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

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breedeen and the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom. And this week we’re talking about Process Philosophy, and then it’s ancillary, the process theology, to think a little bit about liberal religions and some concepts that have been going into the construction of liberal religion. Yesterday, I asked the question, what is the common philosophical underpinning of much of feminist Unitarian Universalist, Christian, Jewish, black, church, indigenous and Earth based theology? And the answer is process thought. Well, just as a idea here, I did a little searching online and found this pretty immediately. This is a description from a Unitarian Universalist minister on their church’s website about her theology theology. I describe myself theologically. I describe myself as a metaphorical theist with humanist tendencies. Process theology comes closest to expressing my understanding of interrelatedness and mutual transformation. For me, metaphorical theism means that there is one ultimate reality and we use different metaphors to interpret that reality. I sometimes use the word God to describe the creating, sustaining and transforming power in and of the universe. And I would say that this really stands in for a very large number of Unitarian Universalist ministers these days. So where does that come from? Well, it comes from a book by Alfred North Whitehead called Process and Reality, published in nineteen twenty one. I described yesterday a little bit about how he worked with Bertrand Russell, two mathematicians and logicians trying to figure out and prove that mathematics is logically all interconnected and true.They fail to do that. Alfred North Whitehead for his next project, decided to do this. How might we systematically describe not only scientific knowledge, but also ethical esthetic and religious knowledge? Well, so having failed to do math, he goes and decides he’s going to define just about everything out there. A kind of a large bit to bite off, probably, but there you go. He said, we think in generalities, but we live in details. We think in generalities, but we live in details. That’s one of the contradictions in the human condition. Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge, said Alfred North Whitehead. The only simplicity who to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity you get. The idea here is we’ve got to go through those ideas of generalities to particulars, find those particulars which then are simple, and find the larger complexity that is outside of those. Before we go back to the particulars, it’s a particular way of thinking that he’s doing. He said this The misconception, which has haunted philosophical literature throughout the centuries, is the notion of independent existence. There is no such mode of existence. Every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe. So let’s get over it. It’s astonishing how relentlessly Western philosophy has strayed to prove we are not squirrels by the philosopher Crispin Sartwell. You get the idea that often in Western philosophy we work over and over and over again trying to prove something that cannot be proven.Then we have to go back and dig around a little bit to come up with new ideas, usually based on older ideas. So here’s an old idea that Whitehead was going to begin using, and that is from Gottfried Leibniz, a philosopher and mathematician who said The monad of which we shall speak here is nothing but a simple substance which enters into co...