Eyre Lines

In the first post in this series, I talked about how classical philosophical ideas didn’t cope well with modern science, and suggested that the same might hold with theology. In the second, I talked a bit about Process Theology and why I’d avoided it to date. In the third, I outlined some concepts in classical theology and three problems which that gives rise to. In the fourth, I explored two less than fortunate consequences of the dualism of classical Greek philosophy; this post deals with more.

To amplify further, classical philosophy dealt, by and large, with metaphysics, that which lay beyond physics. The “physics of the day” was more advanced in many respects than it had any right to be, considering that it had almost no conception of scientific method and was drawn almost entirely from musing on data drawn from everyday experience. I say “more advanced” because it had, for instance, the concept of the “atom”, the a-tomos, the undivisible minute building block of all matter, the concepts of force, power and potential, even, arguably, the concept of the field. These concepts took physics a very long way, indeed up to the point at which Einstein proposed matter-energy equivalence, special and general relativity, quanta and wave-particle duality (and various other scientists were proposing other equally revolutionary breaks with anything which could be sensibly described by the physics of the day).

The classical metaphysics followed the same lines, and used the same concepts as its building blocks.

The snag is that we now have a better understanding of the material world in which concepts such as “essence”, “the material”, even “spirit” do not have anything like the same basis as they did in the classical world (and we need to remember that the thinking of the classical world was effectively the only way to think until at the earliest the nineteenth century, although some philosophers and theologians had been delving beyond that as early as the seventeenth century). Some of them are, in truth, incoherent in the eyes of a Physicist (and I used to be one).

The sixth (and for the moment the last) problem is the failure of classical philosophical ideas to deal with continua and with enmeshed and interdependent phenomena, which are a significant feature of modern physics. This leads, in theology, inter alia to a tendency to create binary opposites; that dealt with in the last post (spirit and matter), heaven and hell, good and evil, God and Satan, sinful and justified (or redeemed, or forgiven), orthodoxy and heresy as some of many instances.

Callid Keefe-Perry puts things this way:- “One of the struggles that I believe we face is that even the language we use to talk about talking about God is marred with the marks of a Hellenization that does not well suit the numinous.  When we postulate that God may be too transcendent, we seem to be articulating a vision of God that is somehow fixed “out there,” something akin a quasi-Platonic Form of Divinity.  Indeed, Plato’s description of the Form of Beauty seems not too far removed from how many talk about God: “It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself” (The Symposium, 211b).  That is, the transcendent Form is so far removed from our world and our experience of the world that the best we can hope to do is experience some lesser reproduction of the thing.  The result of this thinking then, is that the best we can do when attempting to articulate something transcendent is hope to name some flawed copy of the thing we actually sought to speak.  I reject this construction.”

Now, process doesn’t really suffer from this dualism, as it stresses interconnectedness and relationship over hard and fast boundaries. It tends more to see things as centered on some point, but as attenuating from that point and not being really “bounded”, if indeed it sees things as “things” at all – there is more of a tendency to talk of “events” and, of course, “processes”. In addition, at the level of human beings as biological entities, we are, in terms of modern concepts of biology, not discrete entities – we are, for instance, dependent for our functioning on a host of bacteria (as many Yoghurt adverts will tell you); we are not on the level of groups of us truly independent, as most models of social structure will say. As such, process-relational thinking is a far better fit to what we now know about the most basic mechanisms of the universe.

It is also, however, a better fit with scripture. The bulk of scripture is the Hebrew Scriptures, which were by and large not written with a classical Greek philosophical framework. The result is that concepts such as omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, impassibility and even incorporeality, transcendence and simplicity are at best underdetermined by the texts and at worst flatly contradicted by some. Yes, you can find proof texts which state something about God which is along each of these lines, but you can find other texts which cannot be sensibly understood if you attribute to God these characteristics.

The result is that in the writings of, for instance, Bruce Epperley and John Cobb, process theology starts looking very promising as an alternative way of looking at theology to replace the Platonism or Aristotelianism of traditional theology.

Bo Sanders says of Process-Relational theology:- “This is not a simple tweak of the existing system (like Open theology). This is not a program that you just download and install into your already in place operating system. It is not a patch that employ to get rid of the bugs and kinks in the classical program. Relational thought is a different operating system (to use the fun Mac v. Microsoft Windows analogy).” He also remarks:- “When someone looks into Process (or many other schools) and wades into the explanation against substance/matter and its replacement with packets of time/moments/actualities – it is just too much jabber-talkie and vocabulary.”

Here is the real problem: although in the writings of process theologians (as opposed to process philosophers) Process is very attractive, there is a really major shift in how you need to start viewing the universe as a whole, not just how you view theology. I’ve already confessed to a certain degree of blind spot towards philosophy generally, although I also feel a need to be as solidly based as it’s possible for me to be. That said, for upwards of 40 years I’ve looked at the universe at its most basic level as not being composed of “things”, not being best described by a substance/matter kind of description, and I’m happy to carry on with that.

However, I also learn from that background that it isn’t on the whole useful to expand that way of looking at things to a more general context. I may, for instance, know that both myself and the wall next to me are composed of emptiness with some widely spaced vibrations going on (and as a result of mystical experience be entirely confident that the boundary between myself and these things is not a true boundary at all), but that does not mean I can get up and walk through the wall (as direct collision of the vibrations could in theory be avoided). I am sitting on a chair; I do not fall through it, despite it being composed mostly of empty space. It is far more practical for me to regard the wall, the chair and myself as distinct objects occupying discrete amounts of space. A really good comprehensive theology should reflect that, as well as the basic fact of my being a set of vibrations.

However, as the universe is clearly (from physics) a set of vibrations, of events and processes, rather than a set discrete entities (or a single entity), and as at the biological and social levels I am not truly single, separated and discrete, a really good comprehensive theology should reflect that as well. That may not be “process” as such, but it has to be relational.

 

In the first post in this series, I talked about how classical philosophical ideas didn’t cope well with modern science, and suggested that the same might hold with theology. In the second, I talked a bit about Process Theology and why I’d avoided it to date. In the third, I outlined some concepts in classical theology and three problems which that gives rise to.

The fourth problem rests in the mind (or spirit) versus body dualism of Greek thought. The thinking of the Hebrew Scriptures was not, by and large, influenced by this concept; Jewish thought did not see the spirit as being something which temporarily inhabited a material body, but saw people as material beings which were made alive by the divine spark, the breath of God, but only vivified by that, not “inhabited by” a separate spirit. Greek thought, and that of some of the very late Hebrew Scriptures, the Intertestamentals and the New Testament, did see the essence of the person as being something separable from the body. Isa. 26:19, Dan 12:2 and Hos. 6:2 are examples of this Jewish thinking.

[As an aside, I am reasonably convinced that the insistence in certain of the resurrection accounts that the resurrected Christ was tangible was a concession to this Jewish belief that a person was inherently material, and that there could be no resurrection without a body. Paul’s early account of resurrection appearances, which is the earliest, is fairly clear that he is not talking about a revivification of a dead body, but of an appearance, possibly but not definitely cloaked in a tangible form; I suspect that this was not acceptable to non-Hellenised Jews and there was therefore a need for something more like the conventional view of resurrection. It may be, however, that the expectations of certain of the disciples that there could not be an appearance of the resurrected Christ without his original body gave rise to the subjective experience of real substance. ]

This combines with an individualism which was not the dominant theme of the Hebrew Scriptures; these dominantly regard salvation as relating to a people rather than to individuals, and individual behaviour as being important to preserve ones place within an already to-be-saved people of Israel. This is a concept labelled by scholars in the “New Perspective on Paul” as “covenantal nomism” (these scholars include E.P. Sanders, James Dunn and N.T. Wright).

Of course, in terms of modern science, the concept of a separable spirit or soul is now generally regarded as untenable; although mind (or spirit) is given importance as a concept, it is as  an epiphenomenon of  consciousness, which is itself an epiphenomenon of life. That is to say that mind, spirit or soul arise from the fact that we have brains capable of conscious thought, and brains capable of conscious thought arise from the fact that we are fairly complex living beings. Granted, science fiction has frequently played with the concept of conscious thought in machines or other forms which would not be regarded as “living” by most, but to date in order for there to be conscious thought, it has been found to be necessary for there to be a brain. Similarly, it is extremely probable (by extension) that in order for there to be a mind, spirit or soul, there must be conscious thought. Mind (or spirit, or soul) is not separable from the material body.

In other words, I am suggesting here that in this respect first century Jewish thinking was more conducive to modern scientific and philosophical ideas than was first century Greek thinking, resting on the Greek philosophical tradition which continued in the West unchallenged until at least the early stages of the Enlightenment.

This is, of course, not to say that there cannot be some survival of mind or spirit; using the analogy of computer software and hardware, a computer program and its associated stored memory can be separated from the hardware on which it runs (and can run on other hardware), but it is not functional in the absence of the hardware. In much the same way, it seems extremely probable that mind or spirit cannot function in the absence of a material matrix, but could conceivably continue in a form of existence given some storage medium, and similarly could be “resurrected” into a new matrix.

This mind-body dualism links with two other potential problems, the first of which is that the unseen, immaterial, “spiritual” is seen as “higher” and more perfect than the material, and so what really matters is not the whole person or the material body but only the spirit, and secondly that the spiritual (and God) is seen as being of infinite duration, so the infinity of time to come after death matters far more than does our current life. The result is a focus on survival after death to the exclusion of living today. Of course, if my analogy of the computer program has any validity, an infinity of storage on a floppy disk is probably not preferable to actual functioning…

This leads me neatly to the fifth problem, which is that as the immaterial, mental and spiritual is seen as higher, better and more perfect than the material, it is also seen as more fundamental, more real. In other words, the immaterial creates the material, usually in a rather poor imitation of the immaterial ideal. Plato’s “cave” image is one way of putting this: the world as we see it is a series of distorted images of what is more real, more perfect and more fundamental but which we cannot see directly.

I am not here attacking Idealist philosophies generally; for a start, some idealist philosophies lend themselves to panentheism, and I experience God in a way which is for me massively best described by panentheism. There is no problem in terms of science in the concept that our concepts can only approximate to the reality beyond “the cave”, indeed this is very much the way philosophy of science tends to see things, and the state of modern physics tends to underline this in that there appears to be a substrate of reality which is irretrievably uncertain, where Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and chaos theory reign.

The problem comes when this couples itself with revealed religion and we think that our concepts are “higher, better, more real, more fundamental and more perfect” than what is actually experienced, because that is what has been revealed to us. I have to be very careful with this aspect myself, as the bones of panentheism represent to me something “revealed” directly to me, and there is an inevitable temptation to say that that is what must be so irrespective of any material evidence to the contrary. It would, of course, be a mistake for me, and it is a mistake for theology generally. Whatever else can be said about revelation, it has passed through at least one individual human consciousness before reaching us, and that must give the basis for error. Paul recognised this in 1 Cor. 13:12: “Now we see through a glass, darkly…”

Process recognises that things change, that things are interdependent, and as such is antagonistic to concepts such as perfection but very conducive to the idea of “better approximations” which develop with time.

Number 6 is giving me difficulties, so there may be a delay!

 

In the first post in this series, I talked about how classical philosophical ideas didn’t cope well with modern science, and suggested that the same might hold with theology. In the second, I talked a bit about Process Theology and why I’d avoided it to date. I’m now going to look at some concepts in classical theology and see how they might be problematic.

Classical theology stresses the transcendence of God; God is wholly other. This is linked with the concept of God as being “holy”, but is not equivalent to it.

It also stresses the perfections of God; in the classical mould, God is all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), not bound by time (eternal), creator of all things, perfectly just but also perfectly merciful and loving (omnibenevolent). It isn’t difficult to find proof texts for each of these statements about God in the Bible.

However, it is also not difficult to find texts which don’t read as if God possesses any one of these characteristics.

Thomas Aquinas (perhaps the most influential Christian theologian after St. Paul) also derived some further statements about God. He is the unmoved mover, the origin of motion; the uncaused first cause of all things; the fount and origin of all order. (These are three of the quinque viae, Aquinas’ “proofs of God”; the others are perfection and necessary existence).

Quoting the Wikipedia article, Aquinas determined there were five basic things which could be said of God:

1. God is simple, without composition of parts, such as body and soul, or matter and form.
2. God is perfect, lacking nothing. That is, God is distinguished from other beings on account of God’s complete actuality.Thomas defined God as the ‘Ipse Actus Essendi subsistens,’ subsisting act of being.
3. God is infinite. That is, God is not finite in the ways that created beings are physically, intellectually, and emotionally limited. This infinity is to be distinguished from infinity of size and infinity of number^.
4. God is immutable, incapable of change on the levels of God’s essence and character.
5. God is one, without diversification within God’s self. The unity of God is such that God’s essence is the same as God’s existence. In Thomas’s words, “in itself the proposition ‘God exists’ is necessarily true, for in it subject and predicate are the same.”

The first problem this raises for me is that it takes insufficient account of the immanence of God, his presence in all things (omnipresence). There are also plenty of proof texts for God’s omnipresence, such as Psalm 139:7-12. Yes, classical theology will stipulate the omnipresence of God, but in practice we will see time and again the suggestion that God is “other”, that there is a great gulf fixed between us and God, that being sinful we cannot be in the presence of or accepted by the holy and perfect God. This is probably the most vital problem for me, given that my experience is overwhelmingly of an immanent God, a God present in all things.

Classical theism will also say, however, that God is spirit, and that spirit can indeed permeate everything, but is something distinct from the material. Except insofar as we are acknowledged to be in part spirit ourselves, this also emphasises the “otherness” of God; we are material, God is spiritual and never the twain shall meet, with the exception of the incarnation and, possibly, the Holy Spirit. However, the presence of the Holy Spirit is something which is not always there; the presence of God is in effect rationed. There is, of course, also the sacrament of communion in which God is commonly thought to be particularly present – and passed out in very small bits by a gatekeeper, thus even more rationed. However, spirit-body dualism is a problem area in its own right, which I mention later.

This theology does not, frankly, lend itself well to the evangelical thinking of “relationship with Jesus” either; a tension is created with the distant, unapproachable God.

Process thinking does not draw rigid boundaries, and sees God as intimately involved with the world on every level and needing the participation of humanity in order to bring about his purposes.

The second problem, and the one which is perhaps most important for those who do not have a compelling consciousness of omnipresence, is that of theodicy, i.e. why bad things happen to good people. Put very simply, if you propose:-
1. God is all-powerful
2. God is all-knowing and
3. God is omnibenevolent (i.e. wishes the best for each and every one of us)
the mere observation of the world tells us that bad things are happening daily, hourly, minute by minute and second by second to millions of reasonably good people. Thus not all of these statements can be correct; either God is unable to correct these evils, he does not know of them (or does not know of them in advance so as to be able to prevent them) or he is not a good God.

A large number of “work-rounds” have been proposed for this problem. If there is a countervailing force of evil, God is not really all-powerful. If God withdraws (kenosis), God is not in practice all-powerful. If God witholds action in order to permit free will, God is not in practice all-powerful. Those are the common answers.

In fact, a prominent process theologian, Charles Hartshorne, wrote a book called “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes”, which argues very cogently that neither omnipotence nor omniscience can actually be the case as a matter of philosophy, and, of course, Process Theology holds that God’s power and knowledge are in fact both limited, albeit very great. However, God’s power is expressed cooperatively and relationally rather than unilaterally. Theodicy is not a major problem to a Process Theologian.

The third problem is that God is thought of as perfect and therefore unchangeable and unmoved by emotion (“impassible”). This is not easy to provide proof texts for, and is in fact a deduction drawn from Platonic and Aristotelean philosophy; indeed, the Hebrew Scriptures are full of instances in which God is seen to be wrathful, jealous, merciful, loving and downright emotional. There are also several instances of God changing his mind – the sparing of the Ninevites after their wholesale repentance in the story of Jonah springs to mind. A particularly good account of this is found in Jack Miles’ book “God, A Biography”, which treats the Hebrew Scriptures as a work of literature in which God is the main character (as far as I know an unique approach) and seeks to plot his character development.

The fact that unchangeability and impassibility is not well supported by scripture is only the start of it; if we are to talk about having a relationship with God, or indeed loving God, how is this possible in a situation where no emotion is returned? In fact, the God of the Greek philosophers is distant, unapproachable and indifferent, an attitude summed up by Shakespeare in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport”. It is unsurprising that development of this train of thinking led to the Enlightenment Deists, who were content with a God who set things in motion but was uninvolved thereafter, and was certainly nothing that one could love or have a relationship with, or, really, worship.

Process sees god not as the “unmoved mover”, as classical philosophy would have it, but as the “most moved mover”, intimately involved in every aspect of creation.

I’ll continue in the next post with some further problems.

 

I’ve been avoiding looking more closely at process theology for years, despite knowing that it dovetails well with panentheism – and I determined that I was a panentheist very early in my spiritual life – and also with modern science.

In my last post I mentioned that I’d been kicked into thinking of it again by a scad of blog posts around December and January, but I also was involved with editing a new short book “Process Theology” by Bruce Epperley last year, which I recommend, and which had already started me thinking in that direction. If there’s a major snag to that book, it’s that it’s too short – it’s part of Energion Publications’ “Topical Line Drives” series, which are designed to be very concise. Its shortness and directness is also its greatest advantage, mind you! Bruce Epperley is one of the three or four most prominent process theologians around, so despite its brevity, this is a serious book.

Why was I avoiding it? Well, I am not a philosopher by inclination or training (or, probably, natural ability – philosophy seems to require a certain mindset with which I tend to become impatient). My major interest is in articulating ways of talking about a mystical consciousness of God, and as anyone who has read (for instance) Meister Eckhart will appreciate, while the result may look fairly philosophical, it mainly shows up the inadequacy of human language and concepts to express an experience of something as awesome as God and his relationship with us (and the cosmos).

(Some of my friends use “awesome” a lot in talking of God. No, I have not “gone over to the other side”; I just think that “mind-boggling” and “ineffable” are aspects which need stressing here!)

My first contacts with Process were however through Whitehead’s writings and formulations, and this launches you straight into fairly heavyweight philosophy. I’ve also found Charles Hartshorne and John Cobb less than easy going when they start talking about process, though I like Hartshorne’s demolition of the “omni” concepts (and have blogged about this before). It seems to me that a lot of what is actually wrong with classical Theology comes from arriving at philosophical positions which are somewhat supported by scripture and then using those as guide to reinterpreting the rest of scripture. Perhaps naively, I tend to think that scripture should be allowed as much as is possible to speak from its own historic context without imposing systems on it, and it did rather appear to me that Process, in common with much philosophy of religion, was assisting in imposing systems.

Philosophical language is certainly one way of articulating ways of “talking about a mystical consciousness of God”, though. Indeed, as I’ve mentioned the problem of expressing mystical experience in human language, it might have some merit in expanding the vocabulary. The problem, to me, is when the philosophy overtakes the fact that we are talking about human experience of God, which has tended to be the case with the writings of Whitehead et al. I’m hoping in this series of posts to work out how Process may be of use to me in doing this, hopefully without philosophically dense language.

As I am at root a scientist, I take this mystical experience as being my primary data set. Data is data; you can’t say “I don’t like this data, it can’t be right, it doesn’t fit the theory” (provided you’ve eliminated things like deliberate falsification and accounted for any bias in your instrumentation – which I grant is no simple thing as your instrumentation here is individual human consciousnesses). No, if the data doesn’t fit the theory, the theory needs to be altered, as I suggested in my last post is the case with classical theology and will be expanding on later.

Mostly, of course, theories in science are adjusted very slightly; if a theory has worked reasonably well (and in order to last, it must have worked reasonably well) it must have been describing the situation fairly well; it gets changed to accommodate some data which just didn’t fit, and usually this can be achieved by a slight tweak to the theory. Very occasionally there is a revolution in thinking, and an entirely new way of conceiving of something comes along (relativity and quantum theory are two examples from my old scientific sphere), but even then they tend to allow the old theory to be a “special case”, as in the case of relativity; Newtonian mechanics still works well in non-relativistic cases.

Process is, however, a radical rethinking, not a slight adjustment, as I indicated in my last post; a “new operating system”. Bruce Epperley’s book makes a start on providing a way of doing the adjusting, to be sure, but can’t in that few pages really address all the implications of this way of thinking differently about God. In addition, it is probably foolish to talk of “Process Theology” as if it were an uniform thing – it isn’t; Process Theologians share some major basic ideas, but there are many slightly differing Process Theologies, and Dr. Epperley’s is one of those; slightly different from (for example) Whitehead’s rarified philosophical version and different again from John B. Cobb’s worked through thinking.

So what I’m proposing is to take Process thinking and see if it expands my ability to talk about mystical consciousness of God without getting overly philosophically technical or letting the philosophy take over the – er – process.

The most fundamental novel aspect of process theology is that in it, God is capable of changing, and indeed does change. Dr. Epperley comments that philosophically, Process stresses movement, change, relationship, possibility, creativity, freedom, and open-endedness. It follows that Process does not regard God as being unchanging, or impassible (that is to say emotionally unmoved), or in principle separated from humanity. It doesn’t stress the concept of perfection, though perfection could be incorporated as long as it isn’t regarded as something static; certainly it doesn’t start by positing the perfection of God and then deducing multiple other things from that.

It also doesn’t regard God as being either omnipotent or omniscient in anything remotely like the classical sense. Charles Hartshorne, a process theologian, has to my mind exposed the impossibility of both of these characterstics in “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes”. They both, of course, tend to spring from consideration of God as unchangeably perfect.

Process is also fundamentally unitive rather than divisive. It sees connection and interdependence rather than separation and independence, it sees the unity of all things in God rather than a vast gulf placed between the Creator and the created, and finally it doesn’t rest on a duality of spirit and matter or of ideals and the concrete.

In my next post, I will look at some of the ways in which I think classical Theology has failed us, to underline why it is worth looking at Process as a way forward.

 

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Jai McConnell left “The Voice” this year in the knockout rounds. A shame, I felt, as she has an instantly recognisable, unique voice; just the kind of thing “The Voice” looks for, in my eyes. But I mention her here because of her chest – and I have in mind her startling ink, not (for instance) her lung capacity. Just in case you thought I meant something else…

In case you can’t get that from the link, it reads “Nothing endures but change”.

There was a time when this would have been a much more controversial statement than it is today. Science, in particular, has come to terms with the fact that what we used to perceive as solid and unchanging is, in fact, changing – mountains are ground down over years, continents move, stars are born, grow and die, even the universe itself appears to have a defined beginning and the prospect of a long-away heat death. Solid matter is not only not solid, being mostly empty space, but even the particles of which it is composed are at their most fundamental level something more like vibrations, and even their positions are ultimately uncertain thanks to Werner Heisenberg.

We have had to move beyond the philosophical basis we once had, which was for most of the history of Western Civilisation fundamentally Platonic. The observable world was, to Platonism, a corrupted and degraded echo of an intangible world of ideals; the ideal was fixed and unchanging and perfect, and the more untouched by outside influences something was, the nearer perfection it was viewed as being – hence (in part) the value placed on gold, which was for a long time the most unreactive metal known.

Platonism went hand in hand with atomism, the idea that everything could eventually be broken down into indivisible (a-tomos from “no cutting”) particles which were then combined like building blocks, and which were in a way “perfect”, as they didn’t change. But the atom was split, and the result is a host of subatomic particles which at some level appear and disappear and are defined by probability densities rather than locations and sizes, and even those are as much waves as particles.

Of course, all these concepts actually allow us to describe how things work far better than did the old concepts; technologies derived from this thinking allow, for instance, the writing of this blog and its transmission to its readers, as well as countless other applications throughout the lives of most people in the developed world. The 21st century Physicist largely regards the Platonic philosophical basis as useless, pointless, a distraction from how things actually are.

Not so, however, much 21st century Theology, including those parts of theology labelled “conservative”, “orthodox” or “evangelical”, not to mention “fundamentalist”.  This is hardly surprising; the New Testament is, in one way of looking at it, the point where Jewish monotheism got translated into Greek language and, in the process, into Greek philosophical concepts, notably Platonism. A new set of philosophical concepts gave rise to a new way of conceiving of God and of God’s relationship with mankind. I will grant that that is not by any means all that happened in the process, but it is most definitely one of the things which happened.

Towards the end of last year and stretching into the early part of this year, a lot of blog posts were talking about concepts such as process theology and open theism. Partly these seem to stem from a piece by Roger Olson (some are linked to at Homebrewed Christianity), but some posts seem to have been independent of the line of discussion which was set off by that post, such as this one from James McGrath. This led me to start thinking about the general area of God-concepts, and I’ll write a bit more about my historical position there later.

It has, I think, to be said that ditching a God-concept in favour of a new one is a really major upheaval. Tony Jones I think touches on this, saying “This is: By almost every measure, process theology is a radical rejection of what the church has believed for 1600 years, so what voice do you think the historic church and classical theism [has] in our present situation?” This is a very fair point. One commentator (who I cannot now find a link to) said, in effect, that adopting process theology was rather like installing a completely new operating system on your computer; you don’t do that unless you have to, as there’s a significant possibility that all of your programmes will need to change or at least be updated.

I’m going to suggest that we have to, and, in fact, that we should have done this years ago. Part of the reason is that given above; science has moved beyond Platonic thinking and the philosophical structure which we now think best reflects the way things actually are is very non-Platonic indeed; to try to impose Platonic ideas on modern science would be to warp and distort it so that it was of much less utility in describing things and predicting events (though those two may best be thought of as the same – it may be that we should think only of events and not of things at all). Assuming for a moment that theology actually relates to how things actually are, should we not bring theology into line with science here?

There are other more detailled reasons, however, which I’ll go on to in the next post.