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Our speaker pointed out that any text (even God’s own word) requires interpretation. He also suggested that his hermeneutical method treats much of what he reads as metaphor. There are just a lot of ways of saying “God is great!” All the “omni” language is just that, not a logically coherent system, which he says the Koran is not. This is a bit Whiteheadian. We don’t know very much about God. What we can count on is vague, a feeling and a direction. The rest is there to help us appreciate just that much. If some of the language speaks to us more than the other, we should listen to that. That’s a flabby way to do theology, but the advantage is tolerance and openness to novel, motivating perspectives. (The disadvantage is heresy, but if you don’t hold that too tightly either, then there’s less of a problem.) Look at our class — I think we are being calmly ecumenic and inter-faith, and I think we are deepening our feeling in that mode. That may be a good way to advance faith, with a principled loose hermeneutics. It seems contrary to what most spiritual leaders would recommend.

I started out on Sheri’s side, figuring that a “genleman’s C” grade in flourishing and virtue was good enough. Covered dishes, not slavishly materialistic, just OK and lazy. Then Charles seemed to judge that this was not good enough, that it was pathological. Now I’m thinking he was right — but he’s backing down! Stoics are not shy on this matter. They say you are not doing your job if you aren’t vigorously pursuing philosophy, despite the distractions and sorrows of life. I’m testing for the midpoint. Everybody can agree on the extremes. When can you say, “That’s just not enough, you are failing to actualize your unique human capacity to respond to reality.”

I guess the model is this: humans have a capability and tendency to respond to the call forward, and that call is broadly toward beauty, shalom, wholeness. We act creatively forward. Another name for that is flourishing. Avoid getting discouraged when bad things happen. God didn’t do it, and there are remaining opportunities to flourish. But I have been musing about the person who has no dramatic misfortunes to overcome. Let’s say that he’s been meeting all his responsibilities, nobody complains about him, and he thinks good thoughts occasionally. Nothing is in the way of his flourishing. One might say he is pointed in the right direction, but he isn’t responding strongly to the call. Is this also a pathological state? Not a failure to launch, but a failure to rise? Is this a failure to use one’s lucky situation? This person isn’t misunderstanding God, he just doesn’t do a lot of listening and flourishes minimally. He recognizes his gifts and has gratitude, but he’s not fired up to use his gifts. Maybe traditional language doesn’t appeal to him and dosn’t help him out of his stupor. Maybe whitehead language would, but our speaker doubted it. He said that you need ritual and stories and a community, which is what you get with religions. And I guess he was arguing that process can help us understand and key on the good parts of religion, That combination might fire up our lazy flourisher.

I’m on board with Charles’s pro-life stance, but I just saw something that gives me pause. “God is arguably liable to prioritize the woman and her needs and rights.” If God is setting these priorities all the time, it doesn’t seem all that difficult to recognize what those priorities are and act on them. God’s priorities could solve all the trolley problems for us. Why all the hand-wringing? Certainly we don’t want to allow any potential to be snuffed out needlessly, but when a choice between loss of life is inevitable, should we always favor God’s high-flourishing option? Across all situations, that would seem to tip the scales toward the young, strong, and even rich. Women get the nod when it comes to life boats.

An addendum. I recieved my December Scientific American today, and in an article on the Webb telescope, on page 38, it says this:
“The most startling explanation is that the canonical LCDM cosmological model is wrong and requires revision. ‘These results are very surprising and hard to get in our standard model of cosmology’ Boyian-Kolchin says. ‘And its probably not a small change… “One controversial idea is Modified Newtonian dyamic which posits that dark matter does not exist and that its effects can instead by explained by large-scale fluctuations in gravity. To date, JWST’s observations could support such a theory. MOND has had a lot of its predictions come true — this is another one of them.”

Sheldrake’s point is that calling something a constant doesn’t mean that it always was constant. You just assume that, and everybody refuses to consider that it might not be true. So that’s why he brings in the evidence of new materials. They are supposed to have constants like every other material, such as a boiling point. Turns out that they don’t. The boiling point is initially measured high, and the reading is not wrong. It goes down, becomes easier to boil, as there are more experiences of boiling. I know, sounds impossible, but the data is there. So just extrapolate, and old constants have certainly been here a very long time, but maybe not forever. There are a lot of other assumptions, never questioned, that force us to make up things like dark matter and dark energy, and say that it must be a huge portion of the universe, but there has been no evidence found over decades. The only reason we have it eists is that we don’t want to consider giving up any prior assumptions in the Standard Model. It seems as if we know far less than we think we do. I looked at the readings for the session questioning the Big Bang. I thought that must be a kook, but it sure makes me wonder. Everybody said Fred Hoyle was crazy for doubting it, the last holdout. I wonder if he would be encoruaged that things are starting to go his way again.

Jesus seems to both “honor and transcend” morality, but I sense that he does that for purity as well. In the cleansing water you are born again. Your new life is ‘pure’ in a new sense, though you remain, in the old sense, both unclean and immoral. We are invited to participate in his “immortalizing”. In our reading this week, Cobb formulates this as God’s “call forward”, which I guess is not just forward but is also leaving behind, dropping our nets, as it were.
Here’s a passage from Voegelin, which says it the way I like, but may not be sufficiently Whiteheadian: “The experience of transcendence…is dif­ferentiated to the point where the supranatural fulfillment of hu­man potentiality has come into clear view; for the bios theoretikos is, within the Hellenic limitations, a sanctification of life leading toward the immortalization of the soul, toward the beatitudo in the Christian sense.”
from “The Failure of Immanentist Metaphysics”
Notice the word “supranatural.” That might be the same as Griffin’s bigger version of nature, as understood before the modern constriction of nature.

I think the slide this morning said that everything was “alive”. That would obviously be a broader meaning of life than just the eventual five kingdoms of life. Some members of some kingdoms developed what we would conventionally call consciousness. Sticking to convention, I would draw a line somewhere, below which it is just liveliness without consciousness. We heard today that an argument can be made that bacteria are conscious. I would prefer to say that there are gradations of liveliness, and that liveliness exists always and everywhere. (The next event at the Cobb Institute is a presentation on why the big bang hypothesis is wrong. That’s why I said “always” instead of “from the beginning”. I’m just trying to keep up!)

Kyle, I’ll check out your universalism group. I’ll be looking to see how process supports that position. This article https://opc.org/os.html?article_id=800 reviews Hart’s position on the matter, and while the writer is hostile to what he says, I think he does a good job of explaining Hart’s metaphysical argument, which appears to overlap with process (though Hart seems to have heated complaints about everybody, including process). I’m also a fan of Jacques Ellul, who was both Reformed and universalist. He argued that the faithful ‘elect’ are distinguished, not by being saved (everybody is), but by knowing what the situation is and having an obligation to live it and show others.

Griffin is emphasizing that there is no need for a supernatural explanation of non-sensory experience, meaning the things we know of that we are unable to prove using conventional science. Non-sensory experience is a part of nature like everything else. There are no miracles, nothing directed by forces outside of nature. But this “nature” has to be broader than what we were led to believe, hence the need for two definitions of nature, the larger correct meaning and the smaller incorrect meaning. (It’s tedious to do it this way, but he wants to take possession of the word, mainly for the purpose of eliminating super-nature.)
I like the process thinkers who point out that it is the small minded naturalists who actually believe in miracles, but they don’t admit it. They believe that life just appeared one day out of dead matter — miracle one. Then human consciousness appeared one day — miracle two. No miracles needed if you recognize that everything was there all along, developing within larger nature.

I realized that my words about re-processing actuals was wrong immediately after I posted it, and I anticipated that you would point this out! So I’m learning. My only excuse is that it does fit with what a lot of non-process writers on creativity have observed. I must also have been thinking about the movie, Tar, that i just saw. The maestro agonizes over a new piece she is writing, saying to her old maestro mentor it was so much “pastiche.” (We now seem to call that “sampling”). The old maestro says don’t be concerned, “It was a full 29 bars that A copied from B in in his great symphony C!” She was quizzical, not recognizing the similarity in the two pieces. He insisted that it was the same, modified just enough that you don’t realize it.

Creativity does disrupt, and I think Whitehead says that somewhere, but I can be happy with thinking that it is aiming for harmony at all levels. That would often mean aiming at a new and better general order instead of constantly trying to patch up or perfect an old order. There always has to be some disharmony, a looseness in order, that creates opportunity for a transition and reconfiguration toward a new order. And sometimes, or perhaps often, the order is a sticky malformation.

Gardiner, I won’t respond to your above message, but rather to your question in class about what a true human is. Voegelin wrote about Aristotle’s spoudaios, translated as mature man. The true human is “attuned” to a reality that sounds a lot like the reality that Whitehead describes. Not more than 100 of these men could be found in Athens! I once asked a Voegelin scholar whether anybody could be a spoudaios today, and he said no. That seems a bit harsh, but I think he was making a point that it is very difficult to escape the contemporary climate of closure. An excpert from Voegelin is here:

The Purpose of Theory

It seems to me that the lure of ideals is the transcendental motive force for actual creativity. What becomes new is a modification of actuals. I don’t quite see what is missing in terms of a source for creativity. I am, however, wondering about how we end up with “order”. As a newly minted process thinker, I am no longer content with saying that things just emerge. Creativity disrupts. While there may be “unification of diversity” in any creative act, the unification feels local to me. It might not be harmonious on a broader scale, even chaotic. And yet we find order. The “emergent” people and the “self-organization” people throw a lot of words on this without quite explaining it. I must have missed this part in our readings.

I had a good adult ed class on Sunday with a New Testament professor. She reminded us that Scripture was written by people, not by God (unless you are Muslim). So there’s a lot of material that we can pass over if it doesn’t suit the way we want to live, within the bounds of essentials. So if you just look at Jesus, and stop being literal-minded in your reading (i.e., read parables as parables, etc.) there’s actually not so many problems to overcome. For myself, I latched on to the idea that I’m free. And now Whitehead emphasizes that I can be creative and aesthetic with that freedom. Then add that this is what God expects from me. This is most encouraging!

It might be useful to call the paper a “meditation.” That’s how I’m treating it. Meaning, work with the readings and whatever else that you are already familiar with. This is a time to synthesize, land the plane. Don’t spend your effort finding other sources, attempting to master a technical aspect of what we read, or proving a point. Instead, talk about what you now see that you might not have grapsed before, and how it affects your life and thinking. Put something in your words that is meaningful to you. Don’t make it air tight, don’t presume to ‘finish’, don’t add a lot of flowery caveats. You have 7 pages, and don’t plan on doing more. It you finally get going it might go longer, then cut it back. Make it an “adventure” — you are seeing multiple items of note as you move along in your consciousness as a philosopher. (f you do that, I would like to read it.) You can also think of it as a first pass over topics that you might want to dwell on further in your “final” paper. Make that one publishable research, if that’s what you think is proper for a certified process thinker!