David Breeden is speaking all week about Process Theology and Process Philosophy.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom. When we try to do some looking at some ideas that are floating around out there in religion and philosophy that coming from the past and then their impact on the present and perhaps the future. This week we’re going to be looking at “It’s a Process”. And so, first off, I have to ask you a question. What is the common philosophical underpinning of much feminist Unitarian Universalist, Christian, Jewish, black church, indigenous and Earth based theologies? Well, it’s the answers in the title. They’re a movement, engaging process, thought a movement engaging process. Thought you’re going to see that everywhere when you’re looking at theological materials these days, it is “Process Philosophy”, which is then used within “Process Theology”. And that’s what I want to take a look at this week, is how this came to be and where it kind of is what it is and then it may be heading next.So there’s just all kinds of books out there on this subject. “Process, Philosophy and Christian thought”, “Emptiness and Becoming”, “Integrating my Heart”, my Yanique Buddhism and “Process Theology”. Who knew that was a thing, right? Everything flows toward a process of philosophy where, you know, you in this goes on and on. Just look up process and begin looking at all the books and covering. So we got everything here from Christian thought to Buddhism to biology. And how are all of these tied together and all of those things I already mentioned in terms of theologies all the way from Earth based to Judaism? Well, it’s all tied together with a very basic idea that also is a bit of a head scratcher or there wouldn’t be so many books about it being is becoming. So where does this come from? Well, first off, we have to go back to the late 19th, early 20th century and consider a book that was one of the most massive failures ever. And it was by a couple of the geniuses of the 20th century. The book was “Principia Mathematica”, and the geniuses were Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. We’ve heard quite a bit about Bertrand Russell. He’s one of the greats in terms of humanist thought. A couple of weeks ago we were looking at his his teapot problem and he was a great logician in his time, as was Whitehead, and they were dealing with mathematics and set theory. And their idea was, how do we get to a basis of to prove that mathematics is true. And so this is a three volume set that came out over several years. And as they were working on it, they just saw more and more that they were never going to get there.I have a little sample problem here from this proposition. It will follow when arithmetical edition has been defined that one plus one equals two. Well, you can see where this might become a problem when we have to think this much to figure that out. The fact is they never reached a place where they could show that mathematics had a an indisputable basis. And because while they were working outcomes, girls incompleteness theorems. Now don’t ask me to define them. Really, I don’t understand, except the fact that it also is dealing with a set theory. And the fact is that girl discovered that you can have a set of solutions that also have within it a set of provable solutions. So some things can be true within the set, true facts within the set that can’t be proven. There’s always going to be something that is undecidable.