The REAL Evolution Debate

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The REAL Evolution Debate

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10	The Process Philosophers

Core idea

God is not a static creator outside time and space but the dynamic, creative dimension of the evolutionary process in time and space.

What they say. . .

The Process Philosophers view the universe from a perspective we might call “top down.” Following in the footsteps of the great English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, they reject the scientistic impulse to reduce all of nature to its most basic material components, instead looking to integrate science and spirit into a whole new understanding of God—and a whole new understanding of evolution.

“[Whitehead] said that if you want to know the general principles of existence,” writes integral philosopher Ken Wilber, one of his growing number of contemporary fans, “you must start at the top and use the highest occasions* to illumine the lowest, not the other way around.” For Whitehead, the highest occasion of all was God, and God could best be understood as an active principle within the manifest universe—a principle he famously called “the creative advance into novelty.” This fundamental cosmic urge toward newness, he said, was profoundly entwined with the processes of evolution, at all times calling the events of the world forward into ever-greater beauty, variety, and complexity.

But Process Philosophy’s emphasis on novelty and divinity doesn’t mean that it is at odds with science; rather, these innovative thinkers see God’s influence “not as a violation of the world’s normal causal processes,” theologian David Ray Griffin explains, “but as one of its regular dimensions.” They maintain that the course of evolution is still shaped by ordinary cause and effect while at the same time always infused with the promise of fresh possibilities and always, at all levels, subject to at least some measure of free will.

* In Whitehead’s system, the fundamental elements of reality are called “actual occasions,” discrete moments of experience that are always in the process of becoming.

What it means. . .

By bringing God down from heaven’s unchanging skies and thrusting him smack into the middle of the creative universe, the Process Philosophers have redefined the relationship between nature and the Divine, sparking a sea change in twentieth-century philosophy and theology. Although you won’t hear about them in the popular press, their influence is steadily growing among a whole range of thinkers who are now gathering science and religion together under the same banner in the quest to develop new, more integrated theories of evolution. Process thought is sometimes compared to Buddhist teachings on flux and change, but by adopting a Western evolutionary perspective as its underlying framework, it transcends the premodern religious paradigm that holds our universe to be both physically and spiritually static. Profoundly rational and deeply satisfying to the post-traditional mind, it forms an important groundwork for a new twenty-first-century evolutionary theology.

“There is no God without a world, just as there is no world without God. We cannot think of a beginning of either.”

John Cobb

Listen to this interview with John Cobb as he illuminates this increasingly influential school of evolutionary thought: "The REAL Evolution Debate: The Process Philosophers"