Introduction
by R.E. Slater
I
At the 22:00+ minute mark Matt Segall speaks to why Whitehead's process metaphysic is becoming so attractive to the natural sciences. It is why I became so quickly attracted to it once learning of it: "That in Whitehead is offered a helpful, competent cosmological metaphysic to the quantum world of science more than any other current metaphysic presently available." If you have a science background you will understand what I mean.... As introduction, Matt spends the first 22 minutes speaking to why process thought came to life in the early days of the quantum revolution of the sciences.
Moreover, Whitehead's process ontology seems to right all the errors I had once been taught from an Americanized bible educational perspective as learned from within a Reformed Calvinist evangelical theism. My education was neither Methodist nor Lutheran, Catholic nor Orthodox, nor even interfaith though I strive to understand each a bit better now then I could then when held in the grips of westernized evangelical thought. And yet, it may be said that all Christian and non-Christian religions easily fall into my critique of the Christian faith here in this article.
Finally, I find Whitehead's process ethic to be ironically far more generous than any Christian ethic displayed by the church when influencing state government and social thought as observed historically over the centuries by Christian oppression, cruelty and terror. Not that other parts of Christianity hasn't had its good results despite it's assimilating efforts of Westernized thinking and behaviour when communicating in cross cultural situations. But in Whitehead's universe, God and experiential outcomes tell of the love God holds for us and is working causally (not casually) through a cooperating universe... which tells us of an interacting divine prescence which is real and meaningful:
Usage: Cause v Casual: "The interviewers tried to be as casual and friendly as possible whereas Cause is the reason or source for something to happen." Thus, I prefer to write of a processual God as an interacting, non-coercive causal presence than of an evangelic God seen more as a determinatively controlling and forceful presence over-ruling creaturely agency. Hence, God by love, is working causally through a cooperating universe effecting not only God's non-coercive, interacting causal will but affecting universal and creaturely will as well in a working fellowship of novel creativity, benevolence, and beauty.
17 "You know this, my beloved brothers and sisters. Now everyone must be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger; for a man’s anger does not bring about the righteousness of God. Therefore, ridding yourselves of all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness, in humility receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls. But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not just hearers who deceive themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was. But one who has looked intently at the perfect law, the law of freedom, and has continued in it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an active doer, this person will be blessed in what he does. If anyone thinks himself to be religious, yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this person’s religion is worthless. Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world."
II
Having watched the good-and-bad words-and-deeds of the church tells us the "Christian" God needs a better definition than what God has been given by the church over the centuries. I submit that Process philosophy undergirding Process theology can offer any church or religion a more thoroughly loving God and universe than presently had under earlier Greek/Roman Stoicism, neo-Platonic Hellenism, or conflicted Jewish-Semitic thought. This would include all succeeding church ages held under various philosophic arguments and arrangements which have influenced its theological outcomes. As example, the Marxist German-Lutheran God who was quickly turned into a Nazi-Aryan God of hate and genocide. Thus and thus, a non-processual God is a more secularized and worldly God than a loving God of processual actuality as seen in Whiteheadian vernacular.
Which brings us to the subject of sin and the many kinds of "bible" theologies behind this idea.... Process theology describes sin differently than would a non-processual theology. That the subject of sin is approached through creaturely freewill or agency rather than as an inbred force of nature. That is, creation is good and beautiful. It is not inherently sinful even though it groans and is affected by sin. So too humanity. We are not sinful but fraught with ethical tension. I would suggest we rather are born with a love nature in a freewill universe.
Moreover, a loving God created a world and a creation without sin as birthed from God's image as versus i) the church's imagined "sin nature" which it's theology flatly states inhabits all creation. It is further imagined ii ) that "Sin entered Adam and that all creation fell in Adam" per the Apostle Paul. Whence comes the idea that humanity is born into sin even as all creation is... thus answering the church's question of sin and evil's origin.
However, Paul's kind of Semitic thought was influenced by the intermix of Greek and Roman philosophies across his own Semitic Judaism. Paul is searching for words and phrases to describe sin and evil which a processual theologian may take as a tensional force interacting with love-ingrained or imputed "freewill " agency. But NOT as an imputed force into nature as described by the traditional church's "Adamic Fall." Sure, it makes for good preaching but soon all of God's creation is seen as ugly and unloving giving to us in consequence a fickled, dipolar God who both loves and shows wrath which in consequence gives to us a austerely moral church full of legalism and hypocrisy, but not a church of love and goodwill. The point? The kind of God we have is the kind of God we get. God becomes humanized rather than Godly. God is love. God is not evil.
Hence, today's meta-modernist theologian must work through the bible-and-church's many pan-philosophical and psycho-social historical outlooks of God which church has betrayed it's kind of God that it worships. The portrayal of God in either Moses' day, or Jesus' day, 4000 to 2000 years ago is quite a bit different from the 21st century church's God today. A God which the church has added to in the bible or subtracted from in the bible over it's many theological eras. It is a myth that tbe traditional God has only been one kind of God.
And so, in process thought the church is afforded the opportunity yet again to re-orient it's bible's many enculturated kinds of theologies so that it may revisualize a God worthy of following. A God who speaks love and beauty against the unbeing and unbecomingness of unloving theologies, attitudes and actions.
As example, look at the early church's bible in it's eschatological depiction of God in the New Testament book of Revelation. Certainly this is not a loving God but a God of wroth and judgment. Such a picture defies a God of love, health and welfare (notably, I have discussed Revelation in another article several months ago which the interested reader may review). Let's just say that Christian thought has been affected by secular thought many, many times.
Too, God has often been described by our own anthropological demeanors too many times. So if we are going to continuely employ such a practice let us justifiably pursue a decent enough philosophy to help guide us in our preaching and ministries rather than to look to ourselves as the sum total of who God is as theologians and dogmatists have done over the centuries. Which is another way of saying that if we are to effect God's love than we our responsible to love in word and deed in healthy, helpful ways per the kind of God we have constructed in our minds and hearts. When we do not, the world blows up under us and around us. That is the story of Revelation. An eschatological picture of what happens when we do not love one another. It is the story of us and our failures and not of God and God's character.
Conclusion
And so, it is not necessary to further describe God as a wrothful divine ruler come to curse and destroy. We are the ones who are affecting our own destruction... not God. The gods of the Greek pantheon are not like the Jewish God of Jesus. They are different. And the church must account for the bible's many interior enculturated writings of God and theology when reading the bible for it's own day and age. If it doesn't, we continue to get a muscular dipolar God of human imagination. In process thought this won't do.
Hence Whitehead, and hence a reconstruction of Westernized theology from a post-evangelical or post-traditional outlook. One that is built on a processual metaphysic, ontology, and ethic. Process theology's God is more thoroughly beautiful. More loving. More kind and good. And traditionalized words like "holiness" become irrelevant as all creation is seen as holy in processual thought even as all can be beautiful and loving when based in a God which is beautiful and loving in God's Self.
Amen and Amen,
R.E. Slater
January 4, 2025
Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism
with Matthew D. Segall
Dartington Trust | June 4, 2021
This talk introduces Alfred North Whitehead’s “Philosophy of Organism,” a novel metaphysical scheme that he articulated in the first half of the twentieth century not only as a protest against the lifeless Nature imagined by scientific materialism, but also as a rejection of the narrow linguistic analysis and sterile logical positivism of his philosophical contemporaries. His was an attempt to make natural science philosophical again by asking whether physical causes and motions need be so violently segregated from the conscious reasons and emotions by which we apprehend them. We will explore the major themes of his magnum opus, Process & Reality, wherein Whitehead attempts to construct an organic system of the universe that not only brings quantum and relativity theories into coherence, but gathers up scientific truths, aesthetic feelings, and religious values into an integral vision of reality.Matthew D. Segall is a process philosopher whose research focuses on process-relational thought (especially Alfred North Whitehead) and German Idealism (especially Friedrich Schelling). He is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA (CIIS.edu). He has published articles on a wide-array of topics, including metaphysics, Gaia theory, religious studies, psychedelics, and architecture. He also blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.
This talk is part of the Holistic Science programme at Schumacher College. Find out more about the programme and register for updates about the course: https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/...
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Oct 10, 2024 | 55:42
Matt Segall, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Department at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and the Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute. He is author of Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead, and Physics of the World Soul: Whitehead's Adventure in Cosmology. His website is https://footnotes2plato.com/about-me/
New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death.
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Matt Segall weaves together the thought of Descartes, Kepler and Alfred North Whitehead in a deep synthesis with biology, physics, cognitive science and theology.
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Matthew David Segall returns to the Homebrewed podcast with Dr. Tripp Fuller after 8 years! It was a blast to talk with Matt about his new book and a bunch of other process-related goodness. When you get done listening make sure you check out his YouTube channel and the new book.
How did Matt end up with cosmological questions finding Alfred North Whitehead through Terence Mckenna "Whitehead is like Psychadelics, you shouldn't jump into them alone." The allure of Whitehead's vision of mind in nature as the potential of a process engagement with different sciences. Tripp talks about how part five of Process & Reality feels like a philosophical revival sermon; the limits of science and problem of repressed reductive metaphysics; what does Whitehead mean by a philosophy of organism; the hot spring hypothesis for the origin of life; what is in the concept 'world-soul'; how does Whitehead help one think of life after physical death; how Whitehead came to affirm God.
Matt shares the story of his own wrestling with Christianity and his reflection on the future of the faith... 'a non-denominational non-institutionalized Christian' what do we make about the power and problems that come with a religious tradition. Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
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April 1, 2022 | 1:21:29
Welcome to More Christ, where we seek to bring some of the world's most interesting and insightful guests to discuss life's central and abiding questions. In this sixty-ninth episode in a series of discussions, I'm joined by Dr Matt Segall.
Matthew D. Segall, PhD, received his doctoral degree in 2016 from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. His dissertation was titled Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead. It grapples with the limits to knowledge of reality imposed by Kant's transcendental form of philosophy and argues that Schelling and Whitehead's process-oriented approach (described in his dissertation as a "descendental" form of philosophy) shows the way across the Kantian threshold to renewed experiential contact with reality. He teaches courses on German Idealism and Process Philosophy for the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.
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Jan 30, 2024 | 1:36:16
Prof. Matthew David Segall (@Footnotes2Plato) is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer, and philosopher applying process-relational thought across the natural and social sciences, as well as in the study of consciousness. He is the Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA and the Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute. Prof. Segall has authored many books, including 'Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead' and is the creator of Footnotes2Plato. In this episode, we discuss the paradigm shift in biology, Whitehead's philosophy of organisms, Schelling's Naturphilosophie, deep ecology, Transcendental Materialism and Slavoj Žižek.
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August 2, 2023 | 46:04
My presentation summarizing the paper linked below at the 13th International Whitehead Conference hosted by the Munich School of Philosophy. Introduced by Godehard Brüntrup.
Link to paper I am summarizing: https://footnotes2plato.com/2023/06/2...
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Sep 5, 2023 | 1:13:00
Matthew Segall joins The Meaning Code to discuss the intersection of music, memory, and the fundamental nature of life. They explore the communal nature of cellular life and how it relates to the collaborative effort of human development as well as the importance of intelligent sensitivity in decision-making and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
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Apr 6, 2022 | 58:06
Conversations in Process has returned for a second season! Host Jay McDaniel will be interviewing exciting guests from both within the process community and beyond. Want to listen to this conversation on the go as an audio-only podcast? Find the show on your preferred podcasting application at https://cobb.institute/conversations-...
On this episode of Conversations in Process, Jay is joined by Professor Matthew Segall to discuss the finer details of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy and theology, and to draw connections between Whitehead’s thought and other important thinkers and religious traditions.
Matt is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where he teaches graduate level courses on process philosophy and German Idealism. His recent book, Physics of the World-Soul: Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, put Whitehead’s process cosmology into conversation with various contemporary scientific theories, such as general relativity and quantum theory. This book is exemplary of much of Matt's recent work, which puts ideas from process philosophy into conversation with the natural sciences.
In this conversation, Matt begins by sharing a bit of his own intellectual journey, telling how he came to Whitehead through Terence McKenna. He talks about his own spiritual background, growing up in a mixed religious family and coming to appreciate eastern religious sensibilities at a young age. Along with guidance from mentors, he eventually discovered that the spiritual insights from dharmic religions which had captivated him in his adolescence actually had equivalents within Western spiritual and religious traditions. Discovering these sources of Western wisdom was what eventually led Matt to encountering Whitehead’s own work, first exploring Adventures of Ideas before diving into Process and Reality.
At this point, Matt and Jay dive into some of the finer details of Whitehead’s philosophical vision, spending some time dwelling on his conception of God, considering how this differs from previous understandings of the divine and subverts certain Western philosophical tendencies generally. Matt also shares his perspectives on God as both the divine lure and the divine companion in Whitehead’s thought, and also emphasizes how Whitehead’s God is something that may appeal to more scientifically-minded folks due to the strong empirical emphasis in Whitehead’s thought. Another important aspect to Whitehead’s philosophy is his insistence on “organic realism,” which Matt presents as an alternative to either idealism or materialism.
Matt and Jay conclude this conversation with a discussion of how Whitehead’s thought interfaces with other important traditions such as Neoplatonism, shamanism, Buddhism, and Jung’s depth psychology. Matt and Jay both emphasize that these two-way dialogues are always fruitful and that these are areas ripe for further research and conversation. Matt will be returning to Conversations in Process later this season to continue this dialogue and explore the ways in which process thought can contribute to contemporary social, cultural, and ecological issues. Stay tuned!
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Sep 13, 2020 | 1:07:01
Matt Segall is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness a the California Institute of Integral studies. Here is a link to one of his talks: Religion in Human and Cosmic Evolution: Whitehead's Alternative Vision (with discussion)
Matt and I have a deep discussion and get into dialogs about Whitehead's process philosophy and his idea of the religion in the making which has connections to the religion that is not a religion. It was a very great pleasure to talk with Matt, and I look forward to many more such discussions.
