Rupert Sheldrake's The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God argues that the modern scientific picture of a lifeless, purposeless universe is not a neutral description of reality but the product of a specific historical campaign to strip spiritual power out of the natural world. Against that inheritance he sets a programmatic alternative: nature as alive, memory-bearing and self-organizing, organized by fields that evolve and inherit habits rather than by timeless laws. The book moves through three registers — a historical argument about how nature was disenchanted, a theoretical argument about morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance, and a reading of the Gaia hypothesis as a step back toward an animistic view of the Earth.
The disenchantment thesis
Sheldrake's historical claim is that the removal of spiritual power from nature was deliberate, not incidental. He locates it in the Reformation and the scientific revolution, which together confined the spiritual realm to human beings and denied it to the natural world. The reformers attacked the accumulated practices of medieval Christianity — the cults of Mary and the saints, the use of images, pilgrimage, relics, holy wells and wayside shrines — as pagan survivals. Sheldrake cites Martin Luther's 1525 polemic against iconoclasts, in which Luther describes a death-dealing spirit hidden in the images being destroyed, as evidence of how charged the dispute was. He also cites the systematic political dimension: between 1536 and 1540 Henry VIII's commissioners dissolved the monasteries, appropriated their lands and treasures, and emptied the great shrines. The royal warrant for the visitation of Lincoln is quoted for its double purpose — removing occasions of idolatry and superstition, and conveying the relics, jewels and plate safely to the Tower of London. Sheldrake's point is that the second motive shows the operation was as much about power and property as about doctrine.
The consequence he draws is that even the sacraments were denied inherent spiritual power, and the natural world was left as a realm of matter to be understood and used. This is an interpretive historical argument built from documentary sources, not an experimental result, and it should be read as such.
Domination of nature is not uniquely Judeo-Christian
A second historical argument targets the influential claim that the ecological crisis follows from a distinctively Judeo-Christian command to subdue the earth. Sheldrake counters that heroic imagery of conquest over wild nature is ancient and cross-cultural: Marduk over Tiamat, Horus over the hippopotamus, Perseus over the Gorgon, Apollo over the python, St. George over the dragon. He adds that the Jews neither built the most technically advanced ancient civilization nor stood out in ambition to dominate nature, and that Christian cultures such as Ethiopia, Byzantium and medieval Europe did not outstrip contemporary India or China in power over nature. On this account the decisive change was not a biblical doctrine but the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, which grew out of Renaissance and Reformation ferment and produced a vast inflation of the ambition to control nature — treating the natural world as having no inherent value or life of its own, and removing traditional restraints on knowledge and power. He notes the background image of the European conquest of America, with its promise of gold and its plunder of native peoples, as part of that shift in attitude.
Morphogenetic fields: a third position
The book's central theoretical move is to distinguish three ways of understanding the morphogenetic fields that developmental biologists had independently proposed. These fields were conceived as invisible, holistic regions of influence within and around organisms, containing nested hierarchies of organ, tissue and cell fields — a biological replacement for the older notion of entelechies, much as electromagnetic fields had replaced souls in physics. The principal analogy Sheldrake uses is magnetism: cutting a magnet yields smaller complete magnets each with its own field, just as cutting up flatworms yields pieces that regenerate into complete flatworms.
Sheldrake then separates three interpretations. The first treats the fields as no more than convenient shorthand for complex spatio-temporal patterns of physico-chemical interaction not yet fully understood. The second treats them as governed by field equations dwelling in a Platonic realm of eternal mathematical forms — so that the field equations for dinosaurs, and for all possible species, would have existed before the Big Bang and would be unaffected by evolution or extinction. Sheldrake's third way, the hypothesis of formative causation, holds that these fields are a new kind of field with an intrinsically evolutionary nature: the fields of a species have evolved and are inherited from previous members of that species, containing a collective memory that each individual draws on and contributes to. Their formative activity is not fixed by timeless laws but by the actual forms taken by predecessors, so that the more often a pattern is repeated the more likely it is to recur. The fields are the means by which the habits of a species are built up, maintained and inherited.
Sheldrake acknowledges that morphogenetic fields can be modeled mathematically, and cites René Thom's catastrophe-theory formulation that morphogenesis can be described by the disappearance of the attractors representing initial forms and their replacement by capture by the attractors representing final forms. This reliance on a mathematical attractor formalism sits in some tension with his rejection of the Platonic pole, since attractor descriptions are themselves timeless mathematical structures.
Morphic resonance and inherited habit
The mechanism Sheldrake proposes for how past forms influence present ones is morphic resonance: the influence of like upon like across space and time. He states that it does not fall off with distance and does not transfer energy, only information. On this view the regularities of nature are habits inherited through morphic resonance rather than expressions of eternal, non-material, non-energetic laws. He applies the idea across levels of complexity — molecules, crystals, cells, tissues, organisms and societies of organisms — all organized by morphic fields, with morphogenetic fields as the subset concerned with the development and maintenance of bodies. Protein folding, the crystallization of substances such as penicillin, and the development of the giraffe are all presented as following habits established by repetition rather than timeless mathematical necessity. The hypothesis was first set out in A New Science of Life (1981) and developed further in The Presence of the Past (1988). In this source it is presented as a theoretical proposal supported by analogy, not as an experimentally confirmed mechanism.
Gaia and the new animism
The final strand reads the Gaia hypothesis as a major step toward what Sheldrake calls a new animism, and as the reason the hypothesis is so controversial. He notes that its appeal lies in reconnecting us with pre-mechanistic and pre-humanistic patterns of thought. He also preserves a disagreement rather than resolving it: James Lovelock, the originator of Gaia, explicitly rejects the formulation that the Earth is alive and that Gaia is an organism, arguing that no one has defined "organism" in this context and that Gaia is better described as an extremely complex system with specific regulatory properties. Lovelock has also produced computer models showing that some regulatory processes could operate by purely mechanistic means. Sheldrake's response is that even if aspects of Gaian self-regulation can be modeled mechanistically, the nature of Gaia's life remains a mystery, and he points to morphogenesis, instinctive behaviour, learning and memory as unsolved problems of biology. He notes that many scientists may prefer the watered-down version advocated by Lynn Margulis, but argues this cannot disguise the radical shift from a man-centred humanism to a recognition that we depend on the providence of Gaia — a shift he illustrates with Lovelock's remark that in Gaia we are just another species, neither owners nor stewards of the planet.
Evidence and limits
The book's historical and comparative claims rest on documentary interpretation. Its biological claims are programmatic: morphic resonance and formative causation are advanced as hypotheses with analogical support, and no experimental validation appears in this material. The Gaia discussion is a reading of others' positions, and the source deliberately keeps Lovelock's disavowal of the "Earth is alive" formulation visible alongside Sheldrake's animistic framing. The available text is partial — front matter, mid-chapter fragments and back matter — so the book's experimental chapters are not represented here, and no conclusion about the absence of evidence should be drawn from these boundaries. The edition is published by Park Street Press, a division of Inner Traditions International, with copyright dates of 1991 and 1994 and an original Bantam Books edition of 1991.
Related work
The book sits within Sheldrake's wider project alongside Morphic Resonance and Formative Causation, and connects to the wiki's existing Sheldrake material on Rupert Sheldrake and the gaia-hypothesis. Its distinctive contributions relative to the morphic-resonance-focused pages are the historical disenchantment argument and the three-way distinction among mechanistic, Platonic and formative-causation readings of biological fields.
Keep reading
- Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness — Develops a related question.
- The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature — Develops a related question.
- Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation — Develops a related question.
Source notes & attribution
- https://rexresearch1.com/SheldrakeMorphicResonance/Rebirth%20of%20NatureSheldrake.pdf