Question of the Day

What is your vision of what church should be?

Quotables

"Life plus significance equals magic."- Grant Morrison

My Own Two Cents On A Non-Believing Parent

Jamie's post on the recent CNN article was so good, I was tempted to avoid writing my own. But the article was too good to ignore. It got my theological and creative juices flowing. For that, and for other things, I am indebted to both the original blogger over at CNN and Jamie Nguyen for bringing it to my attention and her thoughts on the matter. 

Here are mine:

The original article is here: 

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-910282?hpt=hp_c3

I am going to take the article piece-by-piece beginning with the introduction and general explanation:

1) First of all, TXBlue08, let me thank you for your thoughtful and insightful post on irreligious parenting. This kind of essay is exactly the kind that religious people like myself need if we are to continue on the quest for truth and fulfillment that we believe we are on. Anyone who refuses to take seriously those who disagree with them do themselves no service. I found much of what you wrote very interesting and indeed I agreed with a large part of it. 

I want to congratulate you on your decision to seek first and foremost to rid yourself and your children of all illusions, to be honest and truthful. You made the right decision explaining to your child what you really believe and why you believe it, and raising them in what you see to be the truth. I think, ultimately, your article betrays this goal, and I will explain why later. But I think that internal inconsistency is logical rather than moral. I also am happy I live in a country where people can raise their children how they see fit, within some legal limits. It makes me proud that a people who believe differently, as you and I do, can be a part of the same national society. I only hope that you share this pride, and the conviction that this freedom is absolutely foundational to a healthy society. I am not sure that you do, given some of the statements in your paper, but I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, and interpret you as charitably as possible.

One of the wonders of a free society, and a tool like the internet, is the opportunity for genuine discourse. And part of genuine discourse is the need to point out inconsistencies, both in terms of statements and behavior. Any genuine, logical criticism of another's position must include just this kind of analysis, and I will be doing that throughout this paper. Know that this stems from no moral judgment on my part, nor from any desire to hurt or insult you, and rather stems from a genuine intellectual respect which is necessary for respectful and constructive discourse.

I have to wonder how thoroughgoing your commitment to being absolutely honest with yourself and your child is. Do you really teach your child to avoid all illusions, and do you always avoid lies meant to comfort your child? Let me ask you, have you ever picked up your child when they were hurt and afraid, and said "everything will be alright, everything will be alright."? Is this not a lie, from your perspective. It seems to me that a purely empirical view of the world would tell us that it is never true that 'everything will be alright'. The mother that comforts her child in that moment will someday die, just as the child will suffer and die. It may be that when you lie to your child, that lie is based on love, and my point is certainly not that you cannot be a loving parent. But it remains that you must, if this situation is something that sounds familiar to you, admit that you lie for just the reasons you avoided "lying" to the child about the afterlife.

Further, don't you believe that for your child to be healthy and happy, that they will have to live lies for much of their lives. Don't they have to step into experiences that are such that they must life as if hope, joy, and comfort are the centers of the world when, in point of fact, from your point of view they are not? What is humor, but a stepping into a world where, for a moment, joy is the center of existence? What is play but a bracketing off of life as it is normally experienced, and replacing it with a counter-world based on joy? Certainly, these experiences are stepped into and OUT OF for you, and will be for your children, but what would life be if we did not live what must be, in your view, lies much of the time?

Of course I do not think these are lies, but simply another piece of data from which to build my worldview. I, like you, do not want children to live or believe lies. But I have to ask if in a godless world this is really possible. If it is not, yet truth and a thoroughgoing commitment to it seems a given, then it seems necessary to posit God. You seem trapped by the very lies you claim you want to avoid.

I agree with you that beliefs concerning the afterlife can act as systems of control. But surely you realize that Christians disagree on how all of that works, and not all systems function as control systems. Predestination removes the ability to control people by removing people's ability to be confident about whether they go to heaven or hell. No wish-fulfillment there. Universalism removes the threat of punishment altogether. There is also a position called objective immortality that you are probably not familiar with but should investigate. Beliefs about the afterlife can lead to systems of control. But they need not.

2) I agree with you that God as He is believed in and portrayed by most religious believers is not a good father or parental figure. I also agree that the standard free will defense doesn't work, for just the reasons you suggest. In fact, I argued this very thing last night to a friend of mine. When I stop a murderer, nobody would say to me 'well you infringed on his free will'. No, they just say I stopped a murderer. Why give God a pass when He refuses to do, what seems obviously right for everyone else? 

No the free will defense is no answer to the problem of evil, not only for this reason, but because of the mountains of 'natural evil', the suffering caused by nature, that cannot be explained away by it. But let me suggest that the problem is not that God is not a good parent, but rather that God has a limited sphere of influence. That God's power is different from the power that most people attribute to Him. It may be that God's power is persuasive, rather than coercive. That the love of God is His power, and that tells us all He can do, and all He cannot. Certainly, a parent's control over their child is not absolute. A parent can do everything right, and still have a child that makes bad choices, even destructive choices. It is wrong to conclude from the evil of a child that a parent is necessarily evil. In point of fact, genuine suffering takes place in the smallest slice of existence. Most of the universe, especially at the level of the very small and very large, is overwhelmingly wonderful and beautiful. The fact that there are pockets of genuine horrors need not lead us to conclude that God is a bad parent, but rather that like most parents, His ability to influence events has it's limits. In this way we can make sense of all that is wonderful in the universe, and put ourselves behind it with reckless abandon, and still understand and account for the horrors as well. 

3) While your second point about God being illogical is in many ways just a re-statement of your first, I agree with much of what you said there. In fact it mirrors a recent post I made here on this blog: http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-problem-of-evil-mystery-of-god.html

The Problem of Evil cannot be explained by CHRISTIANS by backing up into the mystery of God. I also agree that we ultimately have to take responsibility for many of your own problems. But I disagree that we can look to the answers within ourselves, without any aid from a transcendent source. The simple fact is that people are finite, in terms of inner resources. What is the ultimate difference between me, and a morally committed non-believer such as yourself? In point of fact, I see none, except one. Every day we fight for justice, for right, for a better world. But every day, that struggle is frustrated, is fought against, is undercut. Where do you get the strength to keep fighting and keep fighting and keep fighting? You cannot turn to nought but yourself and the people around you. But surely you must realize that people often let you down, and that if you turn to others for strength in fighting for the good, you will find that they also only have so much to give. So if you keep pulling strength from limited sources, you may find one day that that well has dried up. But I believe that I can pull from a source without measure, that when I am empty I can look without and find wells of strength that were not within (either individually or socially). 

One more issue that I will continue to examine as we go along, is that you seem to assume that tragedies in Newtown are some how bad or evil. Of course, I agree, but do you ever reflect on what MAKES them bad our evil? What makes some things good and some things bad? Certainly there have been many philosophical attempts at making sense of moral statements, but all of those attempts are part of a tradition that goes back forever, and make up an endless cacophony of arguments and counter-arguments, and many look at that tradition as essentially betraying a groundlessness that no one wants to admit. This is what has led to the rise of relativism, the view that what is right or wrong is simply what one individual, or society, decides. I doubt you would be inclined to agree with people like this, but many of them are quite brilliant, and I know of no knock-down, unassailable argument to refute their claims. My point is that your very moral assumptions are no more hard and fast, no more empirically given, than the religious point of view you disagree with. There are many people who would tell you that your own convictions about right and wrong are no more than wish fulfillment, lies you tell yourself so that you can protect what you happen to like. This unanalyzed assumption about morality runs throughout the rest of your article. And it deserves to be challenged. 

4) Your view about God being fair, again, is nothing more than a restatement of the first 'point' you made in the body of your article. Is life fair? No, but life is not fair to God, either. God, I believe, is the repository of all experience, and all value. One of the consequences of believing God to be love is believing that God shares in the experience of all beings. All joy, and all suffering, that is visited on anyone, is also visited on God. And yet God does not disengage, He never stops loving, never leaves us to oblivion. The amazing thing is just how extreme the suffering God endures so that we can have the honor of being alive at all. The unfairness of life is the consequence of a universe that has the freedom to go it's own way. Not because God 'granted' this freedom, but just because that is what it means for anything to exist at all: to be, is simply to self-determine. And so the world has a large mass of free beings. The laws of nature, unfair as they often are, are the consequence of a world where such freedom is present. Note, this is not a 'free will defense', as I am not saying that God 'grants' free will to people. Rather, I am saying God relates to a universe of freedom, where things both living and non-living, both conscious and non-conscious, have the ability to go their own way. What we call the laws of physics are simply regularities, some deterministic and some probabilistic, that result from the action of this sea of freedom. The real shocking thing is not that the laws that supervene on this action aren't fair, but that their is any consistency and order in the world at all! That a universe of countless beings and things with genuine freedom would add up to a world not only of order, but of beauty and creativity on the scale we see is mind-boggling. The unfairness of the system is not the fault of the God who calls us to goodness and beauty, no. It is the fault of those things that refuse to conform to the Will of God as God wants them to. And the unfairness of the system is inevitably visited upon the God whose relationship with the world makes existence possible at all. That is just the consequence of God being not what we wanted...a genie or an all-powerful parent who could keep us from harm but from God being what God is...Suffering Love, whose being leads to the existence of an entire world of inspired but not controlled self-determination.

5) Your next point about abused and neglected children is yet another restatement of the last three points. But let me say that hating God for the hurting of the innocent is like blaming the victim. God, being the repository of all experience and value, necessarily shares in the pain of the victim. In the end, any person who hurts anybody in such a manner, knowingly or unknowingly cuts themselves off from God, in that moment. God conditions the world for beauty and goodness, He cannot guarantee that beauty and goodness will be the result.

6) Your fifth point about God being present is, simply put an example of 'the fallacy of begging the question'. It is the question of whether God is believable that is at issue. There are many good reasons to believe in God. I have a long apologetics series you could look at: http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-3c-f.html

Bill Vallicella over at the blog Maverick Philosopher (http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com) takes a vastly different approach to apologetics. But I for one would not want to be an atheist who debates him on the subject. Would you?

There are many metaphysical posits that are based on something less than unassailable foundations. Let's take a simple statement: 'nothing you cannot prove with sensory evidence is true'. What is the evidence that this statement is true? It's negation 'there is at least one thing that is true that cannot be proved with sensory evidence' is consistent with not only every observation we have, but with every CONCEIVABLE observation. Empirical data is not the only way to prove something true, and proof is not the only way to know something is true.

Science itself proceeds on a set of what philosophers would call 'epistemological foundations' or 'epistemological assumptions' that cannot be scientifically proven. To try to prove them scientifically is circular, and besides any attempt to do so is fated for frustration. For that the universe is a place of consistency and order cannot be proven scientifically. It must be assumed if science is to proceed at all. The principle of uniformity, that the whole universe works about the same way and always has, is a similar assumption. So is Ockham's Razor, or the need for predictive efficacy. 

And if you move away from hard science it gets worse. Notice that a relativist that simply wants to deny that there are any genuine moral laws at all, or that there is any 'truth' or 'falsehood' behind any moral statement, is not doing anything much different from what you are here. They simply assume the falsehood of your beliefs, and then ask you to justify them from premises that both you and they would share. But it is doubtful that a morally committed person shares the types of foundations that would provide common ground for the strict relativist. Wittgenstein once said that we have a hard time facing the groundlessness of much of our knowing. And that's about right

7) Your next paragraph has a clear internal inconsistency. On the one hand, you claim that you want your child's morality to be 'internally' rather than 'externally' focused. Yet you end that paragraph by making a point that one of the reasons a child who has no belief in God will do the right thing in part because they will make their family proud. But this is an external, not internal focus. If you truly want morality internalized, then what anyone thinks should mean nothing at all to the moral agent at issue.

But of course a purely internal moral experience is senseless. Everyone gets their moral rules from somewhere. And one can ask why a purely internalized moral structure would look anything like you expect it to. If I am my own judge, if moral rules supervene on my own mind, then why not just structure morality however I wish? It is I who decide not only whether I will do what is right, but what right even IS, at all. In the final analysis what ground does a selfless person stand on when the selfish person simply turns to them and says "I know how you feel, but that just isn't 'goodness' in my philosophy"? See, this view, if made consistent, makes all morality simply a matter of taste. You and I may share the same tastes, and we can celebrate this fact. But we are in no way better off than anyone else. Oh you try to dance around this by insisting that people who 'act a certain way' will be better and feel better about themselves, but this simply begs the question. There are plenty of people who live rather selfishly  who seem by all lights happy and proud. I know of no way to prove them otherwise.

One of the most dangerous things for non-believers is the thrill of evil, of rebellion. Dostoevsky wrote about this a lot. Realizing that you make your own moral rules, that whatever is good is whatever you decide it to be, brings with it an intense thrill that non-religious people never seem to be able to account for. Rebellion in the most extreme sense of the term is thrilling for it's own sake. Religious people call this 'making yourself your own god'. Irreligious people seem unaware of this, you certainly come off as if you are unaware of it in your post.

8) I found it ironic that this section followed the last one. It seems to me that there is a great danger of narcissism in your musings on so-called internal morality, than you realized. Moral experience is one of the most powerful experiences people can engage in. Believing that this experience derives solely from within seems one of the most narcissistic thoughts one could have.

Nor is it narcissism to think that God has a plan for a person or loves them in a unique way. I love my wife in a unique way, and I think she is special. I also love my sister in a unique way, and think she is special. No one need draw some special conclusion about their worth or value from my love and special vision of them. Narcissism is the view that one is better than other people, or the center of the world. But if God loves every person, and loves them in a unique way, and has a plan for all people, then narcissism should not result. Anyone who really thinks about the view that God loves every person and all people should be able to see how inconsistent it is to draw narcissistic conclusions from it. What's more, most Christians think God's love is an undeserved gift to a wretchedly sinful humanity. Such a view should never lead to pride. Quite the contrary. If God's special love was believed to be earned or deserved, and (and both of these things need to be true) I think that such a love is given to some people and not others, then that indeed would be narcissistic. But few Christians believe this cognitively. Of course many Christians ARE narcissistic. And they use their religion to justify their pride. But intellectual pride, and moral pride are just as common among non-believers. People are prideful, the justifications they offer for that pride are backwards-looking.

On the issue of God having a plan, it is ridiculous (I think) to believe that God's plan for any person is unassailable, or even very specific. You have plans for your children, I gather. You want them to be healthy, and happy, and to make a positive difference in the world. No doubt, you can see skills in them that would make them better at that in some capacities over others. They may or may not live out these visions, but you would be remiss not to help them see that this is what is best for them and the other people around them. The truth is that the Bible is full of passages where God's plans are frustrated, and where God changes plans in reaction to human decision making. Imagine that a friend of  yours needs a kidney. God calls you to give that kidney, but because of fear or doubt you don't do this. Your friend dies. God now calls you to a new life, maybe one where you tell your story to inspire others to do what you did not. Of course, God did not want your friend to die. God's plan was simply for you to do what was best. Now that this plan was frustrated, God comes up with a new plan. This doesn't mean that something wasn't genuinely lost when you failed to actualize God's earlier plan. Indeed, there may be entire universes of possibilities lost because your friend died. But GIVEN the facts as they are NOW, God is bringing some good out of what is left. 

Saying God has a plan is no different than saying that God wants us to do what is right. God's vision for that is no doubt tailored to every individual's particular situation. But only a morally blind fool believes God wills anything other than the good for all people all the time. And only a person who is already a narcissist sees in God's particular call to him or her any reason to be prideful.

9) Your definition of humility is way off. Humility is not having a bad or lowly self-image. Humility is simply having an accurate self-image. Maybe what humans do in this world is supremely important, maybe it isn't. But you have given no reason to think anything one way or another. Certainly you think you are right, but as you've said, your belief about your rightness is no indication that you are, in fact, right. What you paint here is a picture of meaninglessness. See, in the end, a universe where we make no real difference is a universe where what we do doesn't mean anything. It is a way of saying that what we do doesn't 'matter'. But think about this statement: "doing the right thing doesn't matter". Does this make sense? Isn't this just another way of saying that one shouldn't care if one does the right thing or not? For what could 'mattering' be, but simply significance? If what we do has no significance, then every action, every choice, every belief, is meaningless. You began with a conviction about truth. Truth is more important than happiness. But then you end at a place where it doesn't matter if you believe what is true, or what makes you happy. Given that fact, why not just believe what makes you happy? It doesn't matter anyways. In the end your essay is an Oroborous, it eats it's own tail.

And the truth is that we have direct, unfiltered experience of the importance of many of our actions. You betrayed just such a sense at the beginning of your post. If your child is in danger, does it not FEEL like it is the most important thing in the world, in that moment. Maybe you can later brush this off as a false belief, brought into your mind by evolutionary forces. But what is this but to say that we must, sometimes, lie to ourselves? And isn't this just what you wanted to avoid? Further, why is a stultifying skepticism preferable, or more believable, than an experienced significance?

10) Your final statement about keeping religion away from the public sector so leaders can make decisions based on 'logic' 'justice' and 'fairness' reveals a fundamental inconsistency in your thinking. For what is 'just' or 'fair' or even 'logical' is not clear. There is no such thing as an un-embeded value-neutral reason or logic. Look up Graham Priest's dialethteism, or fuzzy logic, logics themselves are choices, choices made on pre-existing intellectual prejudices. And if logic itself is up for grabs in the market of public discourse, then morality even moreso. Metaphysical prejudices color your every musing, your every statement. And so you end with a lie, the very kind of lie that you began trying to avoid... a lie about yourself, and about who we are as people. For there is no greater self-deception than the deception that our own metaphysical and moral positions are those that are clear to any and all rational and clear mind. The hardest thing for people to face is that intelligent, rational people of good conscience can disagree on important issues, both moral and metaphysical. The pretense to cetainty is a warm blanket people wrap themselves in to avoid facing the hard truth of our limitations. To demand that religious people stay out of public discourse is to betray an intellectual prejudice and to reveal in yourself the very fear that you wanted to keep from motivating and animating your child. Don't do that, stay the course, be true to your original commitment to truth and self-honesty. No true position need ever fear the light of day or the rigor of debate. Good day and much love to you and yours.

Guest Post By Jamie Nguyen

Read this first: http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-910282?hpt=hp_c3

Jamie Nguyen's fantastic commentary (first posted on Facebook):

Let me start by saying, I am a Christian, and I primarily teach my children what I believe. With that said, I do my best to teach them about atheism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, etc. They are free to ask me any question and I will answer it to the best of my knowledge and if I don’t have the answer, I ask my brother…LOL…or research the answer for them.
This article really caught my attention because I realize Christianity is a dying religion. And if people don’t speak-out about logical ideas of who God is and what He expects of us, it will not survive many more generations.
God allows us the opportunity for life. That does not mean that life will be free of hurt. Lives lived can be short-lived, difficult, sad even; but life itself is good. Anyone that has children takes a risk in whether or not that child will make the best choices. God, like a parent, does his best to guide us, and I believe he makes every effort to persuade even the most violent criminals to turn away from harming others. The news shows us how many people turn away from God’s beckoning, but it rarely publicizes how many people turn away from hurting others and do what is right and just. Just as we do not force our children to be heterosexual, Christian, righteous, etc, God does not force us to be his servant.
God does not wish death on anyone. Now I believe God to be omnipresent, that does not mean I believe God is omnipotent. I don’t believe in predestination. Even Christ rushes to judgment in Matthew 15: 25-27,
25 The woman came and knelt before Him. “Lord, help me!” she said. 26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.” 27 “Yes, Lord,” she said, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
27 Then Jesus answered, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.
What do we learn from his reaction? Well, his humanity gets the best of him at first, but when he listens to the woman, he realizes something. His position with the Jewish people is so much bigger; his position is with God’s world, not just the Jewish people. 
When we ask questions like, “Why did God allow this to happen?” it is very similar to Christ on the cross, Matthew 27: 46,
46And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" that is, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" 
What makes us most human also makes us most like God. Do we not change God’s universe for the better when we return a wallet with someone’s week’s pay into the customer service desk? When we place our hands over a bleeding stranger to help save them? When we give something to someone with no intentions of a return? But we don’t hear of these circumstances every day, and I guarantee they happen more often than not. We do God’s work even if we don’t give him credit for the action. 
If we are made only for survival of the fittest, there is no reason to love, there is no meaning in the word “forever”, and we certainly have no reason to lie to our children and tell them everything will be okay when they go to bed at night. Because there is no guarantee that everything will be okay. If what we do matters, and if our existence makes a difference in the universe, then God must exist. Otherwise, we are lying to our children; not everything will be okay, because the “everything” we are referring to will be gone at some point. The earth will not be here forever, and the love we may feel for that child is only evolution trying to cling onto what is left of human existence.
God is life; that does not mean life is always fair. Just because one has been “good” does not mean they will receive good in return. Look at the Book of Job. The man has done everything he feels is necessary to do God’s work, but he ultimately loses everything (his possessions, family, health, etc.). Let’s face it, Karma just isn’t a reality. Good things don’t necessarily happen to good people, and bad things don’t necessarily happen to bad people. 
We are not in a fish bowl with God taking care of the tank. God is with us. And when God cannot convince evil to not harm us, he suffers with us. He is the only one who knows our sufferings and encountered the experience just as we do. I was once told to think of it as, “when someone rapes a child, they are not only killing the life of the child, but they rape God as well.” The universe is a different place when something so horrific takes place. Steps back have been taken for peace in the world. The only justice is in the “suffering servant.”
God has given us the opportunity to teach our children the difference between right and wrong. I fall short of being the “best parent ever” all the time. I trust that my kids will look at moments in their life and see how wonderful the world can be. Because if these moments matter, if my children take each of these moments seriously, if our existence makes a difference, then we cannot take full credit for the universe and of how truly awesome it really is. 
The Bible, priests, nuns, monks, prayers, religions, etc. contain contradictions, and can be fallible; but does that mean that we should discredit the existence of God entirely? Do we discredit Einstein entirely for what he got wrong, or do we look at what he got right and make sense out of it? Learn from it?
The writer says “religion should stay at home or in church where it belongs”. I beg to differ. I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, but I was once a skeptic and I still am sometimes (there are no guarantees). When God was introduced to me in a whole new way, my life began to make sense. I wasn’t a book that was already written, in fact, I wasn’t a book at all. A book may eventually be lost, but not me. Nope. My existence, as well as my children’s existence, changes God’s universe forever. And our memory never dies. It stays forever in Him, and with Him. 
So if my child asks me, “Where is heaven?” I’ll say, “I believe heaven is where the best parts of us stay forever with God.” When someone asks me, “Why did God allow this to happen?” I say, “God tried to do everything possible to keep evil away, when that did not work He tried to save as many people as he could, and when some still suffered and died, God suffered along with them.” If someone says to me, “Is God fair?” I would say, “It’s not about what we don’t have. It’s about what we do with the life that God has given us.”

A Process Pneumatology- From My Unpublished Book BREATH OF GOD

Process Theology & The Holy Spirit

            Another vital theological movement of the 20th century, one I reflected on in a limited way in my last book that will play a significant role in my own thinking, is process theology. Process theology began as a philosophical movement started by Alfred North Whitehead, a mathematician and philosopher. Alfred North Whitehead was an agnostic before he began his quest to develop a comprehensive worldview that could make sense of the scientific revolutions taking place at the turn of the century. Whitehead thought that the mechanistic model of reality, seeing the world as a giant clock whose workings could be perfectly described through math and science, had about run its course. It no longer served to push the cause of science and humanity forward, and some new thinking was going to be required if we were to engage in the big paradigm shifts that the future looked like it would be forcing on us. Whitehead thought the line between life and non-life, as well as the line between the world of the mind (the human condition) and the world of the mindless was blurry, at best. Rather, the world and the things that make it up are lifelike and mindlike, and all of reality could be modeled this way. The world by Whitehead's lights was a realm of freedom, and the laws of physics were descriptions of the regularities in the behavior in the use of this freedom. What's more, all things are themselves only societies of other things, all things are organic and societal, and this is one reason why his philosophy is often called "The Philosophy of Organism". Strange as this may sound, not long after Whitehead's theorizing about metaphysics, physics itself started to turn in this direction. Quantum mechanics changed our view of the world as something hard, fast, material and determined. Later, influenced by Whitehead and others, a new field of science called systems theory started to permeate all branches of science, from biology and chemistry to physics and even social science. Systems theory very much treats reality and the things that make it up as lifelike and often even mindlike. I personally believe that in time, Whitehead's influence in science will be as great or greater than even Albert Einstein.

            Whitehead was taken aback when he realized that the implications of his theories, which are laid out in his writings in ways far more complex and yet precise than what I've said here, pointed the way to the existence of something very much like the God spoken of in the world's great religions. What shocked him was the way free beings, over and over again, on an unimaginable scale, constantly added up to not just aggregates but real wholes, wholes that often expressed an increasing aesthetic value. Whitehead wanted to understand how it was that value is produced, and how a progression of value in the universe took place. It seemed obvious to Whitehead that things moved in the direction of being more complex, and more beautiful. Why should this be so? From his point of view, increasing physical zeal and zest were a reflection of a mental pull towards increasing depth of being. Things were trying to be the 'most' of themselves they could be, to impress deeper upon the world. This action was ultimately self-centered. But from this self-centered action of free beings, a whole, coherent, ordered, and beautiful world resulted. Things, trying to be fully themselves, did so by trying to produce a better, ordered and more beautiful whole. This tendency in things to 'choose' to live for others, in order to fully live for themselves, indicated to Whitehead that Something was impressing upon them something like the human experience of meaning and value.

            This led him to take a close look at the broadest range of religious experience throughout human cultures. What he found was something similar going on in religious life. A common religious thread, the one that he thought had the strongest evidentiary force, was the view that I only really find self-fulfillment in my fulfillment of the widest possible human community and moreover, in reality as a whole. I try to be the 'most me' I can be. But I find that I can only truly do this if I live for the whole of things, for all of reality. We live most of the time with an atomized vision of self, where we think we are this singular experiencing center, and we find fulfillment by satisfying that center. But such a life is ultimately self-defeating, unless it includes in it a wider circle that we also try to fulfill: familial, cultural, societal and so on. I only find my own real good by fulfilling these larger wholes. Who I am, is only discovered in my relationship with others. Religion at its best, thinks Whitehead, opens us up to an even larger sense of self, one that is only found when we completely lose that sense of an atomized 'me'. If I find my life I lose it, and if I lose my life I find it (Matthew 10:39). This paradoxical insight is yet the foundation of all that truly seems to be 'the good life'. Whitehead thought that this human insight was something that applied to all reality. Whitehead's philosophy is ultimately an attempt to take the reality of individual things seriously. Individuality, novelty, and freedom are real, for Whitehead, and yet they are only fully expressed in and through community. Individuality in community, and community through individuality, is the very nature of the universe, for Whitehead. He says this explicitly in RELIGION IN THE MAKING, I apologize for the technical language, but if you do the work to understand Whitehead, the profundity of the message is real:

"The actual world, the world of experiencing, and of thinking, and of physical activity, is a community of many diverse entities; and these entities contribute to, or derogate from, the common value of the total community. At the same time, these actual entities are, for themselves, their own value, individual and separable. They add to the common stock and yet they suffer alone. The world is a scene of solitariness in community.

The individuality of entities is just as important as their community. The topic of religion is individuality in community." (emphasis added)

            Whiteheadian philosophy posits a dual natured God as the source of the physical world. The primordial nature of God is a non-physical reality, a "best possible" image of the whole world. The consequent nature of God is the world, which expresses that "completed" image to some degree. Each individual 'thing' is imaged in God's primordial nature as the best it can be, adding up to the best possible world given the facts of the world as they are now. An object in the world, possessed of some kind of mental capacity, has a basic ability to respond to this image, and it uses its freedom to 'lurch' towards it, actualizing it less or more. God then re-orders His primordial nature, to produce a new ideal image, which is respondent to the actions of the objects that make up the world. T       Think about how it like this: a friend of mine needs a kidney, and I happen to be a match. God presents to me the ideal of me donating my kidney to my friend, within His primordial nature. Through religious and moral experience, and more so through true self-awareness (awareness of myself in and through the whole of things, an awareness Whitehead called 'prehension'), I apprehend this 'ideal possibility', this best possible image of myself within a best possible image of the world. But because of fear or distrust I procrastinate and my friend passes away. This ideal image is now gone, a new one replaces it. God may, say, call me to tell others my story to encourage others to have the courage I did not. This is the new ideal image, the new primordial nature of God, for me. What is true for me is true for every thing in the universe, and the universe as a whole. All things, from the cells in my body which are called in each moment to behave according to biological rules and yet still have the freedom to go cancerous to weather systems which are called to continue the dance of life and beauty but can become destructive, have some imaged reality in the primordial nature of God. To the degree the individual things express the primordial nature in the physical world, God exists along side us, and that is what Whitehead calls the 'consequent' nature of God. Whitehead says in that same book 'all acts leave the world with a greater or fainter impress of God'.

            It didn't take long for Whitehead's philosophy to get appropriated by Christian theologians who thought it presented a new and exciting way for us to reconcile science and Biblical religion. Charles Hartshorne was the first to really get the ball rolling. He started by simplifying Whitehead's system into a Divine Personalism, whereby the universe is treated as the Body of God and God as the mind of the universe. The Divine Mind could set the goals and imagine the ideals to which the things that make up the body respond. This was a simpler and more personal way to express the same truths. A flurry of thinkers developed an important school of thought known as process theology, and it has had a wide influence in Christianity. There are many process theologians, and even more traditional theologians who have been influenced by process thought. It is an exciting and important field. Process Pneumatology has been sorely lacking, unfortunately. Process theologians have tended to identify the Holy Spirit with the primordial nature of God, guiding the universe forward through inspiration, and Christ with the consequent nature, the good things in the world expressing the Spirit. Jesus is usually seen as a paradigmic example of this kind of intersect. As Clark Pinnock points out in his wonderful work of Pneumatology "Flame of Love", this is not concomitant with the experience and worship of the Christian community as a whole, and will not do as it stands. For this reduces the Spirit and the Son to parts of God, aspects of God, and not God Himself. This aspectism is not personalism and it is three Persons of God that we need, we need the sense of the Spirit as a Person, not an idea, not an abstract part of the whole. That said these ideas will play important roles in my own Trinitarian vision and Pneumatology. I think that the material here can be brought into conversation with tradition and we can reach a whole new height in Pneumatological and Trinitarian reflection. And that is a big part of what I will be doing in this book: giving tradition a much stronger voice alongside process theology than it does for almost any other process thinker. I have explained before why I think honoring tradition and the church experience is important, and it is important for me, just as process theology, too, is important. That is why these ideas will play a role, but the role they will play is to give form and function to a Pneumatological project.

            One last thing needs to be said about process theology and Pneumatology. I said before that Greek philosophy tended to weaken the church's ability to talk about the Spirit and the Trinity. One of the things Whitehead did for theologians was give them a philosophical framework that freed them of the substance vision that so limited their ability to talk about God relationally. This God, the God of Whitehead, is essentially relational, as all things are. Objects are their relationships, and so is God. As such, we have a language which will make it possible to talk about God in and through the relationships of three distinct persons. Whitehead's greatest gift to us was to give us a way to talk about God AS love. For that reason, if for no other, all Christians owe him a great debt of gratitude.

Quotables

"The quest is to be liberated from the negative, which is really just our own will to nothingness. And once the moment is affirmed it becomes contagious...it breaks out into a chain of affirmations which knows no end. To say 'yes' to a single instant, is to say 'yes' to the sum of existence."- from the film WAKING LIFE

One-Post Wednesday: My Weekly Homily

"I Believe...Help My Unbelief"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3Q4X4UBC8Y