Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Saturday, October 31, 2009, 19:12 (5501 days ago) @ Frank Paris

Frank continues the daunting task of explaining process theology to me, but first a brief word about music. We share a passion for Mahler. I first got hooked by the Kindertotenlieder, and then by the 2nd Symphony. Bruckner has never reached into my depths as Mahler does, and I can't go back beyond Mozart and Schubert. For consistently spine-tingling beauty, I turn to Beethoven, Brahms, Berlioz, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius...I guess you'd have to sum me up as a Romantic.-A note on "protocol". The forum is indeed a free for all, and I think George had his tongue in his cheek (as he often does). -And so to process theology. There's been a big misunderstanding, the source of which is as follows: In the "brief guide" I quoted Dawkins, who "believes there is nothing beyond the natural physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, etc."
Your comment on 24 October at 19.23 was: "The process theologian can accept everything in that statement, yet still find the divine in all of it." I therefore assumed that you accepted it, but you now say: "No, I don't agree with this." (Your references to panentheism didn't help, because different people appear to have different concepts of panentheism.) Since you appeared to think there was nothing beyond the "exclusively physical" world, I'm sure you'll see why I found the intellectual framework of your faith somewhat confusing! Now that you've rejected Dawkins after all, it's clear that you think there is an intelligence lurking behind the observable, physical universe (though you still haven't said if its infinite consciousness arises solely from the physical).-"Supernatural" is a problematical term, so let's turn instead to "creative". In your response to George, you've written "[...] if strings are the fundamental particles, then all that God creates are strings, each with its own nature which it receives from God." And then: "It's only when strings come together, or "stick" together in higher and higher organizations of them (organisms), that the individual experience of each string "adds up" or comes to a focus and eventually is bright enough to produce consciousness." But God doesn't know what the particles "will do from one instant to the next". -I see no difference between these statements and the theory that God set up the original mechanism for life and evolution and then sat back (figuratively) to see what would happen. The strings ... to each of which he even gave its nature ... would not have stuck together if he hadn't made them in such a way that they could stick together. In your post of 27 October at 00.52, however, you wrote: "I'm with Dawkins in claiming that science has utterly refuted the notion of some kind of being "out there" or even "within" that has a mind that can conceive complex forms and somehow "force" them into existence according to his will." In your response to George you write: "All God knows is that, given enough time, organisms will evolve [...] but in what form, he has no way of knowing at the beginning." Well, if God (who you say is in fact out there and within) created the strings that were complex enough to reproduce and combine, and if he knew they were going to evolve, he must have created the codes that enabled them to evolve! So he does have a mind which can conceive complex forms, and he did somehow "force" them (the strings) into existence according to his will. Even if he created them in such a way that he couldn't control their evolution, thus allowing himself to be "surprised", he's still responsible for designing them in the first place. I find this a very coherent scenario, but it could hardly be further away from the belief (27 October at 15.45) that "life and the codes for evolution" came about "by accident" ... my objections to which you dismissed as nonsense! -There are vast areas for us to explore here, including the nature of consciousness and your reference to "purpose", but we should proceed gradually, or this will become a full-time occupation! I must finish, though, as I usually do, by apologizing if there have been yet more misunderstandings. Perhaps these are inevitable when one is trying to grasp the ungraspable. (In case you haven't realized it, George would say that the ungraspable is ungraspable because there's nothing to grasp.)