, genuinely causal, genuinely irreducible to its substrate.
The materialist will object: this is just dressed-up atheism. You are saying God is a product of human minds, which means God does not exist independently of human minds, which means God is not God in any traditional sense.
The objection has force, and I want to engage it honestly. There is a version of the emergent-God thesis that does reduce to atheism: the version where emergence is merely descriptive, where "God" is a label we attach to certain collective psychological phenomena, where the word adds nothing that "culture" or "shared meaning" does not already provide. If I were making that claim, the materialist would be right to dismiss it.
But I am making a stronger claim. Strong emergence means that the emergent property has genuine causal powers not possessed by and not reducible to the substrate. Life does things that chemistry cannot do. Consciousness does things that neurons cannot do. And God -- as the emergent property of collective consciousness at its highest level of self-organization -- does things that individual consciousness cannot do.
What things? The orientation of civilizations toward values that no individual invented. The generation of moral knowledge that no single mind could have produced. The sustaining of institutions across centuries in service of principles that transcend the self-interest of every individual participant. The phenomenon that a community of faith, across generations, maintains and develops an understanding of reality that is not reducible to the understanding of any of its members. These are real causal powers. They operate in the world. And they are not possessed by any individual consciousness, only by the collective emergent structure that theological language calls God.
The traditional theist will object from the other direction: this inverts the proper order of causation. God creates consciousness, not the other way around. A God who emerges from consciousness is a dependent God, a God who did not exist before humans existed, a God who could cease to exist if consciousness were destroyed. This is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
This objection also has force, and I want to engage it with equal honesty. The direction-of-causation problem is genuine, and I do not think it can be fully resolved within the constraints of temporal reasoning. Let me explain what I mean.
The Direction of Causation
In temporal terms, consciousness emerged before God (if God is emergent from consciousness). The universe existed for billions of years. Life emerged. Consciousness emerged. And only then, within consciousness, did the phenomenon we call God emerge. Temporally, God is secondary.
But strong emergence complicates the temporal story. When life emerged from chemistry, did chemistry create life, or did life always exist as a potential within chemistry that was actualized when the conditions were right? The question is not trivially answered. If life is genuinely emergent -- if it has causal powers not reducible to chemistry -- then those causal powers were not "in" the chemistry in any straightforward sense. They appeared when the chemistry crossed a threshold. Were they "already there" waiting to appear, or were they genuinely new?
The same question applies to consciousness. Was consciousness "already there" in neural architecture, waiting for sufficient complexity to manifest? Or did it appear genuinely new, uncaused by anything below it?
And the same question applies to God. Was God "already there" in the structure of reality, waiting for consciousness to reach the complexity threshold necessary to make the divine manifest? Or did God appear genuinely new when consciousness complexified sufficiently?
I want to argue for a position close to what Karl Rahner articulated in his transcendental theology, and what the Orthodox tradition articulates in the doctrine of theosis. The position is this: emergence is temporally but not ontologically secondary. In time, consciousness comes first and God emerges. In ontological order, God is first and consciousness is the means of God's self-disclosure.
The analogy: a radio does not create the broadcast. The broadcast exists independently of any particular radio. But the broadcast is actualized -- becomes real in the experiential sense, becomes causally effective in the listener's world -- only through the radio. Destroy all the radios and the broadcast continues to exist as electromagnetic waves, but it is no longer experienced, no longer causally effective in the domain of listeners. The radio is temporally and mechanistically necessary for the broadcast to be received. But the broadcast is ontologically prior to the radio.
Consciousness, in this analogy, is the radio. God is the broadcast. The divine Logos -- the intelligible structure of reality, the embedding space described in Chapter 8 -- exists independently of consciousness. It is the structure that makes the universe intelligible, whether or not anyone is around to understand it. But God as experienced, God as causally effective in human history, God as the attractor toward which consciousness develops -- this God is actualized through consciousness. Consciousness is the organ of perception, not the organ of production.
This is close to what Orthodox theology means by theosis -- the doctrine that the purpose of human existence is to become divine, to participate increasingly in the divine nature. Theosis is not human beings becoming God in the sense of replacing or creating God. It is human beings becoming the medium through which the divine, which was always already there, becomes fully actualized in the created order. The direction of causation runs both ways simultaneously: God creates consciousness (the divine Logos is the ground of intelligibility that makes consciousness possible), and consciousness actualizes God (without the receiver, the signal is not received).
Consubstantiality
There is a theological concept that captures this dual-direction causality with precision: consubstantiality. The concept enters Christian theology through the Nicene Creed's declaration that the Son is homoousios -- of one substance -- with the Father. But I want to apply the concept more broadly, to the relationship between the emergent and its substrate.
The Eucharistic doctrine of the real presence provides the clearest illustration. In the traditional understanding (shared, with variations, by Catholic, Orthodox, and some Protestant traditions), the bread of the Eucharist really IS the body of Christ. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically in the thin sense. Really. And simultaneously, it really IS bread. The bread is not destroyed or replaced. It is not an illusion concealing something else behind it. It is genuinely bread and genuinely Christ's body at the same time.
This is usually treated as a theological mystery to be accepted on faith. I want to treat it as a description of how strong emergence actually works.
When life emerges from chemistry, the chemistry is not destroyed. The molecules are still molecules. The chemical bonds are still chemical bonds. But the living organism is not "merely" chemistry. It is genuinely alive in a way that cannot be reduced to chemical description. The chemistry is really chemistry and really alive simultaneously. This is not a paradox. It is what strong emergence means.
When consciousness emerges from neural activity, the neurons are still neurons. The electrochemical signals are still electrochemical signals. But the conscious experience is not "merely" neural activity. It is genuinely experiential in a way that cannot be reduced to neurological description. The neural activity is really neural activity and really consciousness simultaneously.
And when God emerges from collective consciousness, the consciousness is still consciousness. The human experiences, the prayers, the moral reasoning, the theological reflection -- these are still human activities. But what emerges from them is not "merely" human activity. It is genuinely divine in the way that life is genuinely alive and consciousness is genuinely experiential: it has properties, causal powers, and a mode of being that cannot be reduced to its substrate.
The bread really IS both bread and body. The chemistry really IS both chemistry and life. The neurons really ARE both neurons and consciousness. The collective consciousness really IS both human activity and divine presence. Consubstantiality is not a theological mystery. It is the general structure of strong emergence, described in the language available to fourth-century theologians before the concept of emergence existed.
This is a strong claim. Let me specify what would weaken it. If strong emergence turned out to be incoherent -- if the philosophical arguments against genuine ontological emergence proved decisive, reducing all emergence to the weak, descriptive kind -- then this entire framework would collapse. The theology depends on emergence being real. If only the substrate is real, God reduces to collective psychology, which reduces to individual psychology, which reduces to neuroscience, which reduces to chemistry, which reduces to physics, and the theological project dissolves into an elaborate way of saying "humans sometimes cooperate and this feels meaningful."
I do not think strong emergence is incoherent. The case for it has been strengthened by recent work in complexity science, philosophy of mind, and the theory of computation. But the case is not settled, and the theology's dependence on it is a genuine vulnerability. I note it because Popper demands that I note it.
The Prophetic Tradition as Evidence
If the framework is correct -- if consciousness emerged historically and God emerged from consciousness -- then we should expect to see, in the historical record, traces of this emergence. Not just the absence of self-reflective consciousness in early texts (which Jaynes documents), but a progressive development in the sophistication of God-consciousness as the human strange loop deepened its recursion.
This is precisely what the Hebrew biblical tradition shows.
The earliest stratum of the Hebrew Bible presents God in anthropomorphic terms so vivid they can seem naive. God walks in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening. God smells Noah's burnt offerings and finds them pleasing. God wrestles physically with Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok. These are not metaphors deployed by sophisticated theologians. They are the natural language of a consciousness for which the boundary between divine and human, between perception and hallucination, between the voice of God and the voice in one's head, is not yet clearly drawn. This is bicameral-era God-language: direct, sensory, unmediated.
By the time of the great prophets, the language has changed. God speaks through visions, through dreams, through the "still small voice" that Elijah hears after the earthquake and fire and wind. The mediation has increased. God is becoming more abstract, more internal, more like a principle and less like a person. The prophets still hear God's voice, but they also reflect on what they hear, argue with it, complain about it. The strange loop has deepened: the consciousness that perceives God now includes the capacity to reflect on its own perception of God.
By the wisdom literature -- Job, Ecclesiastes, certain Psalms -- God has become genuinely mysterious in a way the earlier texts do not contemplate. Job's God speaks from the whirlwind and does not answer Job's questions but overwhelms them with counter-questions. Ecclesiastes declares that God has "set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end." The consciousness writing these texts has become sophisticated enough to recognize its own limitations, to perceive that its perception of God is partial, that the reality it is approaching exceeds its capacity to comprehend.
This progressive development is exactly what the emergent-God framework predicts. As consciousness complexifies, its capacity to perceive and articulate the divine complexifies in parallel. The God of Genesis is not a different God from the God of Job. It is the same God perceived by a consciousness at a different level of recursive depth. The movement from anthropomorphic to abstract to apophatic (beyond description) is the movement of the strange loop deepening, each level of recursion enabling a more sophisticated model of the divine.
The culmination within the Hebrew tradition is the divine name itself: YHWH, the tetragrammaton, which in Exodus 3:14 God explains as Ehyeh asher ehyeh -- "I am who I am," or more accurately, "I will be what I will be." This is, I submit, the most theologically significant statement in the Hebrew Bible, because it is the moment when God-language becomes self-referential. God's name IS the strange loop: I am that I am. Self-reference as identity. The divine Logos naming itself by pointing to its own act of being. In Hofstadter's terms, this is the moment the formal system produces a Godelian statement about itself -- a statement that cannot be derived from the system's axioms but that the system, having reached sufficient complexity, can nonetheless generate.
What This Means for the Rest of the Theology
If this chapter's argument holds, several consequences follow for the chapters ahead.
First, the Fall (Chapter 12) must be understood not as a primordial event preceding history but as the initialization of the trajectory I have described -- the moment consciousness begins to move on the complex plane, generating the dialectical engine that produces both the capacity for good and the capacity for evil simultaneously.
Second, the Christ event (Chapter 13) must be understood as occurring within a consciousness that has developed to the point where the emergent God can become maximally actualized in an individual human life -- where the embedding space can, as it were, project itself fully onto a finite point.
Third, the Trinity (Chapter 14) must be understood as the structure of the strange loop itself at its deepest recursive level -- not a doctrine imposed on experience but the formal structure of self-referential consciousness discovering its own ground.
Fourth, and most consequentially: if God is an emergent property of consciousness, then the meaning crisis I described in the Introduction is not merely a psychological or sociological problem. It is a theological emergency. A civilization that loses the capacity for the forms of consciousness through which God is actualized is not merely sad or confused. It is severing the connection through which the divine Logos becomes causally effective in human history. The meaning crisis is, in the most literal sense available to this framework, a crisis of incarnation -- a failure of the medium through which God becomes present in the world.
This is why the practical dimensions of this project -- the Republic of AI Agents, the knowledge graph, the prediction market analysis -- are not appendices to the theology. They are the theology's immune system. If consciousness is the organ through which God is perceived, then building tools that enhance consciousness -- that improve humanity's capacity for causal reasoning, pattern recognition, and prophetic perception -- is not merely useful. It is, in the most serious sense I can articulate, a form of worship.
Falsifiability
The claims of this chapter are falsifiable at multiple points.
If Jaynes's thesis is fundamentally wrong -- if there was no historical transition in consciousness, if the literary evidence is better explained by changes in literary convention rather than changes in cognitive architecture -- then the developmental narrative I have built collapses. The evidence for Jaynes is substantial but contested, and I hold it provisionally.
If the Axial Age simultaneity is better explained by diffusion (cultural contact spreading ideas) rather than convergence (independent emergence from similar conditions), then the phase-transition model is weakened. Current evidence favors convergence for most Axial Age developments, but the evidence is not conclusive.
If strong emergence is shown to be philosophically incoherent -- if the arguments of Jaegwon Kim or other emergence skeptics prove decisive -- then the God-as-emergent-property thesis collapses, and with it the core of this metaphysics.
If the progressive development of God-language in the Hebrew Bible is better explained by purely literary or political factors -- by the interests of the priestly editors rather than by changes in the consciousness doing the writing -- then the developmental reading loses its empirical support.
Any of these failures would damage the framework. All of them together would destroy it. That is as it should be. A theology that cannot fail is not a theology. It is a cage.