Tuesday, April 25, 2023

R.E. Slater - Process Christianity & Questions of Faith

https://cobb.institute/

Process Christianity & Questions of Faith

by R.E. Slater

Whitehead's background was an unusual one for a speculative philosopher. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his coauthorship with his student and disciple Bertrand Russell and publication in 1913 of Principia Mathematica, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of gravity in Minkowski space as a logically possible alternative to Einstein's general theory of relativity. Whitehead's Process and Reality[1] is perhaps his philosophical master work. - Wikipedia

After arriving home yesterday from a two week vacation I went out to coffee the next morning to meet with some friends. At the cafe I stopped to say hello to two casual acquaintances whom I see a lot but made the mistake of being too honest answering their questions. It began innocently enough and went something like this:

[Me] Good Morning [to a Christian couple].
[Couple] Good Morning. Why aren't you at the Christian College's special breakfast this morning?
[Me] Yeah. Thought about it. Even got a personal invite yesterday, which was nice; but wanted to meet up with my friends at the cafe here whom I haven't seen in a couple of weeks. I guess, bad timing, eh?
[Couple] Any special reason for not going?
[It was here I missed the impending judgment coming my way... ]
[Me] Yeah. I've been going to the college's educational classes for the past ten years taking about 4-8 classes a term and have been active across several of their committees. So, taking a break. Probably missed a great breakfast.
[Couple] Oh. Why?
[Now I am picking up on their line of questioning and threw an anchor into the conversation to end it. But they wouldn't let it go... ] 
[Me] After sixty+ classes across a wide diversity of subjects I wanted to see more process-based instruction than the college's Calvinistic interpretation of the bible, history, literature, art, economics, and such like.
[Couple] Oh. What's "process?"
[Me] Process thought. Or, process philosophy and theology. From Whitehead.
[Couple] Who? Whitehall?
[Me] No. Whitehead.
[Couple] Never heart of him.
[Me] Most people haven't (trying to end the conversation).
[Couple] How is he connected to Christianity?
[Me] He's more of a (quantum-based) Philosopher looking to redact Rene Descartes and post-enlightenment science by bringing back Hegel in an updated form. Whitehead proposed a way of looking at God, the bible, and life in general, in an organic, connective, relational, and open way using the lenses of love, peace, and hope.
[Couple] Oh... How is that different from regular bible teaching?
[They've decided they've had enough and are beginning to close down] 
[Me] It can be deeply meaningful for many Christian faiths and religions. But, here, at the college, they prefer Calvinism and do not wish to think about any other approaches. I find process thought very helpful for today's Christianity in a number of ways.
[Couple] Oh. Well, that's your opinion....
[An awkward silence ensues telling me our conversation has ended...]
[Me] Hey, thanks for asking. Have a great morning.

A Heaven Sent Spirit Calling

I've had countless discussions like these in one form or another and know quite well that very few Christians - from the groups I've been involved with - never wish to question their faith nor admit some form of lack in their theology.

For myself, not so many years ago, the Lord brought down the hammer and broke the centers of my belief into pieces. And I was glad for it.

I was a trained M.Div. theologian with years and years of intense learning from the best teachers I could find; while also teaching, pastoring, and ministering extensively as a lay person to youth and adults for many more years. But yet, I was dissatisfied and tge Spirit of the Lord was troubling my heart.

This experience was no mere "opinion". It was a divine shaking out which I yearned for when asking questions of my tradition it could not answer in ways I needed to hear.

It was also a profoundly dark time and one which I was glad to be experiencing. Where I was spiritually needed deliverance. And this the Lord did with finality...
"BOOM! I was suddenly and violently out on my own and there would be no fellowship nor help in this dark, empty place. All that I knew, and had believed, came smashing down and burned up. Only the smoking ruins of my brokenness were left."
Nor did I have any wish to leave after a week, a month, or many months. I wasn't leaving my divine retreat, or wilderness, until the Spirit called me back to the Christian faith. A faith I was being prepared to break and rebuild much as I had been.

It was a task I did not want. I was empty and the task ahead was too hard. Too vast. Too demanding. It would require an examination and rewrite of everything calling itself faith, belief, witness, and testimony. 

But when the Lord finally released me from this deep pit I felt freed from my unrest and filled with vision and hope again. I was being sent forth "to learn to unlearn that I might relearn" and present my faith as a much broader version of itself than it was observing.

At that moment I knew where I was going and had some sense of what must be done but without having any of my questions answered. Those answers would come with my next several phases of spirit growth (I call them phases I, II, III, and IV, which is my present process phase).

The Lord was with me; He had given to me a strong discontent over my present situation; and said "Rebuild" even as he did to Noah, Abram, David, the Prophets, Jesus, the Disciples, and Paul. "REBUILD!"

This is what I heard and was very glad to do so. And I hope to always be rebuilding upon the cornerstone and foundation of Jesus Christ and the Love of God. It was never a personal "opinion" but a personal breaking and submittal to harder tasks ahead. 


The More Common Story of Christians and their Faith

Other Christians, like myself, who are curious, who have longed to find a loving God in their Christian faith, have likewise had to deconstruct their own Christian traditions in order to rebuild it again in a better version of Jesus' love. In essence, to rebuild, or reconstruct, a new Christian theology of love.

This is the story of Tripp and Marjorie shared in the podcast below.

If you are going through some very deep questions know you are in - and have been in - very good company. We can go back to Martin Luther and his 95 articles of discontent with his church. Or, to John Bunyan of Pilgrim's Progress or the phenomenal Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon whose autobiography is filled with questions and searchings and discontent with the Christian faith.

Today, it appears to be Process Christians who are seeking a better faith and more becoming way to live out faith than the hide-bound (Trumpian) Christianity some 2,000 years in the making (under differing names and eras). An institue bearing deeply unhelpful Church dogmas and teachings of Christian legalism; cosmic determinism; the oppression of non-Christians including it's "Christian" judgments upon other faiths in not-very-good-ways; all of which spins towards Christians making idols of God through pictures of their own corruptible selves.

Process destroys all of this. It removes it and destroys all past worthless, unChrist-like Christian traditions, creeds, and dogmas by saying,
"This isn't working. It never has worked. It never will work. It's time for a change. Keep the good stuff and throw out the bad. Let's start again knowing what we know by bringing love into the center of the Christian faith. God is love. Jesus was God's love. Let's become that love against the un-love we haven't been showing in our church polities, policies, teachings, and public addresses and behaviors."
And so, rather than looking for a new hermeneutic to interpret the bible... Or, properly repenting of not loving others as God showed to us through Christ... A new form of Christianity has risen to undo the past and help God's children course-correct in their lives and faiths, their witness and testimonies.

Process Christians thereby are addressing the elephant-in-the-room... they are removing the non-Christian, Greek/Westernized philosophies supporting such things as Calvinistic Christian theologies. It says we need better biblical foundations to build upon using more profound and better situated philosophical-theologies..
Theologies which are organic. Connective. Relational. Open. Loving. Peaceful. And Hopeful.
And instead of ending Spirit-sent discussions in our minds, hearts and spirits by not wishing to think about them anymore than we have to... or by finding other voices denouncing process Christianity in favor of supporting our own traditionally closed theologies... let's keep conversations alive and become more open in our souls to asking sincere questions not intended to judge people and make them feel stupid.

Blessings,

R.E. Slater
April 25, 2023

I hope you find this discussion helpful and enlightening.
Marjorie Suchocki is of a great age along with several other
process scholars such as John Cobb. These heavenly
treasures are still bearing testimony to the God of Love.
May we do as well. - re slater


Homebrewed Christianity w/ Dr. Tripp Fuller
and Marjorie Suchocki



Process and Reality

Process and Reality

Process and Reality is a book by Alfred North Whitehead, in which the author propounds a philosophy of organism, also called process philosophy. The book, published in 1929, is a revision of the Gifford Lectures he gave in 1927–28.

We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies, are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions. Such a change of thought is the shift from materialism to Organic Realism, as a basic idea of physical science.

— Process and Reality, 1929, p. 471.

Whitehead's Process and Reality

Whitehead's background was an unusual one for a speculative philosopher. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his coauthorship with his student and disciple Bertrand Russell and publication in 1913 of Principia Mathematica, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of gravity in Minkowski space as a logically possible alternative to Einstein's general theory of relativity. Whitehead's Process and Reality[1] is perhaps his philosophical master work.

The following is an attempt to provide an accessible outline of some of the main ideas in Whitehead's Process and Reality, based on the book itself, but guided by a general reading of secondary sources, especially I. Leclerc's Whitehead's Metaphysics. An Introductory Exposition.[2] Whitehead often speaks of the metaphysics of Process and Reality as 'the philosophy of organism'.

The cosmology elaborated in Process and Reality posits an ontology based on the two kinds of existence of entity, that of actual entity and that of abstract entity or abstraction.

The ultimate abstract principle of actual existence for Whitehead is creativity. Actual existence is a process of becoming, and “'becoming' is a creative advance into novelty”.[3] It is manifest in what can be called 'singular causality'. This term may be contrasted with 'nomic causality'. An example of singular causation is that I woke this morning because my alarm clock rang. An example of nomic causation is that alarm clocks generally wake people in the morning. Aristotle recognises singular causality as efficient causality. For Whitehead, there are many contributory singular causes for an event. A further contributory singular cause of my being awoken by my alarm clock this morning was that I was lying asleep near it until it rang.

An actual entity is a general philosophical term for an utterly determinate and completely concrete individual particular of the actually existing world or universe of changeable entities considered in terms of singular causality, about which categorical statements can be made. Whitehead's most far-reaching and profound and radical contribution to metaphysics is his invention of a better way of choosing the actual entities. Whitehead chooses a way of defining the actual entities that makes them all alike, qua actual entities, with a single exception, God.

For example, for Aristotle, the actual entities were the substances, such as Socrates (a particular citizen of Athens) and Bucephalus (a particular horse belonging to Alexander the Great). Besides Aristotle's ontology of substances, another example of an ontology that posits actual entities is in Leibnizmonads, said to be 'windowless'.

Whitehead's actual entities

For Whitehead, the actual entities exist as the only foundational elements of reality, the ultimately existing facts of the world. Nothing "either in fact or in efficacy"[4] underlies or lies beyond the actual entities; rather they underlie all reality.[5]

The actual entities are of two kinds, temporal and atemporal.

With one exception, all actual entities for Whitehead are temporal and are occasions of experience (which are not to be confused with consciousness, or with mere subjectivity). This 'actual entity' idea is most distinctly characteristic of the metaphysics of Process and Reality, and requires of the newly approaching reader a philosophically unprejudiced approach. An entity that people commonly think of as a simple concrete object, or that Aristotle would think of as a substance – a human being included – is in this ontology considered to be a composite of indefinitely many occasions of experience.

The one exceptional actual entity is at once temporal and atemporal: God. He is objectively immortal, as well as being immanent in the world. He is objectified in each temporal actual entity; but He is not an eternal object. Whitehead uses the term 'actual occasion' to refer only to purely temporal actual entities, those other than God.[6]

The occasions of experience are of four grades. The first comprises processes in a physical vacuum such as the propagation of an electromagnetic wave or gravitational influence across empty space. The occasions of experience of the second grade involve just inanimate matter. The occasions of experience of the third grade involve living organisms. Occasions of experience of the fourth grade involve experience in the mode of presentational immediacy, which means more or less what are often called the qualia of subjective experience. So far as we know, experience in the mode of presentational immediacy occurs in only more evolved animals. That some occasions of experience involve experience in the mode of presentational immediacy is the one and only reason why Whitehead makes the occasions of experience his actual entities; for the actual entities must be of the ultimately general kind. Consequently, it is inessential that an occasion of experience have an aspect in the mode of presentational immediacy; occasions in the grades one, two, and three lack that aspect. The highest grade of experience "is to be identified with the canalized importance of free conceptual functionings".[7]

There is no mind-matter duality in this ontology, because "mind" is simply seen as an abstraction from an occasion of experience which has also a material aspect, which is of course simply another abstraction from it; thus the mental and the material aspects are abstractions from one and the same concrete occasion of experience. The brain is part of the body, both being abstractions of a kind known as persistent physical objects, neither being actual entities. Though not recognised by Aristotle, there is biological evidence, written about by Galen,[8] that the human brain is an essential seat of human experience in the mode of presentational immediacy. We may say that the brain has a material and a mental aspect, all three being abstractions from their indefinitely many constitutive occasions of experience, which are actual entities.[9]

Inherent in each actual entity is its respective dimension of time. Potentially, each occasion of experience is causally consequential on every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time, and has as its causal consequences every other occasion of experience that follows; thus it has been said that Whitehead's occasions of experience are 'all window', in contrast to Leibniz's 'windowless' monads. In time defined relative to it, each occasion of experience is causally influenced by prior occasions of experiences, and causally influences future occasions of experience. An occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other occasions of experience, reacting to them.

The causal outcomes obey the usual well-respected rule that the causes precede the effects in time. Some pairs of processes cannot be connected by cause-and-effect relations, and they are said to be spatially separated. This is in perfect agreement with the viewpoint of the Einstein theory of special relativity and with the Minkowski geometry of spacetime.[10] It is clear that Whitehead respected these ideas, as may be seen for example in his 1919 book An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge[11] as well as in Process and Reality. Time in this view is relative to an inertial reference frame, different reference frames defining different versions of time.

The actual entity, the occasion of experience, is logically atomic in the sense that it cannot be cut and separated into two other occasions of experience. This kind of logical atomicity is perfectly compatible with indefinitely many spatiotemporal overlaps of occasions of experience. One can explain this atomicity by saying that an occasion of experience has an internal causal structure that could not be reproduced in each of the two complementary sections into which it might be cut. Nevertheless, an actual entity can completely contain indefinitely many other actual entities.[12]

Whitehead's theory of extension concerns the spatio-temporal features of his occasions of experience. Fundamental to both Newtonian and to quantum theoretical mechanics is the concept of velocity. The measurement of a velocity requires a finite spatiotemporal extent. Because it has no finite spatiotemporal extent, a single point of Minkowski space cannot be an occasion of experience, but is an abstraction from an infinite set of overlapping or contained occasions of experience, as explained in Process and Reality.[1] Though the occasions of experience are atomic, they are not necessarily separate in extension, spatiotemporally, from one another. Indefinitely many occasions of experience can overlap in Minkowski space.

An example of a nexus of temporally overlapping occasions of experience is what Whitehead calls an enduring physical object, which corresponds closely with an Aristotelian substance. An enduring physical object temporally has an earliest and a last member. Every member (apart from the earliest) is a causal consequence of the earliest member of the nexus, and every member (apart from the last) of such a nexus is a causal antecedent of the last. There are indefinitely many other causal antecedents and consequences of the enduring physical object, which overlap, but are not members, of the nexus. No member of the nexus is spatially separate from any other member. Within the nexus are indefinitely many continuous streams of overlapping nexūs, each stream including the earliest and the last member of the enduring physical object. Thus an enduring physical object, like an Aristotelian substance, undergoes changes and adventures during the course of its existence.[13]

Another aspect of the atomicity of occasions of experience is that they do not change. An actual entity is what it is. An occasion of experience can be described as a process of change, but is itself unchangeable.[14]

Whitehead's abstractions

Whitehead's abstractions are conceptual entities that are abstracted from or derived from and founded upon his actual entities. Abstractions are themselves not actual entities, but are the only entities that can be real.

An abstraction is a conceptual entity that involves more than one single actual entity. Whitehead's ontology refers to importantly structured collections of actual entities as nexuses of actual entities. Collection of actual entities into a nexus emphasises some aspect of those entities, and that emphasis is an abstraction, because it means that some aspects of the actual entities are emphasised or dragged away from their actuality, while other aspects are de-emphasised.

Whitehead admitted indefinitely many eternal objects. An example of an eternal object is a number, such as the number 'two'. Whitehead held that eternal objects are abstractions of a very high degree. Many abstractions, including eternal objects, are potential ingredients of processes.

Relation between actual entities and abstractions stated in the ontological principle

For Whitehead, besides its temporal generation by the actual entities which are its contributory causes, a process may be considered as a concrescence of abstract ingredient eternal objects. God enters into every temporal actual entity.

Whitehead's ontological principle is that whatever reality pertains to an abstraction is derived from the actual entities upon which it is founded or of which it is comprised.[15]

A source of an aphorism

The book is also the source of the frequently heard aphoristic reference to Western philosophy all being “footnotes to Plato":

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

— Process and Reality, Free Press, 1978, p. 39.

Publication data

The several originally published editions of Process and Reality were from New York and from Cambridge UK. There were many textual errors, partly due to Whitehead's imperfect handwriting and lack of interest in proof-reading. A largely corrected scholarly redaction was eventually prepared and published as Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929). 1979 corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press, ISBN 0-02-934570-7.

See also

References

  1. Jump up to:a b Whitehead, A.N. (1929). Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927–1928, Macmillan, New York, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK.
  2. ^ Leclerc, I. (1958). Whitehead's Metaphysics. An Introductory Exposition, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London, and Macmillan, New York.
  3. ^ Whitehead (1929) p. 42.
  4. ^ Whitehead (1929) p. 64.
  5. ^ Whitehead (1929) pp. 41, 116.
  6. ^ Whitehead (1929) p. 135.
  7. ^ Whitehead (1929) pp. 269–270.
  8. ^ Siegel, R.E. (1973). Galen: On Psychology, Psychopathology, and Function and Diseases of the Nervous System. An Analysis of his Doctrines, Observations, and Experiments, Karger, Basel, ISBN 978-3-8055-1479-8.
  9. ^ Whitehead (1929) p. 114.
  10. ^ Naber, G.L. (1992). The Geometry of Minkowski Spacetime. An Introduction to the Mathematics of the Special Theory of Relativity, Springer, New York, ISBN 978-0-387-97848-2
  11. ^ Whitehead, A.N. (1919). An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK.
  12. ^ Whitehead (1929) p. 195.
  13. ^ Whitehead (1929) pp. 52, 87, 285.
  14. ^ Whitehead (1929) p. 52.
  15. ^ Whitehead (1929) pp. 48, 64,68.

Secondary literature

External links