Below is a rough transcript of a Cobb Institute class lecture I gave earlier today.
I’m going to speak a little bit about the relevance, as I see it, of process theology to natural science.
Whitehead was kept in print, I would say, for the better part of the second half of the 20th century largely because of the influence he had on Protestant theologians. Charles Hartshorne was a major figure here, along with Bernard Loomer and many others, some of whom were at the University of Chicago with Hartshorne. Eventually, the Center for Process Studies started up at the Claremont School of Theology in the early 1970s under the leadership of David Ray Griffin and John Cobb Jr.
The impact on theology, particularly on liberal Protestant theologians, kept Whitehead’s ideas academically relevant for a while, despite the great work that Griffin and Cobb were doing at the Center for Process Studies to host interdisciplinary conferences with scientists and philosophers. There were some important influences that Whitehead had on scientists and philosophers, of course, but his speculative metaphysics was really kept in cold storage until more recently, when it has been thawed out, reheated, and is now becoming a very important source of insight for an increasing number of philosophers, artists, and activists. Philosophers of mind continue to grapple with the mysteries of consciousness, and biologists try to understand what makes life unique and maybe what may be continuous with the rest of the physical world. They are drawing on Whitehead to the degree that tre is now a bit of a Whitehead renaissance beyond just theology.
Whitehead’s theology was very influential because it gave people who wanted to take natural science seriously a way to continue taking their religion seriously. This can come in the form of Christian theology, Jewish theology, Islamic theology, and there are plenty of overlaps with non-theistic approaches to spirituality including Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, various forms of shamanism. Whitehead aimed to elaborate a philosophy of religion that would be general enough that every spiritual tradition, every wisdom tradition the world over, would find something in it that they could assent to and recognize in themselves.
Whitehead articulates a panentheistic metaphysics—meaning he doesn’t think of God as totally separate from the world or the world as totally separate from God, but posits that God is in the world and the world is in God. This is not the same as pantheism, where God and the world are identified or identical. Whitehead thinks in terms of polarities, dipolarity, where the world and God are in a relationship of creative tension with one another. He says at the end of Process and Reality, “It is just as true to say that God creates the world as the world creates God.” Panentheism attempts to capture this interplay between the divine nature and the cosmos.
In Whitehead’s scheme, while he is a theist of sorts, he also considers Creativity to be the ultimate category. In non-theistic spiritualities like Buddhism, there is a sense in which the ground of existence is just this Creativity—or Buddhists would call it Emptiness—rather than a personal deity. Whitehead’s concept of God incorporates this idea of creativity, allowing even Buddhists to feel somewhat at home in his philosophy. One could see the idea in Mahayana Buddhism and Vajrayana Buddhism of “Buddha-nature” as reflective of Whitehead’s dipolar deity. There is something compassionate and wise about the very nature of reality, which Whitehead suggests when he uses the word “God.”
For much of the second half of the 19th century and the 20th century, and even into the early 21st century, science and religion were generally conceived to be in conflict with each other. More recently, there has been a bit of a shift. About a decade ago, maybe 15 years ago, there was still a lot of talk and many books published by the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. Two of these figures, Hitchens and Dennett, who were popular 15 years ago or so, have since passed away. Dawkins and Harris are still active, but the popularity of atheism and framing the science-religion dialogue as a debate where one side has to win and the other has to lose seems to have shifted. Certainly, there is still tension, but I think a new kind of conversation is becoming possible, and Whitehead is playing a role in that.
What is the significance of Whitehead’s theology to natural science? To get at that question, it would be helpful to think about the relationship between theology more generally and natural science. In our first session, we discussed Whitehead’s account of the history here, that the first scientists in the 16th and 17th centuries were religious. They were Christian and took belief in God as a foregone conclusion. It wasn’t something many people began to doubt until the 18th century or so. For all these early scientists, the idea that a rational God designed the world according to mathematical principles was a presupposition for their research into the inner workings of nature.
Whether we’re talking about Newton, Descartes, or even Galileo, who the church put under house arrest for his Copernicanism, none of them saw theism as in necessary conflict with natural science. As Galileo put it*: “Religion tells you how to go to heaven. Science tells you how the heavens go,” suggesting a kind of division of labor. Descartes similarly articulated his dualism in part to arrive at a truce, writing in the 1630s after decades of religious war in Europe. Descartes fought in some of those wars himself, and wanted to articulate an approach to religion universal enough for all warring camps, the Protestant sects and the Catholics, to stop killing each other. And he wanted to carve out some space for science. And so what does he do? He says, well, there’s the soul, which is a separate substance from extended stuff, all that space and matter out there. Science is going to have charge over the study of all that extended matter, and religion has dominion over the realm of the soul. And because these two substances don’t touch each other, religion and science should each be able to go about their business without undue interference from one another.
Of course, this didn’t work out so well. I mean, the religious wars did subside to some extent. But Descartes created new problems. For example, how do these two substances interact? And it just became more and more apparent as science continued to advance, that it could not respect this sharp division between the human soul and inner life and the external world of matter in motion. Psychology continued to advance, biology continued to advance, physiology developed into a mature science, and it got to a point in the late 18th or early 19th century when it was clear that if science continued to advance with this mechanistic understanding of nature, that eventually the human being too would become subject to the same sort of reductionistic explanations that were being applied in the study of physics. And it was around this time that Immanuel Kant wrote his famous Critique of Pure Reason, where he’s really making a new attempt at what Descartes tried to do, a new kind of truce between science and religion.
Kant says famously in the introduction to his Critique of Pure Reason, that he found it necessary to limit knowledge—natural scientific knowledge of nature—in order to leave room for faith. And what he means is that natural science is just the study of phenomena, that is, nature as it appears to us. Kant thought that the human mind is organized in such a way that we perceive in terms of space and time, and we have these categories like causality and substance that allow us to scientifically understand what we perceive in space and time: all of this is provided by our own organization as cognitive beings.
What we perceive and what we think are a reflection of the structure of our own mind, not a reflection of some kind of reality out there, independent of us. And so while the early scientists like Newton, Descartes, Galileo, etc., may have thought that they were studying nature in itself out there, independent of our way of sensing it and thinking about it, Kant said, no, actually, science is the study of the phenomenal world, that is, the world as it appears to the human being. And why does this leave room for faith? Well, because science can only study appearances. Now, it is not that Kant said, “oh, science is just subjective, it’s just, like, the way the world appears to us, man.” No! Our cognition has a universal and necessary structure. All human beings necessarily and universally experience space and time in a very mathematically precise way. So it’s not like saying, “oh, science is just subjective,” but still, science, limited to appearances, leaves room behind the scenes, as it were, for God.
And so you get, with Kant, this sense that maybe there’s a new way in which religion can deal with those mysteries, that, for example, could account for the unity of nature. Kant would say that science presupposes the systematic unity of nature, and that there’s no empirical way to prove that nature is a systematic unity. You have to assume this unity to then go and search for laws where you measure this fact and that fact and that fact and then search for some underlying principle that connects them.
That assumption, Kant would say, is what drives and motivates science. But science can never prove through some empirical means that that unity exists. It must be assumed in advance. And so Kant would say that one way of thinking about what God is would be to imagine the source of that unity, which is, again, a presupposition of science, not a scientific finding, although science confirms it by the things that it does find. It’s sort of confirming the consequences of that unity, but not explaining the source of the unity itself. This was Kant’s attempt to use reason to establish another sort of truce, and it held more or less until Charles Darwin.
Darwin’s theory of evolution—and Alfred Russel Wallace’s theory, I should add—though what’s interesting is that Darwin gets so celebrated and to the extent that we don’t even call it evolutionary theory, we call it Darwinism—but Wallace was a co-discoverer and Wallace was more spiritual, and was a bit of a panpsychist even, and thought that, we needed more to account for human consciousness than just this process of natural selection. Interesting why it is that Darwin the atheist is celebrated while Wallace is basically ignored. But nonetheless, after Darwin and evolutionary theory was introduced in the mid- to late-1800s, the war between science and religion really, really caught fire.
There were some attempts in the 20th century, like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to bring science and religion back together. There’s a great documentary I highly recommend that you all check out that PBS just produced on Teilhard called Visionary Scientist. Apologies if there are any Catholics among us, but the way that the Catholic Church, or some officials within the Jesuits and the church, treated Teilhard during his life I think is really just reprehensible. It’s terrible. They’ve since come around. Several popes have acknowledged the importance of Teilhard. Vatican II includes a lot of language from Teilhard’s work. But he was attempting to convince the leaders of the church and of the Jesuits that, “hey, we’ve got to pay attention to what evolutionary theory is revealing to us. I’m finding skulls of earlier ancestors of human beings that make it very clear that we did evolve from a common ancestor with primates.” And the fact that his church superiors denied this… to him it meant they were stuffing their heads in the sand. Teilhard sought and I think found a quite compelling way to integrate Christian theology with evolution. And it is another example of panentheism, like Whitehead’s, where Teilhard would say, God creates the world by letting the world create itself. But of course, Teilhard’s understanding of evolution, as he puts it in The Human Phenomenon, involves both Darwin’s process of natural selection as well as a kind of Lamarckian understanding of, say, directed evolution, where the agency of organisms counts for something. There’s more teleology in Teilhard’s view, but I think nowadays, Lamarck isn’t as easily dismissed and laughed out of court by biologists because there is some degree to which characteristics can be acquired by individual organisms that can be passed on to the next generation epigenetically. And there’s even some evidence of environments changing the way that regulatory networks activate different genes. And so some of these old ideas about any kind of Lamarckian evolution being impossible are increasingly called into question. And so Teilhard’s view of evolution, I think, remains a viable one for those who are seeking some kind of integration between evolutionary science and at least Christianity.
So what about Whitehead and process theology? Whitehead suggests that even if we’re just going to do cosmology and try to be as scientific as possible about it, it seems that we still need to make reference to some kind of divine source of order. Now, if we go back to ancient Greece and look at Aristotle’s Metaphysics, he articulates the idea of the first mover, the unmoved mover, the first cause of motion, because in Aristotle’s Physics, you have this idea of the heavenly spheres above which rotate, and that being a sort of source for the order and motion even down here on the terrestrial plane. But when Aristotle reasoned about what the ultimate cause of this motion must be, he eventually got to this point of positing a God as Prime Mover. Whitehead reminds us that Aristotle is just dispassionately thinking here, he’s not beginning with a faith in God and then trying to show how God fits into science. He’s beginning with his theory of motion and his physics and his understanding of natural science, and trying to understand the preconditions for any of that to work.
Now, Whitehead says, contemporary physics, in his time with relativity and quantum theory and everything, doesn’t have this problem of the source of motion. But there’s an analogous problem, Whitehead says, which is the source of finite actuality. Why should there be a world of finite beings when it appears it all started with a infinite plenum of possibility? Nowadays we would call it quantum vacuum, which is just seething with infinite potentiality. And why should there ever have been anything to actualize out of that? This is the analogous problem that Whitehead thinks contemporary physics has, analogous to the problem Aristotle tried to solve in terms of the first mover, the source of motion.
For Whitehead, it’s the source of actualization, the source of finitude or limitation. God is his principle of limitation or concretion. You might say, “why is there something definite rather than infinite possibility?” And so Whitehead was led to his idea of what he calls “the primordial nature of God.” And this is a cosmological principle for Whitehead, it’s the source of the ordering of possibility. And this is the first act, you could say, which reverberates as an initial aim inspiring all the subsequent actual occasions of experience, which come forth to characterize the spatial, temporal, physical universe as we know it. God provides this, you could say, cosmic source code, that gives just a minimal order (with maximal value!) to this realm of possibilities that’s then received as relevant to the unique situation of every actual occasion, a little gift to unwrap and deploy, a little spark from the divine to light our way, transforming what would otherwise be darkness into a colorful and intelligible display.
Whitehead did not arrive at the idea of a primordial divine nature as a result of religious piety. Whitehead claims he’s led to this idea purely through conceptual reflection on the requirements of his metaphysical scheme. However, there’s another side to Whitehead’s theology, which is the “consequent nature of God.” Whereas the primordial nature is a cosmological principle, the consequent nature of God is more anthropological, which is to say, it’s an attempt to make sense of our own conscious human agency, to take it seriously as an integral part of this universe.
That we exist as conscious agents tells us something about the universe. We feel and express values, and we have a certain emotional, existential response to our predicament, and we crave for some kind of consolation. And Whitehead would say, psychologically speaking, we need some source of consolation for our situation, just to be healthy as organisms. It’s just not possible for us to live without a sense of meaning and significance that would allow us to feel like we matter. It is just as important as food and settle when it comes down to it.
Some may say, “nah, I don’t need that.” But I think what you find in the psychology of atheism is there’s very often a sense of the heroic, brave, courageous stance that one takes, accepting the facts and the truths of science, that the universe is an uncaring place and there’s this kind of buoying up of the human spirit, in a sense, as being courageous enough to face a meaningless universe and soldier on regardless. So there’s a source of meaning-making there, and if not believing in a creator God at least believing that man must become his own creator God, must create himself, as it were.
And so even for atheists, I think there’s some need for this consolation, some sense that the meaning we crave, even if it’s in the form of scientific truth, even seeking after that is a kind of religious response to our situation, a longing for something transcendent.
To close, I want to read a couple of paragraphs from the introduction (pgs. 15-16) of Whitehead’s Process and Reality that really gets at how he sees science and religion relating to one another.
Whitehead says:
“Philosophy frees itself from the taint of ineffectiveness by its close relations with religion and with science, natural and sociological. It attains its chief importance by fusing the two, namely, religion and science, into one rational scheme of thought. Religion should connect the rational generality of philosophy with the emotions and purposes springing out of existence in a particular society, in a particular epoch, and conditioned by particular antecedents. Religion is the translation of general ideas into particular thoughts, particular emotions, and particular purposes; it is directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating particularity. Philosophy finds religion, and modifies it; and conversely religion is among the data of experience which philosophy must weave into its own scheme. Religion is an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone. In the higher organisms the differences of tempo between the mere emotions and the conceptual experiences produce a life-tedium, unless this supreme fusion has been effected. The two sides of the organism require a reconciliation in which emotional experiences illustrate a conceptual justification, and conceptual experiences find an emotional illustration.
This demand for an intellectual justification of brute experience has also been the motive power in the advance of European science. In this sense scientific interest is only a variant form of religious interest. Any survey of the scientific devotion to ‘truth,’ as an ideal, will confirm this statement. There is, however, a grave divergence between science and religion in respect to the phases of individual experience with which they are concerned. Religion is centered upon the harmony of rational thought with the sensitive reaction to the percepta from which experience originates. Science is concerned with the harmony of rational thought with the percepta themselves. When science deals with emotions, the emotions in question are percepta and not immediate passions—other people’s emotion and not our own; at least our own in recollection, and not in immediacy. Religion deals with the formation of the experiencing subject; whereas science deals with the objects, which are the data forming the primary phase in this experience. The subject originates from, and amid, given conditions; science conciliates thought with this primary matter of fact; and religion conciliates the thought involved in the process with the sensitive reaction involved in that same process. The process is nothing else than the experiencing subject itself. In this explanation it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of sensitive reaction to an actual world. Science finds religious experiences among its percepta; and religion finds scientific concepts among the conceptual experiences to be fused with particular sensitive reactions.”
So we can study religious experience, spiritual experience, scientifically. But when we do scientifically study such experiences, as Whitehead says, we’re either studying other people’s experiences or we’re studying our own in recollection. Because when we’re immediately caught up in those types of experiences, we’re not typically conceptually reflective, we’re not thinking in general terms. We’re not seeking a scientific explanation. We’re in it. We’re being transformed by powerful emotion and so can’t exactly engage in dispassionate reflection. But science finds such experiences among the phenomena that it must explain. And religion finds scientific facts and scientific theories. And Whitehead would say, at least so far in the modern period, religion hasn’t done a very good job of integrating those facts. So to the extent that science makes new discoveries and that religion and theology fail to adapt, religion and theology become less and less relevant.
But Whitehead would say it’s such a wonderful opportunity for theology and for religious tradition to engage with science, to clarify their own deeper truths and their own sense of the beauty of human existence and our cosmic significance. Because given Whitehead’s conception of God, science could only illuminate the deeper truths that help us clarify the beauty and goodness of the religious vision. Religion should have nothing to fear from science, in Whitehead’s view.
* Don Frohlich has pointed out to me that this remark actually originates with Caesar Baronius, but was cited by the Galileo in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615).