Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

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 [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Saturday, June 24, 2023

Whitehead - Process Philosophy + Biology



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

This ontology of things and their properties is articulated at a higher level through the concept of mechanism, the arrangement of things into structures that, ...
We identify three main empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology: metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence. We ...
by J Seibt2012Cited by 342 — Process philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any ...
by DJ Nicholson2018Cited by 312 — A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology. 3. John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson. Part II. Metaphysics. 2. Processes and Precipitates.
403 pages
The process view of life, at least, derives from the fact that everything is more or less connected, ecologically or symbiotically. The unity of science is a ...
John Dupré on the view of living things as deeply intertwined processes. ... Process philosophy of biology has powerful resources for challenging the ...
Process philosophy, also ontology of becoming, or processism, is an approach in philosophy that identifies processes, changes, or shifting relationships as ...
by D Sölch2016Cited by 7 — Based on his studies of the behavior of social insects, Wheeler developed a concept of superorganisms that paved the way for a theory of emergent evolution.
Sep 25, 2012 — John Dupré, Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology, Oxford University Press, 2012, 320pp., $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199691982.