Indeed, Whitehead died too soon - as did Einstein. They would no doubt have many comments about the state of things. LOL!
Whitehead would have pitched the steady state universe model. But along with it he would have thrown away something that would bring him in closer focus with the investigation of "intelligence". You nailed it with this:
It is an alternative to the emergent intelligence model often associated with self-organizing complexity for a "methodologically naturalist" explanation of intelligence.
Who knows, perhaps Whitehead would have endorsed that concept...
I look forward to your comparison of Whitehead and Pannenberg.
Perhaps he would, Alamo-Girl; but the question why he would choose to account for the Universe that way would still (apparently) be insoluable for us today.
Got home from work, instantly got distracted; and then when I had a chance, went digging for the source I particularly needed to give an account of Pannenberg's trinitarian theology of nature. [I was looking for something Voegelin wrote about the three Persons of the One God, after Aquinas. But I haven't found it yet. :^( ]
But then I realized: I don't need that particular cite. Pannenberg's theology directly follows the theology of -- surprise! surprise! -- Sir Isaac Newton, founder of modern mechanics, the very mind that conceived and specified the great physical laws of motion.
So I have had to "rethink" the piece. :^)
Still working on it, hope to be back on that topic soon....
As to whether Whitehead was an adherent of the "steady state" cosmological model -- I don't know how we could really find out. He's been dead now for some 58 years so we can't exactly ask him. And people can read a whole lot into him that maybe he didn't exactly intend.
What I am especially grateful to him for is that he evidently believed that no exhaustive description of the Universe could be made without the helps of philosophy and theology. Certainly Whitehead's was in no way a "doctrinal" theology. It seems to me Whitehead had a sort of primitive intuition of the nature of the "Unknown God" referenced in the Acts of the Apostles. This god it seems was the very god to which Plato referred as the "Beyond," the Epikeina. I think Whitehead was trying to "update the ancients" in the way he decided to present his theology.... But only the Greek ones; not Israel's.
Ruminations before calling it a day. Thank you as always, my dear sister in Christ, for your ever excellent correspondence and companionship.
Dear Alamo-Girl, finally.... I have a bias I should disclose: Pannenberg's theology "makes more sense" to me than Whitehead's. As Pannenberg points out [in Toward a Theology of Nature, 1993], he takes his cues from Sir Isaac Newton’s theology. The great elucidator of the mechanical laws of the Universe also had definite ideas about such abstract -- i.e., non-material -- concepts as space (which Newton regarded as absolute and empty); this seems to have been an early anticipation of modern field theory.
Newton was a deeply committed Christian, though it has appeared to many that he was not a strictly doctrinaire or completely orthodox one. (He thought that the mechanical laws would tend to increase disorder in the world, so that it would be necessary for God to "step in and set things right" from time to time....)
I have mixed feelings about undertaking this essay. On the one hand, it deals with a scientific cosmology, which is not a problem. On the other, it deals with God – we are discussing theology after all, and its implications, if any, for other branches of human knowledge. The great difficulty is to not reduce God to humanly-accessible categories in the process....
The divine nature transcends any description of it that the human mind can conceive. St. Anselm of Canterbury makes this crystal clear in Proslogion XV: “O Lord, you are not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but you are also greater than what can be conceived.” We “reduce” God to human conceptual frameworks only at the risk of falsifying divine Reality, and everything in the Universe that depends, or is contingent on it. Which is “All that there is.”
Christianity recognizes that God does not belong to physical reality, except for the one single occasion in human history that He chose to become physically incarnate, in a fully human, physical man, Jesus; and then only for a time (about 32 years). God utterly transcends the Universe, and yet paradoxically He is also eternally “immanent in it.”
The doctrine of the immanence of God is pronounced in Eastern metaphysics: God is not “outside” the Universe, but is effectively co-extensive with, or even embedded in, an eternal, uncreated Universe. [To a Christian thinker, this makes God an “accident” of the Universe – something that Christianity does not and cannot accept.] On the Eastern mystical account, God is preeminently recognizable as the “world soul.”
I understand there are many accomplished scientists working today who are drawn to this notion. But Newton rejected it; for him, God was not some sort of esoteric “world soul.” For Newton, God is “God with His creatures.” That is, the sovereign Lord of creation which He Himself produced ex nihilo by His spoken Word “in the beginning,” thereafter eternally “keeping company” with what He has made.
If such statements strike the reader as inexplicable, then maybe we could try a “thought experiment.” Consider a question: Is Michelangelo “inside” (immanent) or “outside” (transcendent) his sublime sculpture, David? We concede that Michelangelo is the artist who created this work, according to intelligence and will (and probably also the copious shedding of blood, sweat, and tears). We’d also probably agree that Michelangelo personally is not “in” the marble out of which the David was “reified,” according to his astonishing creative genius and skill. But he is “in” the design, the concept, without which the marble would still be just a rough block of unworked stone in the back of his workshop. Michelangelo’s “presence” in the completed creation -- the glorious form of David, poised and balanced in his “wind-up” to sling the stone that would hit Goliath in between the eyes and so strike him dead – is eternally recorded. His mind, his vision, his hands fashioned such beauty in humble stone.
The “humble stone” has a complete physical description, once we know its initial and boundary conditions, according to the physico-chemical laws. But where do we find the physical description of the operations of mind, vision, or the work of hands? What initial or boundary conditions apply to such phenomena?
The above thought experiment generally presents the case of transcendence. But to acknowledge divine transcendence would not give the complete description of what Newton apparently had in mind respecting God’s role in the Universe. Newton’s God – the Trinitarian God of Christianity – is an immanent God also. Top extend our David analogy, this would mean that God would be viewed as constantly active in the microscopic activity of the particles comprising the stone, and/or the constant preservation of the idea embodied in the stone.
Newton held that space – “absolute, empty” – is the “form” of the omnipresence of God with His creatures, which he called the sensorium Dei. By sensorium he did not mean a physical organ of sense perception: God, being eternal, omnipresent, and omniscient, doesn’t need a medium for this. The sensorium in human perception, besides being the “route” through which sense data from the outside world is conveyed to our brains, is also the place where we create the “pictures” of the things we observe.
“Sir Isaac Newton considers the Brain and Organs of Sensation, as the Means by which those Pictures are formed, but not as the Means by which the Mind sees or perceives those pictures, when they are so formed.” [G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (1875-90)]
As Pannenberg points out, Newton means the latter sense of the word sensorium: “God through space creates [not the pictures] but the things themselves. “God constitutes space and time though his eternity and omnipresence: ‘existendo semper et ubique, durationem et spatium constituit’ [Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3rd edition, (1726)].”
To me, here’s what the Trinitarian theological picture looks like: The God who constitutes space and time through his eternity and omnipresence is God the Father, Creator “with his creatures.” To me, the sensorium may represent (in the language of physics) the primary universal vacuum field. God “spoke” the creation into being by His Word – the Logos, or God the Son. The Word God spoke in the Beginning was of Light: “Let there be Light.” So in my picture (adverting yet again to the language of physics), the Singularity – God’s Word – is rather like a single photon (the incipient primary vacuum?) densely “informed” by the geometry (logos) of God’s creative Will and Mind. Thus were space and time created. This also accounts for why our universe is said to be “finite, yet unbounded”: finite because it has a beginning, and unbounded because the vacuum itself reaches to every point of space and time in our inflationary universe. And it is the source field for the propagation of all the other fields in natural reality, which develop in due course according to the “information” loaded into the singularity of the beginning.
Where Whitehead has a multiplicity of “eternal objects,” the Trinitarian view suggests there is only one “eternal object” in the world (immanence): the Logos/Word of the Beginning, which specifies, like a kind of cosmic blueprint, the order of the Universe and of all its "emergent" potentialities. Whitehead puts God “inside” the Universe; but for Newton/Pannenberg, God the Father is “outside,” transcendent; divine immanence comes by way of the Son (Logos) in the natural or physical Universe; and the Holy Spirit in the supernatural realm of mind and consciousness.
Sometimes Christians are accused of being “polytheistic” on the supposition that we believe there are “three gods.” This is a complete misunderstanding of the Christian concept of One God in three persons. For the Son and the Holy Spirit are consubstantial with the Father; none of the persons is the creation of any other. The Son is begotten of the Father, not made; and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son together. It’s just that one Person – the Father, the “Unknown God” of Acts, Plato’s “Beyond,” the Israelite tetragrammatical god (i.e., YHWH, the “I am That Am”) absolutely transcends the world; the Holy Spirit is God in His immanent “aspect” (if we can say God has “aspects,” which is doubtful; but we have to try to articulate these things in the language/modes of thought we have). The Son is the Way and the Life, Mediator between God and Man, of Whom it is said “No man comes to the Father but by Me.” He transcends creation; but is immanent in human souls. And also immanent in the timeless, ultimate, primary geometry of the Logos that is the foundation of the structure of the Universe and everything in it.
The single greatest event in human history was the incarnation of the Son of God in the flesh of a mortal man, Jesus Christ. The Word, already in the natural creation from the very beginning, enters into the realm of actual human history and eschatology – for our salvation, itself the purpose of a loving, willing God.
This is probably a really good time and place to stop. I am probably going to get my head handed to me here, by atheists and theists alike! Please folks, do remember this is only a speculative, meditative cosmology that just happens to take its inspiration from Genesis and the Gospel of John….
Anyhoot, this speculative cosmology has been on my mind for quite some time by now. I just had to “get it off my chest.” :^) Thank you so very much, Alamo-Girl, for your thoughts and your encouragements.