The Relentless Process Of A Processually Loving Cosmology

The Relentless Process of

A Processually Loving Cosmology

by R.E. Slater

I often use sources outside of Whiteheadian sources to provide perspective to a new or unfamiliar complex of ideas. Below is such a source. As I, myself, prefer reading Whitehead's process mindset across a range of topics - from theology to science, human industry to human cultures, etc - I was glad to see Bob Mesle's name come up but generally when listening to Arthur Holmes I felt his Westernized Christian background got in the way of hearing Whitehead's metaphysical cosmology as I might now hear it. Further, the commentor posting this article was circumspect in providing as honest an oversight as could be done... to which I thought it may be help then to post as an introduction amongst the many, many introductions I have posted over the years on Whitehead.

One last, Whitehead's process and reality speculation occurred a hundred+ years ago. Since then much has happened in human history. Over those years Whiteheadian theologians, philosophers, and scientists have "updated" and "integrated" process thought in an ever wider spectra of observation, testing, and correlation between the academic disciplines of all types. I say this to note the what Bob Mesle would differ from shows a growth in the overall subject of processual metaphysics and ontology. I am doing the same in my own way. A good view of the world is one which can absorb, morph and grow constructively over time and experience. I find Whitehead's cosmology of the world and universe, life and death, of extreme help in sorting through all the particulars arising in our contemporary times.

Thus my mission to bring to Christian and Non-Christian readership a valuable help in producing generative ethics and value into the many world of human pursuit. I might call this seeing God's love spread across, and embedded within, all things operating in a relational soup of experience and interaction with one another including that of the inanimate and immaterial. But as a Christian confronted with Christianity's pros and cons to the world I especially desire to recenter not only my own faith, but that of all faiths and religions, outlooks and socio-political economies back towards the center of Love.

Whiteheadian thought carries this value within it to which I, as a Christian may say, that God is Love and shared this Love with us by acts of continuing creation and by-and-through himself in the person and work of Jesus. Other religions can do the same via their origins when having been confronted by evil. As can non-religious civil outcries for liberties and justice. It is here where a value-based, generative system such as Process thought may provide a common ground of solidarity between disparate entities in regenerating our many social organs forward in the loving qualities of goodwill, truth (as we know it), peace, mercy, and forgiveness. Which is Process Theology has arisen in response to Whitehead's evolving insights to help reposition a God or religion back to it's origins... that of Love.

Imagine what a loving religion, a loving Christianity, a loving world, might accomplish with itself if it syncs up with the observed processes found throughout a universe leaning into the formation of valuative generations from every prehended event across all succeeding concrescing events? The possibility for the enrichment of life would be astounding. A Process theologian would then demand a pan-en-theistic cosmology as versus the church's mere "theistic" cosmology. One which integrates God's Imago Dei thoroughly into the metaphysics of life while maintaining the Otherness of God's own ontological being. It would more simulate birthing than adoption of God's Self into the There that was there down to its lowest DNA level.

It is also why Process theologians will contend for love in all things, all activities, all views of the world as against the "survival of the fittest" which the Church has claimed to be non-generative, non-loving, and non-God in act. The Church had gotten part of it right and most of it wrong. It's theistic cosmology did not allow it's God to extend to the lowest reaches of the earth, in a manner of speaking. As God is himself a God of process, so too is creation processual. We see this in the processual evolution of the spacetime, quantum particles, the universe itself, and planetary development urging towards "life" in its broadest meanings and senses. And within all these processes is rebirthed again and again a processual longing for more value, more structural interaction between the parts with the whole, a deep psychic push forwards towards greater and greater response against the necessary entrophy filling cosmology (see my previous post with ChatGPT on this topic).

Traditional theistic theologians may dislike Process theology's God and cosmology but when adopted in replacement to traditional Christianity's structural creeds and dogmas will immediately see the value of Love - of a loving God - insisting on reworking their thoughts of God as a God of Holiness and Penal Justice first in favor of a God who is first-and-foremost-and-at-all-times Loving through, and through, and through. And when done, God's presumed Holiness and Penal Justice must now fall inline to God's Love. A Love where a real divine holiness and divine judgment falls first upon the God of Creation (we know as Jesus) as it ever had done even in God's earliest lessons to Abram when passing God's Self through the slaughtered covenanted sacrificial carcasses.

God has ever-and-always led by Love. His holiness is ever mitigated by Love. His judgment, by Love. So that holiness is now found in presence and judgment in the indwelling Spirit of God upon the hearts of creation. As the universe is ever driven by entropy and negentrophy it's negator, so too creation's freedom to love or not love is ever driven by desire to distance, isolate, and remove the binding forces of loving fellowship between all things. Process theology leans the way of fellowship against the Church's earlier speculations of God's more austere presence. No less helped by a collection of religious narratives it inherited by Israel's confused understanding of God's Love in it's own narratives and national life.

And though Jesus and the disciples came to the Jewish priests and rabbis to correct such unloving narratives of God still they persist today in the Church's literal readings of the bible without seeing how the vary nature of the evolution of God in religion was percolating towards love. A process theologian then will read the bible processually as informing themselves that the person and work of a loving God is not immediately understood or grasped from his first followers but as the story of God and God's atoning, redeeming values of love are presently present and enlarging where it can - even in the more unloving, legalizing portions of the Church - then fellowship of all things to all things wins when Love wins across all the boundary lands of faith, organization, mechanism, and binary concept of a valuative panentheistic creation bounded and positioned, poised and oriented towards, a relentless, undying ethic of generative value against an entropy of isolation, breakage, harm, and evil.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

May 19, 2023

A Short Process Series on the God of Generative Value & Love

• The Relentless Process Of A Processually Loving Cosmology

• Chatbot and I "discuss" Process Philosophy in Today's Quantum Sciences

• Whitehead’s Final Interpretation of Reality: God and the World

A synopsis of process philosophy

Posted on September 18, 2016 by csl4d

A great lecture by Arthur F. Holmes

At the end of my last post (no, not that last post!) I admitted to my predilection for Whitehead, the father of process philosophy and theology. Unfortunately, his magnus opus, Process and reality, is notoriously difficult. Accidentally, I came across a playlist with a lecture series on the history of philosophy by Arthur F. Holmes (The playlist also includes lectures on Leibniz, Locke, Kant, Hegel and American pragmatism, which I will probably use as a background when I will deal with Churchman’s “The design of inquiring systems”). I found the first lecture on Whitehead (there are three in total) greatly elucidating, especially after I made a concept map (see below) of the lecture. I also made a transcription of the lecture, which you can download here. What follows in this post is a short description of the concept map, so a very, very brief introduction to Whitehead’s process philosophy. Best listen to the lecture, while keeping the concept map, the transcription, and possibly this post handy. You may learn something in a jiffy that others (really, really clever guys and gals) have taken months to master.

click to enlarge here

Process philosophy     … is nothing new. Process notions can be found in many traditions, including Buddhism (India), and Taoism (China), but also in the ideas of the pre-Socratic Heraclitus (Greece, 535-475 BC). Process philosophy in its modern guise was formally launched in 1929 when Whitehead (1861-1947) published his Process and reality.

Alfred North Whitehead    … was a ground-breaking philosopher (of science), physicist and mathematician from Thanet in Kent, UK. His main influences as a philosopher were modern science, Hegel, 19th century Romanticism and the Alexandrian fathers. His prime concern is the distinction between science and ethics, the separation of value and fact, a problem that also troubled Churchman (hence perhaps my liking of the two).

Mathematician and physicist   While in Cambridge he wrote Principia mathematica with Bertrand Russell. While teaching at London University he wrote about quantum physics and relativity theory. He reformulated the relational implications of both in a number of fallacies of science, including the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (esp. in relation to mechanistic abstractions) and the fallacy of simple location (which is based on non-relational ideas).

Hegel’s influence     … came to Whitehead mostly through the work of F.H. Bradley, a British idealist philosopher, who rejected empiricism – as did Whitehead. Hegel´s philosophy is best characterized as evolutionary idealism, in which the ‘free, creative spirit’ unfolds into self-consciousness using the well-known triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. This spirit is not a substance or thing, but a process, which Hegel studies by means of a phenomenology of human existence and history. Whitehead borrows most of these ideas from Hegel, with the exception of the ‘spirit’ idea (idealism). He is staunchly monistic (as am I) and prefers his evolutionary process to be naturalistic.

The evolutionary naturalism     … of Whitehead emphasizes process (instead of substance), relations (instead of non-relational, atomistic things), and an organic world view (instead of a mechanistic universe). Whitehead also adopts a phenomenological approach to the study of process as the basic notion of reality. His main subject of phenomenological study is human consciousness, as it is most directly accessible to us.

Sense perception      Of all the processes that make up human consciousness, Whitehead uses sense perception as the paradigm event to exemplify all the processes that constitute the universe. Whitehead’s theory of where our ideas come from differs from that of many of his predecessors. Sense perception follows from the intrusion of real, objective 

data (first step), which prompt us to consider a range of possibilities (second step) as to what this intrusion amounts to. In a third step, we select one of these possibilities or ideas as our ‘working hypothesis’. This hypothetical idea symbolically refers to the objective data that intruded upon our consciousness in the first place, be it by way of sound, touch, vision or otherwise. Whitehead is without doubt a realist (or naturalist) and not an idealist.

Eternal possibilities    The question now is as to where the possibilities of the second step come from? One could say it comes from our “stock of experiences”, as Dewey suggests. Whitehead prefers them to come from the so-called “logos structure” of God as developed by the Alexandrian church fathers such as Clemens and Origenes in the 2nd and 3rd century CE. These possibilities are possibilities of novelty that must have been created in some way. Without novelty no creative process is possible. To Whitehead God is the highest manifestation of creativity, whose stock of possibilities drives the cosmic process of creation. Whitehead does not claim any knowledge of the starting or end point of creation. On the basis of the evidence available to us there is only on-going creation.

Value     … can be observed at two points. In the first place in the range of possibilities, each of them being value-laden, whether it is for good or for bad. The second point is where we opt (or decide) for one possibility or the other. Whitehead wanted a cosmology that has a place for value. Modern science claims itself to be value-free by restricting itself to the facts and nothing but the facts, whereas Whitehead experiences aesthetic and moral value in the world and in nature. This experience of value is also expressed in Romanticism as exemplified by e.g. Wordsworth, whose poetry was a source of inspiration for Whitehead.

Process theology       Whitehead’s metaphysics has greatly inspired Christian theology and perhaps the theologies of other faiths. Important process theologians include Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) and John B. Cobb (1925), who co-founded the Center for Process Studies with David Ray Griffin (1939) in 1973. Dr. Cobb maintains a blog, answering questions regarding process thought and faith. A very pleasant introduction to process theology is the one by C. Robert Mesle. The Divinity School of the University of Chicago was the place where process theology developed for at least 60 years.

Criticism    … of Whitehead and process philosophy comes from a variety of sources. Whitehead’s early friend and collaborator, Bertrand Russell, obviously criticized the theological aspects of process philosophy, since he believed religion to be little more than often harmful superstition. Arthur Holmes (who delivered the Youtube lecture on which most of the concept map of this post based) thinks Whitehead may have stretched his event-based monism too far by applying it to persons.

God     Whitehead leaves many questions on the nature of God unanswered. Perhaps he did so on purpose, to leave open the possibility of process naturalism as suggested by Mesle, who holds that “the world of finite, natural creatures is unified”, but not “in such a way as to give rise to a single divine Subject,” even of a non-supernatural kind as in process theism. A naturalistic God then may be conceived as the subjective projection of a unified world of finite, natural creatures, i.e. an ideal without the unified existence ascribed to it by theists, but well worth approximating as a conception in one way or another. Such a conception leaves ample room to position oneself as an atheist, agnostic or theist, all the while producing a lot of common ground between the three.

Appreciation     There can be no doubt that Whitehead’s philosophy is a valiant effort to bring value or the human quest for meaning and fact or the scientific quest for truth together in a single scheme. The scheme as a whole cannot be understood and appreciated by looking at it from a single angle. Taking human consciousness as a starting point for obtaining a phenomenological description of a paradigm event of cosmic process, both at macro-scale and micro-scale, as well of human as of divine reality,  was brilliant. Once theism is accepted, then the logos structure gives it a new twist (panentheism) that inspired many theologians, including Wieman and untold (not just Unitarian) others. There is also the romantic view of aesthetic and moral value in nature, which aligns well with this type of panentheism. Bertrand Russell, despite his criticism, could not possibly disprove of that.

Systems approach      What I like about the phenomenological description of the “paradigm event” of process is the way it fits with the systems approach. It is important to note that an event can be anything, from somebody’s biography (or life) to the history of the universe. A systems version of Holmes´ account of an event could be: a process (or project or policy) that experiences an intrusion of sorts (a “wicked problem”), which then may become the subject of an inquiry in a systemic way to suggest an infinite range of possibilities, which enables a decision in favour of one option or another. Another aspect of process philosophy is its process-relational vision, its view that reality is relational, through and through. Reality as a social process. Freedom is inherent in the world. To be an individual is to be self-creative, i.e. to take decision after decision. Furthermore, in Mesle’s words, “Experience is rich and complex. The clarity of sense experience is grounded in deeper but vaguer experiences of our relatedness to the world process. Adequacy to this wealth of experience [SH: which can be tapped by taking into account the perspectives of others] is the ultimate test of our ideas.” The value of the systems approach lies in its potential for finding better approximations to such adequacy.