Tag: god
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Stephen Hawking explains the universe over on PZ Myers’ blog
I’ve jumped into a thread over at Pharyngula to offer my opinion of Hawking’s attempt to explain the Universe positivistically.
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Theism/Atheism: Imagination and Ontological Openness
There is no need to oppose one possibility with the other. Speculative philosophy’s task is to overcome the dualistic limitations of sense-understanding (subject v. object, quality v. substance) by way of a schematic renewal of (or participatory intervention into) our habitual way of imaging the world. Speculative philosophy must hold the binary (God/no-God) together to…
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Types of Explanation in Whitehead and Hegel
I’m still working my way through Hegel and Whitehead: Contemporary Perspectives on Systematic Philosophy (1986), ed. by George R. Lucas, Jr. Today I read Klaus Hartmann’s (University of Tubingen) essay, “Types of Explanation in Hegel and Whithead”. Hartmann finds both similarities and differences in their respective approaches to philosophy. Among the similarities, he notes their…
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God and Religious Experience in Whitehead: another response to Levi Bryant
Levi Bryant has problematized my attempt to clarify Whitehead’s position on the function of divinity in the universe. He writes: “You make the claim that without God there would be chaos and no order. This is a problematic claim for two reasons. First, you have repeatedly tried to claim that God isn’t supposed to explain…
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Causality in Whitehead’s Panentheism
Plasticbodies has posted another volley in the theism-nihilism discussion, this time drawing attention to causality. He asks: What does process theology give us that a (process) naturalism cannot? Or, put otherwise, how does one get from nature to divinity without begging the question? I’ll paste my comments in response here: I have written quite a…
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Religion and Philosophy: The God Problem
The discussion continues over on Levi Bryant’s blog. Bryant agrees with me that Whitehead’s conception of God does not fall prey to many of the ethical and epistemological criticisms he levels against traditional theism. But he fails to understand the problem that Whitehead’s God is purported to have solved. Whitehead’s style of philosophizing has much…
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Ontology and God: a further response to Levi Bryant
I posted the following as a comment to Bryant’s short response. Adam Robbert has a nice comment there, too. There is no necessary relationship between OOO (or ontology generally) and theology or morality, but certainly every ontology has theological and moral implications. To the extent that OOO has something in common with Whitehead’s process ontology,…
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SR/OOO and Nihilism: a response to Harman and Bryant
I’ve already posted a short response to Harman, but I wanted to re-visit the issues explored in that post concerning the difference between Homo Sapiens, as an object among objects, and the Anthropos, as an ideal toward which every object tends. I will also try to disentangle my own “cosmotheandric” position from the generic anti-nihilism…
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Science, Art, Religion: The Role of Speculative Philosophy in the Adventure of Rationality
I’ve just completed Isabelle Stengers‘ formidable but rewarding text, Thinking With Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (2011). The final chapters concern the viability of Whitehead’s theology, specifically his articulation of the relationship between God and the World. Stengers’ asks the reader to go slowly while considering why a divine function became necessary…
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The Veil of Isis and the Meaning of Withdrawal
“A good maxim,” writes Nietzsche, is too hard for the teeth of time, and all the millennia cannot succeed in consuming it, though it always serves as nourishment…(Human, All Too Human). Pierre Hadot, in his essay on the history of the idea of nature, The Veil of Isis (2006), leads his reader through 2,500 years…
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Factish God(s)
The following is my comment posted in response to a blog by Sam Mickey about the potential of an object-oriented theology. Postsecularity might also be termed “the After Age.” Perhaps the “end of history” is the beginning of an integral phase of civilization, where the transparent permeability of eternity and time, spirit and matter, reason…
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…the meaning of disaster…
Some of my thoughts concerning the still unfolding tragedy in Japan… —————– I take up philosophy largely to defend meaning and cosmos from the nihilism and chaos at the root of much contemporary thinking. But I am reminded by this catastrophe that the earth’s order and harmony is proved by an exception: ruptures in nature’s…
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Meister Eckhart and the Core of the Soul
For a little more than a week now, I’ve been engaging with Graham Harman‘s object-oriented approach to philosophy. I’m intrigued, but not yet convinced by his tactics. I still have questions about access, about epistemology. How do I know anything about mind-independent objects if their essence remains infinitely hidden? I’m forced to rely upon analogy, the most…
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Where did the idea of “God” come from?
My response to this comment about “God” being a childish idea from a more primitive age. Kev @ 45, Maybe. But I understand the evolution of human consciousness a bit differently. Your theory (that God was invented in our species’ infancy by childish minds who wanted an explanation for things) seems to me to inappropriately…
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Belief in a Personal God
The following is my response to the theologian Jason Michael McCann’s blog post about the personal nature of God in the Christian tradition. Yesterday, he posted a critical response to one of my short essays on materialism and imagination that I will also respond to soon. JMM, The distinction between truth and fact (which I understand…
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Power and Presence in Theology
Another response to NRG’s questions for me on Pharyngula: I have trouble conceiving of God as all-powerful because of the problem of evil and my experience of human freedom. I associated God’s omnipresence with “will” even though, for God, there is really nothing to “do.” From the “perspective” of eternity, God is already everywhere and everywhen…
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That you are what you are.
Some have suggested that the human being can (and therefore ought to) live without God. I reject this claim. I propose that the human being is the spiritual animal, the organism that knows that it is. God is the “thatness” of existence, that transcendent quality of all that is but whose name cannot be spoken.…
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