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Patricia, Thanks for your response to that article. I never understood how we got out of atonality, how minimalism scratched out a beachhead for tonality (while giving up much else that modern had found uplifting), and how composers of faith brought back emotion and the sense of the transcendent to modern music.

One question came to mind: is innovation an essential aspect of “intensity”? So music (and the other arts) must continually create new harmonious intensities in order to evolve Beauty over time?

I have recently discovered process theology, and believe it could have broad and deep application within the Unitarian Universalist movement. For example, as a church musician, I want to create joyful worship elements which align with the process perspective. I am taking this course to understand the process theological view of beauty, and to ground my vocation of creating beautiful music in that view. Ted Lau, St Louis, MO

Loved this article, thanks for quoting from it (“consciousness all the way down”) as well as providing the link. The article also mentions “emergence” which was another topic that came up in the discussion at the end of Session 2. Emergence of novel properties as parts assemble into more complex wholes (life from non-living chemicals, consciousness from non-conscious cells) is highlighted by Religious Naturalists (e.g. Ursula Goodenough) as a source of awe and gratitude, but I believe these religious feelings are evoked within a materialistic metaphysic. A key characteristic of emergent properties in a mechanistic universe appears to be “downward causation”, which physicists haven’t identified anywhere. So the emergent property of consciousness may point to the existence of panpsychism, or the psychic pole of events, which, I believe, was a problem Whitehead’s metaphysic was designed to explain more simply and directly than “downward causation”.

Thanks for this thread on “numbers”. There is a conversation among metaphysicists whether mathematics was “invented” (created by the human mind) or “discovered” (eternal forms we came to understand through the progress of culture and science). Roger Penrose, an esteemed mathematical physicist and author of Road to Reality, believes the latter. It has been one of the pillars of my faith that God created a Universe that is transparent to the human mind through the scientific method, and that mathematics if a human invention could so easily have been useless in discerning God’s laws of Nature. Einstein noted that the laws of physics seem to be expressed through the simplest (or most elegant) mathematical formulations.
I would only suggest that this topic might be opened up to include less concrete numbers, that can be used for counting, to include more imaginative constructs. One of Penrose’s insights is that the imaginary numbers, multiples of the square root of minus one, play a foundational role in modern physics. Not only are these as “real” as the integers, but they are the product of the fruitful imagination of mathematicians, of which Whitehead was one.

My son is an evangelical Christian who doesn’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. This makes me heart sick, for I fear my grandchildren will be blocked from pursuing education and perhaps careers in the medical sciences if they are faced with an “either science or faith” false choice. One of my son’s concerns is that evolution is typically taught with an atheistic / materialistic metaphysical bias, and I sympathize with him in this. In a few slides, last Tuesday you powerfully exposed the error and dire consequences of our culture’s adoption of the mechanistic, dualistic and materialistic worldview. I pray for us all, and my son, that process metaphysics can be seen as a way forward for his children’s lives, in both science and faith.

Dear Sheri,
What a kick-off to the course. Thanks for the warm welcome. I was one of the people swaying to the beat of your wonderful song, The Whole-Making Nearness of God.
See you again Tuesday,
Cheers!
Ted