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I agree that process thought provides a good foundation — or at least resource — for spirituality.

At the same time, I think we need to be careful to not “promise more than we can deliver” regarding the conscious experiential aspect of relationship with God. Process thought most definitely highlights the intimacy of this relationship, and this is inarguably a great thing. Nonetheless, many (if not most) people will still experience times of emptiness and floundering, where they question their thinking and find even the most “Cobb-approved” answer isn’t working for them at the moment, and this is where even the most deeply processual thinker can experience the dark night of the soul.

I think Jace is on the right track in seeing the divine lure in this. I believe, if we are responding as best we can to the “call forward,” we will move into periods where we plateau, and sometimes where we encounter situations and circumstances where the problems seem insurmountable and we find ourselves despairing: “It is too much, I can’t do it, I’m alone and everything is lost.” Process thinking doesn’t promise to spare us these dark moments; instead, by calling us to continually work for the betterment of the world, it all but ensures that we will experience them. Process thought reminds us that God is incarnate in each of these moments, but we’ll still need to grind through them until we once again are consciously living in and affected by this knowledge.

Timothy Murphy talks about this in his book, Counter-Imperial Churching for a Planetary Gospel (https://processcenturypress.com/counter-imperial-churching-for-a-planetary-gospel/). It’s been awhile since I read it (or, more accurately, skimmed it), but I recall him talking quite a bit about liberation theology and post-colonialism.

As I understand it, process thought does not argue that all things have consciousness. In fact, as we see in this week’s recommended reading from Robert Mesle, “…electrons may be said to have experience that is almost purely physical. Such experience would not involve consciousness, of course. Even lower animals seem to lack that” (p. 55). John Cobb expands on this, “Whitehead does not limit subjectivity to conscious subjectivity. He agrees with the depth psychologists that most of our experience is not conscious. Consciousness arises, he thinks, only when experience attains to a certain complexity, a complexity that probably requires a central nervous system” (“Whitehead’s Theory of Value,” https://www.religion-online.org/article/whiteheads-theory-of-value/).

In Modes of Thought Whitehead talks about four grades of being (or, to use his phrase, “aggregations of actualities”): the inorganic or nonliving, the vegetative, the animal and the human. He says, “Consciousness is the first example of the selectiveness of enjoyment in the higher animals” (p. 40), adding,

There is…every gradation of transition between animals and men. In animals we can see emotional feeling, dominantly derived from bodily functions, and yet tinged with purposes, hopes, and expression derived from conceptual functioning. In mankind, the dominant dependence on bodily functioning seems still there. And yet the life of a human being receives its worth, its importance, from the way in which unrealized ideals shape its purposes and tinge its actions. The distinction between men and animals is in one sense only a difference in degree. But the extent of the degree makes all the difference. The Rubicon has been crossed (pp. 37–38).

What is claimed is that all things experience. The lowest forms of being—such as rocks—experience things physically: they prehend the data of their past physical existence and continue that existence, and they can be acted upon physically. They have no conceptual prehensions, however, and therefore cannot imagine possibilities and pursue them (thus, for example, a rock obviously cannot imagine becoming a statue and then reconfigure itself into one).

Not all people agree with this hierarchy, of course. In the previous two courses (for those of us enrolled in the certificate program) an individual staunchly disagreed with Whitehead’s grades of existence, arguing strenuously for a non-anthropocentric standard for valuation.

Segall also posted his dissertation, Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead, at https://matthewsegall.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/matt-segall-diss-final-draft-with-tech-edits-4_9_2016.pdf. I assume his forthcoming book is a revision/expansion of this.

Thank you, Rolla.

I fully agree with your point that Whitehead’s God bears all the hallmarks of custom-made philosophical construct: by way of analogy, Whitehead designed a very efficient vehicle, but then realized he needed an engine to make it run. This doesn’t particularly bother me, but perhaps that’s simply because I find Whitehead’s thought a useful resource from which to (somewhat liberally) borrow rather than a system to which I find myself compelled to adhere; unlike Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, I’ll never refer to Whitehead as “the philosopher” for shorthand. I come to process thought to better understand and live my Christianity (this obviously means that, as much as I love the “Great Tradition,” I nonetheless make revisions to traditional Christian understandings of such things as anthropology, hamartiology and soteriology, etc.). Therefore, where I encounter aspects of process thought with which I disagree (even after study), I simply say, “That isn’t useful for me” and move along. I have found the process understanding of organism (with much of what that entails) to be useful, so I use it in refining my Christian understanding; I find some of the other aspects to be less useful, so I do my best to learn them and then put them aside (perhaps forever, perhaps until further questions lead me to reevaluate them).

I’m going to push back a little on seeing my presentation of God in my post as “nothing more than a traditional notion of God with some Whiteheadian language.” There certainly is some overlap — at least for me, since I am first and foremost a Christian — but there are a number of significant differences.

First, the process God I depicted is emphatically neither omnipotent nor impassable. As I mentioned before, the process God cannot use overwhelming power to defeat evil. It could be argued that God’s power ultimately overwhelms evil within the divine self (although Whitehead’s depiction seems to me almost a Hegelian synthesis or reconciliation), but that “overwhelming” does not continue outside God, where instead God lures entities rather than force them by hook or by crook.

This leads to the second point regarding whether the process overcoming of evil is analogous to the Christian understanding of Christ’s sacrificial death. There are obvious differences between the process view and a traditionally juridical view of Christ “paying the price for our sins,” but I think the point extends beyond this. My interest in process thought began with my deep love for the Christian understanding of theosis or divinization, and process ontology provides me with a valuable framework for thinking about how we can participate in God (I’m enrolled in Jeanyne Slettom’s upcoming “Christian Process Theology” course, and planning — at least at this point — to write my essay on this). I therefore understand the evil I suffer to directly affect God and then, transformed in God into beauty and good, to “flow out” directly into all other existing things to at least potentially help them to exist more fully in truth and beauty and thereby ultimately overcome evil such as I and others have suffered. This is a far more holistic view than, to put it far too simplistically, “evil happens and God whomps it.”

This is where I see creativity. God did not have the data that my (and every other existing thing’s) suffering provides but, after prehending this data, God creates an ever-richer and novel harmony and then shares this, enabling all other beings to engage in creativity and generate novel lives, which then “flow back into” God and the cycle continues. And this goes for not only the big tragedies (and, it should be said, big successes) of life, but every seemingly insignificant detail and event — even those that otherwise goes unnoticed by everything around us (and often even by us) — in some way “fuels” the potential growth and betterment of everything. I love that creativity is holistic: God is creative, and lures us to creativity and novelty, and our creativity and novelty becomes part of God and leads to more…

You could very fairly say that I’m engaging in egregious overreach here, and I wouldn’t disagree. I’ve never performed a physical or psychological examination of God (“Ah, I see that right here in the Godopotamul gland is where evil is harmonized”), and therefore I have no empirical evidence for the theory I’m stating. I wish I did.

Even so, I cannot tell you how much personal meaning I find in believing that every detail of my life is valuable for benefitting the world. Even if I didn’t believe in subjective immortality — which I do — just the thought that even the most seemingly insignificant irritation in my life can have a positive impact on others is tremendously inspiring.

Thanks, Leslie.

I will state up front that my response to this is my own, as a Christian who is gratefully — and even joyously — influenced by both traditional Christianity and process thought; it is not “orthodox” Whiteheadianism, or even a distinctly Cobb-style process theology.

As a pastor, you know from pastoral experience that the answer to “how would someone who is encountering evil respond to an argument like Whitehead’s” is, for better and for worse, “it depends.” It depends on the evil they’re encountering, the presuppositions they’ve brought to the encounter, the psychological (and, if you will, spiritual) state in which they currently find themselves, the resources available to them to respond to the evil, etc.

Part of the problem is that many people in the United States (since I don’t want to speak for other areas) come to the problem of evil with some form of classical theism at least niggling at the back of their minds, either as a belief held to a greater-or-lesser degree or as an irritant. Again, as you know, people who have some level of belief in classical theism will expect God to either intervene and miraculously solve the situation, or to at the very least make a divine recompense in the “sweet by-and-by.” In either case, what they want is an explanation: this is why the evil has occurred, and this is what God is doing/going to do about it.

The answer to the first question — why has the evil occurred — seems to largely be the same for process thought and mainstream traditional Christianity: free will (I note “mainstream traditional” Christianity because there are some Christians who resort to arguing along the horrific lines of “God put this in your path to make you stronger”). That answer is far from emotionally satisfying, and I am in no way trying to be smug and condescending in giving it, but far greater minds than mine have wrestled with this issue and never come up with a better explanation.

Those of us from Abrahamic traditions have to deal with a unique spin on this question that is crippling for many people: why do bad things happen to good people? Because of numerous scriptural passages where God promises to bless the righteous and punish evildoers — and because, when times are hard, people generally do not tend to reject the claim of “when you’re in heaven, all of this will seem like nothing…and the people who are hurting you will get theirs in hell!” that otherwise placates them during better times — many people give an anguished cry of, “I’ve followed the rules, and therefore I should’ve been protected from this!” Your seminary education undoubtedly gave you a solid training in how to unpack this for people, and to reinterpret such scriptural passages, so there’s no need to get into all that here.

It’s with the second question — what is God doing/going to do — that I find the framework provided by process thought to be so helpful and encouraging (and I say this as someone who has encountered horrific evil). As I noted in my original post, most people influenced by a classical theistic perspective see God as a celestial Mr. Fixit who will make right the evil they’re suffering — or at least, God is supposed to, which makes their suffering all the more acute when the problem isn’t miraculously solved. Many people will not be attracted to (Nazarene theologian) Thomas Jay Oord’s pithy response of “God Can’t,” and it certainly won’t immediately alleviate the turmoil of most people who are both in the heart of suffering and coming from a traditional theistic understanding, but I’ve found in my own life that it’s the only explanation that really makes sense of my experience and the world around me.

And, as inexplicable as it may initially seem to people who believe in an omnipotent and impassible God, it’s in the part about God harmonizing evil that I find the greatest comfort and encouragement. Many people from a Jewish or Christian background are encouraged by the traditional (albeit somewhat decontextualized) interpretation of Genesis 50:20, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good…”, and I think process thought works along a similar line of God incorporating all the evil we suffer, harmonizing it, and using it to guide both us and future generations in overcoming this evil to be powerfully inspiring. Granted, as Charles points out, we’re not necessarily guaranteed we will be successful (although Pierre Teilhard de Chardin claims we are slowly but surely moving toward an “Omega Point” of transformation), but it is a truly beautiful vision of harmonious working for good in which I find deep meaning.

I’ve certainly bloviated long enough, but your point about Whitehead’s crafting of his understanding of God is something that has also struck me, and I’ll give a not-necessarily compelling thought about this in a followup.

I chuckled when I read your subject line, “Augustinian Pelagian Theory of Evil;” it was almost like encountering a proposal for a “Trumpian Jayapalian Theory of Politics!”

I like your point about evil being “our ontology of creative power, freedom, and self-realization going tragically and destructively awry.” This is particularly reinforced by the process understanding that such a misuse of freedom isn’t simply a once-in-awhile occurrence of big and catastrophic actions, but a continual, moment-by-moment series of choices (and conversely, of course, choosing to follow the divine initial aims is likewise such a series of choices).

The topic of channeling — about which, in and of itself, I know little — obviously raises the issue of objective and subjective immortality. Dr. Davis, in an article he wrote about immortalities in process perspective (https://www.academia.edu/40056974/Immortalities_in_Process_Perspective_Hartshorne_Suchocki_Griffin_Ford), notes that David Ray Griffin has looked into parapsychology and concluded the evidence supports the subjective immortality of a “resurrection of the soul.” Perhaps Dr. Davis could tell us how Griffin would look at something like channeling.

I know Whitehead wrote, “The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy. The process of time veils the past below distinctive feeling.” Could this mean Whitehead would rule out the possibility of channeling, since the practice seems to entail a full and immediate experience of a past fact?

Just looking at channeling as a concept, however, and how it would theoretically relate to personal identity(ies), I wonder how it would work with the understanding of our responding moment-by-moment to the divine lure. As I understand it (while acknowledging I’ve never had any personal experience with this sort of thing), the channeler experiences the channeled entity taking over her body while her consciousness passively recedes to the “background.” If this is the case, would this render the channeler unable to respond to the divine lure, and instead give the ability to respond to the channeled entity? If so, it would seem as if from a process perspective that the value and satisfaction of the experience might be limited.

Mind you, I’m not arguing for or against the practice — my knowledge of channeling doesn’t go much beyond reading “Doonesbury” comics with Boopsie and Hunk-Ra, which makes me a very low-value participant in such a conversation.

I’ve wondered that as well, but have no answer, particularly since we know the majority of our experience is unconscious. The article I mentioned above looks at the ultimately conscious processing of external stimuli (such as how long it takes to process the appearance and movement of a disc or pair of discs), but how would we quantify processing that never rises to the level of consciousness?

A truly fascinating question.

[Jason Barker]

I am planning to write a reflection involving a process perspective of virtual reality. I would look at VR experiences through the process understanding of prehension, examining both how VR can both potentially contribute to creativity and novelty while also presenting the significant threat of stunting creativity and novelty (both through such possible problems as depersonalization/derealization syndrome, as well as novelty being misdirected by the corporations controlling the VR media).

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Jason Barker.

Thank you, Charles and Jennifer. Your responses highlight areas to which I definitely need to give more thought.

Charles, your point about the nexus gives me food for thought about the way in which the nexus mediates and transmits experience.

Both of you allude to Whitehead’s point about degrees of relevance. I am not familiar enough with his thought to know whether this is the case, but I am guessing that depth of experience is directly related to proximity. Jennifer, your point about ancestors would seem to tie directly into this: we have a deeper experience of traditions to which we have a direct connection. I would think the emphasis some religious traditions place upon the lineage of leaders or teachers is likely rooted in this principle (without forgetting, of course, the understanding that such a practice is frequently utilized to enforce orthodoxy and conformity).

As an expansion of my second question, I’ve read that in Whiteheadian metaphysics actualities receive objective immortality by being received into the divine nature. God then forever experiences the full objective being of each actuality.

In that sense, I assume we can partially prehend these actualities when they are used by God as lures. My question, then, involves how we experience these actualities and the extent to which we do so.

I like your point regarding being mindful about after-effects. It seems that mindfulness — or simply being attentive and thoughtful — would be essential for processing the experiences which have been prehended, and therefore disharmony is frequently an effect of the lack of mindfulness.

I like your phrase, “abandonment of ostensibly obvious expressions of wisdom.”