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

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at process theology and process philosophy, looking at ways that this impacts liberal religion in general, Unitarian Universalism specifically, and the interface between that and humanism. We’ve been talking about the central book in this particular way of thinking, Alfred North Whitehead’s process and reality. I have mentioned before that it is a fairly unreadable book, so I don’t encourage people to read it unless you’re very into this. But there are lots and lots of scholars and theologians who have read the the book think they understand it in some way that’s always debatable and then drawn some conclusions from it. It was published in 1929 based on lectures that Whitehead gave in Harvard after he came here from the United Kingdom. And Charles Hartshorne was Whitehead’s graduate, a student student. And of course Whitehead becomes the his mentor. But then Hartshorne takes this idea and goes in a very different direction, introducing it into theology. And again, it’s quite debatable whether or not Whiteheads ideas and hard Seans ideas are really in the same ballpark. But that’s all part of the fun of process, philosophy and theology. Now, yesterday, we looked at a proof of God that Charles Hartshorne undertook based on Anselm’s proof of God called the ontological argument and some Saint Anselm of Canterbury live from 1033 to 1109.A very brief, this is skipping some points if you saw this yesterday. But just to give you the broad outlines of this argument, God is that being then which no greater can be conceived. Right. That’s a definition of God within this ontological this argument for being it is greater to exist in reality than merely as an idea. All right. Just an idea is just an idea. But it’s so it’s greater to exist. If God does not exist. We can conceive of an even greater being. That is one that does exist. So that would violate proposition one, that God is the being which has no greater. Therefore, God must indeed exist in reality. As we discussed yesterday, there are some rather difficult things about this proof. One of the interesting things is that a contemporary Gaunilo of Marmoutiers in the 1100s offered a counter argument. Now we think of the Middle Ages as being a time when nobody disagreed with anybody in the church. But this is really not the case as as exposed by this very famous argument. So he said this. The lost island is that island then, which no greater can be conceived. All right. It is greater to exist in reality than merely as an idea. OK, if the lost island does not exist, one can conceive of an even greater island that is is one that does exist and therefore the lost island exists in reality. Now, we mentioned Bertrand Russell’s teapot when we were talking about faux religions and those kinds of ideas.And so this is very much like Richard Russell’s teapot that you can’t see it. But I’d say it’s there. Therefore, the problem with these kind of arguments is that from the from Anselm’s point of view would be that, wait a minute, but God does exist and the lost island doesn’t exist. So you’re trying to prove something that doesn’t exist and we know it does it again, a very debatable place to be when you start talking about this. But the fact is, it all comes down to Schleiermacher, as I mentioned yesterday, who lived from 1768 to 1834. His great book on religion was published in 1799.