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PROCESS THEOLOGY |
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A SUMMARY. Modern process theology was born with Alfred North Whitehead's publication in 1929 of his treatise, "Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology." The Urantia Papers that were ultimately published as The Urantia Book in 1955, began to be presented around 1911 and were finalized in about 1935. The published version included 196 Papers presented by more than twenty individual authors. There is no evidence that Whitehead knew anything of the existence of the Urantia Papers. The comparative styles of writing, presentation, and terminology also are quite different. Most people find Whitehead extremely difficult to read whereas, for the most part, people with even limited education and reading skill have little difficulty with the Urantia Papers. However, with the Papers, it would be completely true to state that the ease of reading does not reflect the depth of the material presented. The overlap between the Papers and modern process philosophy and theology is conceptual rather than in their fine detail. Both speak of a God "in the world" and a God who is transcendent. Whitehead has a "dipolar" God having a primordial (transcendent) nature, and a consequent nature that functions in the material, finite world. The Urantia Papers speak of the "I AM," who is the First Source and Center, Infinite Creator of all that was, is, and will be. A derived but independently personal and experiential phase of deity called God the Supreme, functions in the finite, material universes. For Whitehead, the origin of everything other than deity is "process." Starting with the most minute entities (termed "actual enities" or "occasions of experience") that originate in the mind of God, these have their fleeting moment of being in which they may interact with the past and the present, and so influence the future. They then perish. In the finite world these "occasions of experience" may function as "groups" or "societies," each of which is in a state of flux through the process of its component parts becoming then perishing. The Urantia Papers tell a similar story but in much more detail. All that "is" has origin in the I AM, but is "stored" as static possibilities and potentials with transcendent phases of the I AM, the Absolutes of Infinity. Activation of these potentials is in perfect accordance with the needs of the finite universes. Activation ultimately results in the transformation of transcendent, static potentials to become finite "actuals" that are "stored" with God the Supreme. These are then available as "finite potentials" to be utilized in universe creation and functioning. Most of the authors of the Urantia Papers are purported to be superhuman. However these authors make no claim of divine authority for their presentations, nor for infallibility. On the contrary, they infer that the Papers should be judged solely by their content and intrinsic worth. They inform us that absolute truth is the sole possession of divine beings. They also state that for all other beings, truth is partial, relative, evolutionary, and progressive. This attitude of the authors is outlined in the article, "Flow charts illustrating the Urantia Papers' views on revelation and truth." The main purpose of these Papers purports to be the provision of a functional universe framework in which mortal beings can gain understanding of their earthly careers as mortals and their potential careers as immortal spirit beings. They emphasize that soul growth occurs only through finite experiences that have spiritual value and that our future careers are dependent solely upon a faith decision to seek God and become like him. The final seventy seven papers provide fine detail of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. They can only be described in terms of being an absolute masterpiece in respect to their content of truth, beauty and goodness. A SHORT INTRODUCTION. This brief introduction is for those who are familiar with the Urantia Papers but not familiar with the basic concepts of process theology. The beginnings of process philosophy go back at least as far as the Greek, Heraclitus, about 500 B.C. Since then, its various aspects have been advanced by many people including Plato, Blaise Pascal, Herbert Spencer, William James, Teilhard de Chardin, Henri Bergson and many others. However, modern process philosophy draws almost entirely upon the ideas and concepts of one person, mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whom many expect to be ranked as one of the most beneficially influential geniuses of the 20th century. In contrast with the dominant materialist and mechanistic philosophies of early and mid-twentieth century times, Whitehead rejected a reality based upon substance and permanence to embrace the idea that reality is process. Accordingly, the smallest particles that exist at the sub-atomic level are not static substances but are events of extremely brief duration that prehend or grasp influences stemming from their surrounds. They themselves may be changed by what they prehend. In turn, they influence other newly arising "actual entities" that are about to engage in their moment of reality. Why are we unaware of this constant state of flux? Simply because each macro object--like ourselves for example--is a society, or group of societies, of an uncountable number of such "actual entities." Though seemingly outlandish when proposed, Whitehead's idea of process has gained respectability along with the discoveries of sub-atomic physics which provide the evidence that everything really is in constant change, this rate of change varying at different levels of reality. For example, the nucleus of an atom turned out to consist of even smaller particles, the neutron and the proton, and these, in their turn, consist of even smaller particles, the quarks and the gluons, plus a multitude of virtual particles that constantly flash in and out of existence. Moreover, the deeper science penetrates into the mysteries of the sub-atomic world, the more unstable its components appear to become, with "up" quarks changing to "down" quarks, "down" quarks changing to "up" quarks, electrons changing to muons, muons changing to electrons, and even the elusive neutrinos, originally postulated as particles with no properties, turn out to be constantly switching their identity. Given enough energy, it appears that anything can change into anything else. However, under the appropriate conditions, there are zones of stability where collections of actual entities form relatively stable societies. Collections of such societies may then form new, apparently stable societies at a higher levels of organization. Whitehead did not write a lot about God and it was left to his associate, Charles Hartshorne to go further. Nevertheless, neither came close to proposing anything like the degree of complexity of deity relations that is described in the Urantia Papers. Whitehead's God was "dipolar," a concept that has similarities to the polarity of his "actual entities." To these, Whitehead credited a physical and a mental pole. Through its physical pole each minuscule entity can prehend and influence other entities as well as being influenced by them. Through its mental pole, an entity may grasp ideals and values and even form a subject aim for its own subsequent growth towards maximum possible enjoyment of reality. Each society of entities inherently seeks the best for itself. Societies of entities like ourselves can attain consciousness and self-consciousness. Whitehead's God, though dipolar, was still a single entity having one pole independent from the world (God's primordial nature) while the other pole is immersed completely in the world (God's consequent nature). In Whitehead's scheme, God offers a subjective aim to each human being at the very beginning of their growth. However, God's action in the world is always persuasive, never coercive. God's primordial nature is seen as the source of all potentials. Conscious societies of entities, such as ourselves, may call potentials into being through our choices in accordance with our subjective aim. In consequence, and by reason of the relativity of all things, there is a reaction of the world upon God, and thus a prehension into God from each creature that is directed by its subjective aim. Theologians who follow Hartshorne consider that for God to be the source of all potentials would be too restrictive on the creativity of the world and its creatures. Hartshorne termed God's primordial nature his "abstract essence" and this is understood as the ground of all possibility. God's influence on the individual then is of a general nature offering aims that define limits to the actions of individuals and societies. QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS, MATERIALISM, AND THE URANTIA PAPERS - WHY MATERIALISM IS DEAD. "If man's personality can experience the universe, there is a divine mind and an actual personality somewhere concealed in that universe." (30) "There is a divine mind somewhere concealed in the universe." Thousands upon thousands of the philosophically minded would have made a similar assertion over the ages. In this century, many quantum physicists have expressed this same thought, but not simply as a phenomenon of rational thinking. Rather it is because of their experimental work and the hard evidence gained from empirical testing that they have been led to speculate on the reality of an intelligence, perhaps operating in another dimension of space and time, that appears to participate in ordering the outcome of their experiments. Two of the greatest, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli, both Nobel laureates, called this "out there somewhere" intelligence, "the Central Order of Things." Others, Amit Goswami for example, have used terms such as "Universal Consciousness" for this hypothetical intelligence. Naturally there have been many who have sought what they would term a rational explanation for these results--one closer to the norm of materialistic, mechanistic thought. David Bohm, for example introduced the concept of a "pilot wave" as a substitute for "Universal Consciousness," but ended up giving this wave semi-magical properties. Woj Zurek invented the term "decoherence" which he attributes to environmental factors in order to account for a set of properties that are normally associated with mind and intelligence. The mechanistic interpretation of all natural phenomena goes back to antiquity. The modern trend is often attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace (d. 1827) and his statement, "if at one time we knew the position and motion of all the particles in the universe, then we could calculate their behavior at any other time in the past or the future." Taken to its logical conclusion the Laplace concept means the whole future of the universe and all things therein, down to the very finest of details including our thoughts and our dreams, are completely pre-determined by the past. It also means we have no control over anything we say, do, or think. For many years now, this materialist, determinist philosophy has shaped attitudes in the Western world. The concept even demands that criminals are not responsible for their actions, they do as they do because they cannot do otherwise. It follows that to inflict serious punishment upon criminals is as inhuman as the crimes they commit. But a determinist would have to argue that criminals are punished because the society in which they live cannot do otherwise, and not because of any valid moral code. For those who carry the materialist-determinist logic through to its end point, meaning, value, purpose, and any such entity as a "Universal Intelligence" are but the fantasies of deluded minds. Thus we live in a clockwork universe in which hope has no meaning and from which there is no escape. Such considerations led French philosophers and authors like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre to postulate the philosophy of the absurd, from which arose the view that life itself is not only absurd but an obscene joke. In some ways, this way of thinking is the logical outcome of applying the methodology of empirical science to areas of human activity in which it is simply inapplicable. As it was proposed by David Hume (d.1776), the scientific method requires that something makes sense when and only when it can be demonstrated by appropriate empirical testing--otherwise it is non-sense, "fit only to be committed to the flames." This attitude is responsible for the fantastic technical progress of recent centuries, but it ignores as irrelevancies such things as beauty, compassion, love, mercy, art, music, ethics, religion--all those attributes and activities that elevate mankind above his animal heritage. "God exists." By the method of Hume, this thesis is an untestable hypothesis, so is nonsense fit only for the flames. But note that its antithesis, "God does not exist" is also an untestable hypothesis and therefore nonsense. This is the foolishness that arises when we mechanistically apply a methodology to a subject for which it has no reasonable application. Quite remarkably, from the early part of the twentieth century, researchers in quantum physics have been discovering many empirically demonstrable phenomena that do not fit the materialist-determinist interpretation of reality. Factually, so many such misfits have now been unraveled that scientific materialism and determinism must be classified as being hopelessly naïve. In defense, materialists dismissed these findings as being confined to the sub-atomic world and irrelevant to the "real world." But that defense, too, has fallen with demonstrations of quantum phenomena that have now been shown to occur at atomic and molecular levels that must be included as the "real world." The beginnings of the demise of materialism commenced with German physicist Max Planck's solution to what was known as the "ultraviolet catastrophe." According to the calculations of classical physics, a hot black body should radiate infinite energy at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum--and it does not. THE EXPERIENTIAL GOD OF THE FINITE UNIVERSES ACCORDING TO THE URANTIA PAPERS. In the Urantia Papers, some authors tend to refer to this Deity of the finite, the Supreme Being, as both existent and not yet existent--hence in ways similar to how particle physicists treat particles as simultaneously being both wave and particle. Although the evolving Supreme Being is yet to complete his evolution, and still remains in finite reality in fragmented form as God the Supreme, the Almighty Supreme, and the Supreme Mind, nevertheless in the transcendent domains of Paradise, the Supreme Being already "is." It is factual that in some Papers a very concise distinction is made between the incomplete Supreme Being and those "components" that are now functional during the evolutionary stages of the grand universe. In other Papers, the term "the Supreme" or "the Supreme Being" may be used in such a way as to leave the reader to sort out what is really meant. A term also finding occasional use is "Supremacy," which mostly refers to the joint effects of the Supreme Being and the Paradise Trinity. Of interest to the philosophically minded is that, in the Papers, the creativity of us humans is limited to the sorting of basic ideas rather than to their creation. Perhaps this confirms what many of our greatest mathematicians have always believed--that they do not "create" new theorems or laws but rather "discover" them. Naturally this brings up much argument about where these theorems were prior to their discovery, and also on who created them. The Papers inform us that all possible original ideas, concepts, etc., are already present as potentials and possibilities in the keeping of the Absolutes of Infinity. In this, the Papers are closer to Whitehead than to Hartshorne who considered the concept too restrictive on the creativity of the world and its creatures. The Papers have: "Existential infinity is indeed unqualified in its all-inclusiveness, and this very all-inclusiveness must, perforce, encompass even the possibility for evolutionary finite experiencing." (p.1261) "If it is difficult to comprehend that the infinite triodities can function on the finite level, pause to consider that their very infinity must in itself contain the potentiality of the finite; infinity encompasses all things ranging from the lowest and most qualified finite existence to the highest and unqualifiedly absolute realities." (1264) The "triodities" referred are triune associations of existential deity. The potentialities that become available to us humans do so apparently because they have already been transformed, and are present and available for use in the finite realms in the now functional Supreme Mind. (1287) Human mind is derived from cosmic mind and it is through the cosmic mind of the Infinite Spirit and associates that these pre-existent potentials are presented for our selection, sorting, recombining, and decision making. (1284, 1287) |
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