Whitehead -
Process Philosophy + Biology
I didn't have time to pursue the google articles below but wanted to list them for those of you who read my past recent articles on process philosophy/theology and biology (most recently the two articles below). The "Related Resources" section are past articles of mine in which Whiteheadian Thought is further distinguished, examined, and expanded for our time.
As philosophic-theology doesn't excite anybody except people like myself trained in theology but not trained in my inherited theology's philosophical basis... I began this very important CHRISTIAN project in 2011 after writing a number of poems (unpublished) and finding I had come to the end of my epistemological foundation. I needed a more up-to-date approach to the postmodern (now metamodern) era I was finding myself in.
More simply, I needed a better philosophical foundation than the one I had inherited by my Westernized (American) BAPTIST faith once founded in Calvinistic Dispensationalist and later to evolve in college and seminary to a Calvinistic Covenant Reformed theology. After years of teaching this strain of enculturated Evangelical Christianity and by happenstance fell into Evangelical Emergent Christianity (a bible-church form of mainstream progressive Christianity). It left me with a lot of questions and no way to answer them with my present background.
It took some time to understand Emergent Christianity which made the reasonable argument that one's faith in Jesus in nothing but empty if it doesn't also demand works of Jesus across all stratas of society. In past ministries not one aspect of church ministries had not seem by time and effort placed into people and community. And in my 40s I next participated with my public school system, youth sports, and politics from a serving citizen perspective for several decades in addition to church ministries.
But in this newer stream of Christian emphasis of FAITH + WORKS with equal emphasis on each, I also noticed that Reformed Calvinized Covenant theology was unequal to the works of Jesus at hand. Its definition of God and godly faith seemed to fail in all the wrong places. Hence, after some disruption to my existential spirituality and took my next step from personal poetic examination to strategic faith examination.
When I did I found I needed to abandon Calvinism altogether BUT KEEP the Covenant theology I had learned (with or without Reformed theology, whatever that means now-a-days). Thus my historical Baptist roots in Arminianism came to the surface to remove the Cal-Minism (Calvinism+Arminianism) I was taught. Next, Arminianism led quite naturally to a more open and relational faith to which process theology was added later.
This latter I also stumbled across while I was examining Continental philosophical thought. Little to I realize how significant it would become... not as a third Barthian way of Continentalism + Evangelicalsim but a deeply ancient organic philosophy spoke to by many in the past all the way back to ancient civilizations. More recently, we may blame Hegel for unearthing processual thought before he quickly left it to attend to other beliefs and statements in his day.
And then a master mathematician who was interested in the early quantum sciences by the name of Alfred North Whitehead retired from the University of London's Imperial College, and came overseas to America, and was hired by Harvard University at the ripe old age of 63. And for the next six years (68) Whitehead wrote out his treatise of "Process and Reality" among many other tracts and articles. The University of Chicago picked it up in the 1950s under Charles Hartshorne whose student John Cobb and other Generation-2 luminaries brought process thought to universities on the East and West coasts (Clairmont, Drew, Duke, Wilmington, etc).
It was here that I finally found a significant philosophical tradition to re-root my Westernized Christianity based in Hellenistic Platonic thought with all it's corollaries of Augustianism, Aristotilianism, Scholasticism, and Christianized Modernism. I had found an organically open and relational theology on which I might revisualize the God I knew in the bible but had become muddied by nonnatural westernized philsophic-theology.
Hence my deep labor to give to Relevancy22 readers all the tools they will need to continue our present need to once again preach Jesus and to assert a Theology of Love as versus all the other non-loving theologies which have become politically disruptive, eschatologically unhealthy, and foreign to the nature and being of man and nature.
Below are your tools. Use them. Try to understand their flavors and approaches. And ignite the chaff in today's Trumpian churches burning up the chattel that Jesus may be lifted up as a loving God who is deeply present with us, sustaining, burdening, filling us by His Spirit in good and humane ways of loving outreach and community building across all cultures, beliefs, religions, and responsibilities.
Amen,
R.E. Slater
June 24, 2023
*unedited
Alfred North Whitehead OM FRS FBA (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He created the philosophical school known as process philosophy,[21] which has been applied in a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology.
In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. He wrote the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), with his former student Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library.
Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of Western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another. Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.
Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us." For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb.
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RELATED RESOURCES
Process Cosmotheology and the Biological Universe, Part 4 - Andrew Davis' Response to Steven Dick's Naturalistic Cosmology
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GOOGLE SEARCH on
Process Philosophy + Biology
Scholarly articles for process philosophy + biology | |
Process philosophy - Seibt - Cited by 342 Process philosophy of signs - Williams - Cited by 33 A manifesto for a processual philosophy of biology - Dupré - Cited by 137 | |
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