Gospel of Karin

This essay is a continuation of a series on Ian Barbour’s book When Science Meets Religion. Prior essay:

When Science Meets Religion (Dialogue). Discusses the third of Barbour’s four categories for examining the differing views on the relationship between science and religion.

Category 4–Integration
Barbour describes three theologies/philosophies that integrate religion and science:

Natural theology. Design or order in nature implies the existence of God. Scientific evidence holds a central place in providing evidence for God, who is viewed as a transcendent Designer.

Theology of nature. Maintains traditional religious doctrines, but proponents are open to reinterpreting them based on scientific findings and theories. Religious tradition, not science, forms the core of these theologies.

Process thought. Incorporates religious concepts and broad features of science (especially from quantum physics and evolution) into a single framework for thinking about how God and natural entities interrelate.

Thomas Aquinas and Isaac Newton advanced natural theologies. Aquinas for example, viewed God as the First Cause of all secondary natural causes. But the idea that all worldly events are foreordained by God has been challenged by science. This is particularly true of Darwinism, which introduced the role of chance in the evolutionary process.

Natural theologies reconcile chance in evolution in varied ways. For instance, God is seen as the “designer of a self-organizing system” in which law and chance allow for the emergence of new levels of “complexity, life, and consciousness” (113). God endows the world with potentialities but gives it freedom to develop in its own way without interfering with the laws of nature.

For some theologians, the Anthropic principle, a concept drawn from physics and cosmology, provides the basis for a natural theology. Those who hold this view argue that the existence of fined-tuned physical constants, which are necessary for sustaining life in the universe, provide strong evidence of an intelligent Creator.

Theologies of nature propose models of God that are rooted in tradition, but which are reformulated in light of science. Ecotheologians for example have reinterpreted traditional Christian doctrines to reflect the interdependent nature of ecological systems.

Theologian Arthur Peacocke suggests a variety of models of God, such as the Spirit that communicates through “patterns of nature” as well as through Christ. Images of God such a “choreographer of an unfinished dance” and a “composer of [an]…unfinished symphony incorporate the concepts of chance, experimentation, and improvisation in creation (114).

In quantum physics, William Pollard proposes that God is the “hidden variable” who determines quantum indeterminacies (87). He believes that chance at the quantum level is merely an appearance that masks divine determination.

Process philosophy is based on concepts from quantum physics and evolution. It offers a cosmology for understanding the nature of reality in this universe as a long, dynamic, and ongoing process of experiential events in which living and nonliving entities become in relation to each other and God.

Organisms such as animals and humans develop towards sentience, awareness and so on, with humans achieving the highest levels of consciousness. God is viewed as immanent, “eliciting the self creation” of entities, and as transcendent, as the entity that provides order and novel possibilities for creation (35).

Process philosophy incorporates into its conceptual framework both law and chance and accounts for the presence of suffering in the world. Furthermore, sciences such as neurobiology, support Process thought’s rejection of mind-body dualism by demonstrating how the two work together to enable creatures to think, feel, and generally experience the world.

Related essays:
Typology of Panentheism
Panentheism: Definitions and Features
Panentheism: World as God’s Body, Part I and Part II

I came across this comment today, which was posted in response to an article called “Faith of Our Fathers” by Timothy Egan:

The author lays out the quote “Religion has always been about faith and a certain degree of mythology” as if it were revelation. Subsequent sentences show that the author doesn’t know what a myth is. A myth is not something “untrue” in a theological context. It is something that explains the way things are. Theologians talk about the creation myth without implying a lack of truth.

A legend is the tale of a great hero of the past.

So the story of the parting of the Red Sea, and the story of the miracle at the wedding in Canaa should be called “legends” if one isn’t approaching them from the standpoint of belief.

A myth would be “how the leopard got his spots.” A legend would be “how Ulysses got home from the Trojan War.”

Both myths and legends can be full of truth, more true than the mere photographing and cataloging of observable facts.

— Posted by WDannen

I found the distinction the author makes between myth and legend to be quite interesting. I do, however, wonder whether you can make such a clean separation of the two. The legend of Ulysses, for example, says something about “the way things are” from a certain cultural perspective. But it also gives us insight into contemporary human experience.

As a theologian, I read Biblical stories keeping in mind that they say something about the ways things were and, to an extent, about the way things are, although, both are always interpreted from the standpoint of our values and presuppositions. And so, I think the author may be oversimplifying the role of the theologian. Still, I find the distinction useful for thinking about the significance of Biblical narratives.

I also think the author’s last sentence is spot-on correct. Myths and legends can lead us to a more thorough grasp of what is real, beyond what we experience through our basic senses. This is one reason why I find so-called literal readings of the Bible so troubling. They miss the deeper meanings, complexities, and beauty of the texts.

For a related discussion, see “Seeing the Sacred.”

Photo: My cat, Shimsi, pondering the difference between legend and myth.

So many people encounter the sacred in the world. I’ve read statements by the staunchest of rationalists about how the universe fills them with a sense of awe and wonder.

Often, however, it’s these same people who either deny the “reality” of these experiences or simply brush them aside as unimportant in light of the “brute” facts of life (what “brute fact” means is a topic for future discussion).

I thought of this one night after, of all things, a trip to the grocery store. As I walked to my car, wind gusts blew bits of litter across the pavement and shook the branches of trees. A storm was brewing.

While driving home, the heaviness of the rain clouds was both beautiful and a bit frightening. They seemed especially ominous because they were juxtaposed with clear sky in the distance.

It occurred to me that, even though I knew there was a scientific explanation for this phenomenon, that there was no exasperated storm god planning to bring a flood down on humanity, the spiritual experience of it was irreducible. The presence of divinity transcended and made sacred the simple observation.

This dimension of life is as much part of reality as seeing the storm in a very basic sense. It informs the way I see. I can see “just” a storm, or I can see the beauty, grace, and divinity that conveys itself during the encounter.1

Notes
1. I consider this an I-Thou experience wherein God’s eternity is glimpsed in the between of the encounter. See my earlier essay on I-Thou relating for more.

Painting: “Rainstorm off the Coast at Brighton,” John Constable. Courtesy Mark Harden’s Artchive, www.artchive.com.

In my last three posts on panentheism, I discussed the views of some theologians whose perspectives I described as interrelational.

The next set of essays present panentheistic perspectives in which God is understood primarily by way of the concepts of energies and wisdom (although the relational dimension is strong in these theologies as well). I begin with Celia Deane-Drummond.

God as Energies and Wisdom, Part I
Like some of the theologians I described in my earlier posts on interrelational perspectives, Celia Deane-Drummond backs away from the body of God metaphor. She is critical of the more naturalistic panentheistic views (Peacocke, Clayton, and so on) because they blur the boundaries of God and world so much that the relational dimension is lost.

Further, she views these theologies as being too abstracted from daily life to have practical significance. Instead, she favors a modified form of classical theism in which God is other, revealing Godself both inherently through our creatureliness and externally through the Bible and the incarnation.

Deane-Drummond proposes a “Sophianic theology” that takes insight from scientific findings and provides a basis for practical ethics. She claims that, in the Gospel of John, the Wisdom figure of Sophia, God’s “agent of creation,” is used synonymously with the Logos (236-37). Further, she argues that John assumed a general cultural understanding that Logos and Sophia could be used interchangeably.

According to Deane-Drummond, we need to rediscover the Wisdom of Christ as revealed through his life and suffering on the cross. Christ’s suffering points us to the pain, fragility, and brokenness of creation, as well as the “radical nature of evil in the universe” into which science gives us greater insight (241).

Christ’s Wisdom also establishes an ethical basis from which to critique science and other sources of human wisdom. With respect to the God-world relationship, Jesus, through his radical participation in the world, represents God as friend to all creatures, sharing their joys and sorrows.

Works cited
Deane-Drummond, Celia E. “The Logos as Wisdom: A Starting Point for a Sophianic Theology of Creation,” in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World (233-45).

Painting: “The Snake Charmer” (1907), by Henri Rousseau, courtesy Mark Harden’s Artchive, www.artchive.com

In the last couple of posts, I began presenting interrelational views on panentheism, as presented in the book In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being. The present post focuses on the perspective of theologian Ruth Page.

Interrelational Perpectives on God, Part III
In an earlier essay, I introduced the concept of emergent monism in theology. As a reminder, emergent monism is inspired by the evolutionary concept of emergence in which natural systems and organisms spontaneously give rise to higher levels of complexity and novel properties. Theologically speaking, emergence refers to the belief that God is not a static substance but a creative, dynamic presence inextricably intertwined with nature and continually advancing it toward higher states of being.

Page argues that emergent monism as a way of understanding God-world relations is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, she suggests that the argument that evolution reveals a pattern of divine purpose is contrary to the evidence. The overwhelming number of occurrences of “natural evil,” such as mass extinctions, tell against divine providence (224, 227). Likewise, she argues that the Process philosophy notion that God lures creatures toward the good is hard to reconcile with natural relationships such as predator and prey.

Second, she objects to ontological hierarchies which grade the intrinsic value of creatures based on what biologist Charles Birch refers to as “richness of experience.” This view, she argues, is rooted in the mistaken belief that complexity and consciousness are simple goods. (Page quoting Birch, 225).1 On the contrary, says Page. Greater complexity and higher levels of consciousness are at best ambiguous with respect to the inherent value of living beings.

Instead, she emphasizes relational over essentialized ontologies in which God values creatures as they are, embedded in their particular situation without reference to humanity. In Page’s words: “the whole of creation is companioned [my italics] by God, not on the basis of hierarchy, but according to what is proper and necessary to the creature in its circumstances” (229).

Rather than panentheism (all in God) as a way of thinking about God’s relationship with living beings, Page proposes the concept of pansyntheism, or all “with” God (231). This idea, she believes, preserves the separate identities required for participants to actually be in relationship, rather than one party overwhelming the other. It also may help us to appreciate that nonhuman creatures have ways of responding to God that are distinct from humans. Their means of relating to God is appropriate for their own kind. As such, it makes no sense to measure their intrinsic value against the value of human beings.

Works cited
Page, Ruth. Panentheism and Pansyntheism: God in Relation,” in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World (222-32).

Photo: “Predator and Prey” by Carl Purcell, copyright Carl Purcell, image courtesy of www.art.com

In the prior two essays, I discussed the views of several theologians as to what it means for the world to be the body of God. These theologians tended to interpret God-world relations through the lens of physics and biology. The theologians in the next three essays understand God-world relations by way of interrelational concepts, such as the Trinity, community, society, ecology, and intersubjective relationships.

In this essay, I present a very brief description of the panentheistic view of Joseph A. Bracken as conveyed in his essay, “Panentheism: A Field Oriented Approach” (see Works cited below).

Interrelational Perspectives on God-Part I
Philip Clayton critiques Process philosophy (viewed as the strongest form of panentheism) as not giving enough attention to the dialectical nature of the antecedent (immutable and primordial) and consequent (changeable and responsive) natures of God (Clayton 83). Trinitarian process theologian, Bracken, attempts to do just this using a conception inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of “society.” A society is a group of actual entities (the smallest units of experience) that form an enduring level of order. A human being, for example, is a very high-level society (Hosinski 131-32).

The three persons of the Trinity, he explains, “co-constitute an all-inclusive divine field of activity” (212), which stands as the enduring yet dynamic basis from which all levels of creation emerge and become. All fields of creation, which are formed through mutual prehension, also continually prehend the persons of the Trinity, who together co-create the divine unity (212, 217).

Bracken’s approach is an alternative to the organismic view of God-world relations in which God is to world as soul is to body. Bracken believes that this model does not sufficiently preserve the ontological independence of either God or creation. The field metaphor does reflect this independence because lower-level fields are governed by their own laws and help to form higher level fields. Higher level fields in turn, regulate lower levels. Each level maintains an enduring identity while simultaneously being modified through these interrelationships (Bracken 212).

Works cited
In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, eds. William B. Eerdsman Publishing Company (Grand Rapids: 2004).

Hosinski, Thomas E. Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (Lanham: 1993).