Eyre Lines

This is the fifth in a set of reactions to “How I found God in Everyone and Everywhere”, a collection of essays edited by Andrew Davies and Philip Clayton, for which there is currently the “Cosmic Campfire” book group, a crossover between Homebrewed Christianity and the Liturgists, studying the book over the next few weeks. If you haven’t yet read my first post, you should probably read that first!

The fifth essay is by John B. Cobb junior, possibly the best known process theologian of recent years. I was particularly interested to hear that he had been taught Japanese during Word War II, and spent a significant amount of time translating documents, as my father was also taught Japanese and sent out to India to be an interrogator – and, lacking prisoners to interrogate, also learned the script so he could focus on written materials. I could wonder whether the two of them ever met, or, at least, translated the same papers…

He writes about Charles Hartshorne as a major influence and teacher. I was myself delighted to find Hartshorne’s “Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes” some years ago, as it presented a good philosophical argument for the incoherence of omnipotence and omniscience, which I had long thought were stumbling blocks to any attempt to put together a workable god-concept. What surprises me is that Dr. Cobb went from there to atheism. For me, Hartshorne’s work was one of the elements in allowing me to think that my own concept of God was at least somewhat rational, given that following my initial peak experience, a lot of my thought was devoted to understanding what mystical experience might mean; theology has, after all, been called “faith seeking understanding”.

At that point, however, Cobb moves into territory I’m not familiar with, citing Bernard Loomer, Bernard Meland, Daniel Day Williams and Henry Nelson Wieman, none of whom I’ve read. That said, Wieman’s thought that “one needs to stay entirely within the realm of human experience and not speculate beyond it” resonates with me, as I start with experience and work from there, and consider myself at least something of an empiricist. However, everything we construct scientifically as well as theologically involves “speculations beyond experience”, so I clearly cannot rest with radical empiricist thinking.

Cobb wanted more than the God of Wieman as some “event” (and I think of my own rejection of concepts of God as possibly just some impersonal force or principle which might well be adequately described by science one day), wanting something more personal. There, I’m definitely with him; peak mystical experience feels as if it involves contact with something which would not be horribly misdescribed by the term “person”. I’m sorry if that ends up as a convoluted thought; I cannot rule out the possibility that the sensation of God-as-person is a function of the experiencer rather than that which is experienced, and wonder whether “person” is not an excessively confining term – perhaps I can use Philip Clayton’s terminology and say “God is, to me, not less than personal”?

He then went further than Hartshorne to Whitehead, or whom Harsthorne had been a pupil, and there I get a little lost, as I feel myself floundering in wording like “prehension” and “concrescence” as well as being hung up on how that-which-is can be regarded as units of experience rather than an uncomfortable wave/particle/field/continuum arrangement. I rather suspect that there might be a kind of paradigm-shift involved in accepting process, but for this former theoretical Physicist, translating “experience” into a description of fundamental particles is something which has so far escaped me. I recall reading somewhere that adopting Process was somewhat like installing an entirely new operating system. I read process theologians, including Cobb, with interest – it seems to me that once you get over the initial word-salad of describing Whitehead’s thought, they mostly come to much the same conclusions as I do from a panentheist position which doesn’t worry too much about metaphysics. But then, as I kept saying in my response to Keith Ward, I’m not a philosopher…

When Cobb goes on to talk about the past, saying “If the past does not exist in any sense… then statements about the past cannot be true or false”, I run up against this being a philosopher’s argument, but think of one aspect of the mystical experience as the “timeless moment”. I feel from this that, in at least some sense, God is atemporal (and that we can briefly enter into that atemporality in mystical states – certainly there is a huge disparity between objective time and subjective time there, as a mystical state can seem to last a very long time but last only a few minutes “in the real world” or can seem to flash by in an instant, whereas you find you have lost several hours). Am I convinced by this argument? No, but it arrives at the right place, from my point of view…

I do agree wholeheartedly with his identification of immanence as a central feature. If that is not a feature of process thinking, it probably should be! Certainly my own mystical experience is characterised by radical immanence – rather than turtles all the way down, it’s God all the way down.

Cobb talks of his difficulty in conceiving of two substances occupying the same space. That is not necessarily quite such a problem for someone steeped in quantum physics, where two wave functions can readily be superimposed and locality is something which had had to be abandoned. However, he seems keen to avoid Cartesian dualism (mind/matter dualism), and while that seems attractive from the point of view of simplicity, I still have suspicions that it might, at least for many purposes, be a practical way of thinking of things. That said, radical immanence does rather demand that ultimately there is only one “stuff of the universe”…

I think my overall takeaway from this is that I wish I could get my head properly round process, because without that, Cobb’s deepest thinking is obscure to me.