[extropy-chat] FWD [forteana] David Ray Griffin's constructive postmoden theology

Terry W. Colvin fortean1 at mindspring.com
Fri May 21 06:04:20 UTC 2004


Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 21:15:42 -0700
From: "T. Peter Park" <tpeterpark at erols.com>
  To: forteana at yahoogroups.com
Subj: FWD [forteana] David Ray Griffin's constructive postmoden theology


Dear Listmates, friends, and philosophers,

             Are any of you familiar with this rather interesting 
thinker? If so, what do you think of him?

         A few years ago, I began reading some very intrigung and 
thought-provoking books on religion and science by the Whiteheadian 
"constructive postmodernist" philosopher and liberal Protestant 
theologian David Ray Griffin, a professor at the Claremont Colleges in 
California.

Griffin is the Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the School of 
Theology at Claremont, Executive Director of the Center for Process 
Studies, and founding president of the Center for a Postmodern World in 
Santa Barbara. He is also the Editor of the "SUNY Series in Constructive 
Postmodern Thought.." Many of his books are published in Albany, N.Y., 
by the State University of New York Press. Griffin calls himself a 
"postmodernist"--but his outlook is very different from that of the 
writers usually associated with that designation, like Michel Foucault, 
Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, 
Jean-François Lyotard, Julie Kristéva,and Richard Rorty.

The books by Griffin I first read  include _The Reenchantment of 
Science: Postmodern Proposals_ (Albany: State University of New York 
Press, 1988), _God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in 
Postmodern Theology_ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 
and _Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern 
Exploration_ (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997),  
Other books by Griffin on philosophy, theology, and religion and science 
that I read a bit later include _God, Power, and Evil: A Process 
Theodicy_ (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976),_A Process 
Christology_(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973),_Unsnarling the 
World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem_ (Berkeley 
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), and _Religion 
and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts_ (Albany, NY: State 
University of New York Press, 2000). _God and Religion in the Postmodern 
World_ (1989),_Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality_(1997), and 
_Religion and Scientific Naturalism _(2000) are part of Griffin's SUNY 
Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought.

            In a nutshell, David Ray Griffin is a "process philosopher" 
heavily influenced by Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), whom he quotes 
extensively in all his books. He is what some people might call a 
"Higher New Age" thinker. The main influences on Griffin's thought are 
Whitehead, and the Whiteheadian Protestant "process theologians" John B. 
Cobb and Charles Hartshorne, whom he also frequently cites in his books. 
Griffin describes his philosophy variously as "constructive 
postmodernism," as "process philosophy," as "organicism," as 
"panexperientialism," and as "naturalistic theism."

            Griffin, like Whitehead, sees the Universe as a hierarchy of 
more or less conscious experiencing self-determining beings, from God 
down through human beings, animals, cells, complex organic molecules 
like DNA, and simple molecules, down to atoms, electrons, and quarks. 
All of these are historically connected chains of events or "actual 
occasions." Every event or "actual occasion" has a "physical pole" and a 
"mental pole," and "prehends" all other events in the Universe with 
greater or lesser clarity, adequacy, and vividness. The environment of 
every event includes first of all God and the events in its immediate 
past and immediate vicinity, but to a lesser extent also all the other 
events that have ever occurred in the Universe. All events (and all 
chains of events like God, the human soul, the soul of an animal, or the 
dim inchoate awareness of an atom or electron) have experience (if not 
always quite full consciousness in the human or animal sense) and a 
degree of self-determination and free will. As a "panexperientalist," 
Griffin vehemently rejects the Cartesian mind/matter dualism of two 
radically different "substances," instead arguing zealously that _all_ 
events and _all_chains or strings of events are _both_  "mental" and 
"physical."

            Griffin argues for an evolutionary theism of a God gradually 
shaping Chaos into Cosmos over the aeons. God did not create the 
Universe out of nothing, Griffin believes, but has always been working 
on chaos, trying to organize it to ever higher levels of beauty, 
awareness, and significance. God has persuasive but not coercive power 
on events and beings in the Universe, and is not omnipotent--he thus 
disposes of the "problem of evil." Griffin believes in God, the 
immortality of the soul, free will, the ultimate meaningfulness of human 
life, and the reality of paranormal phenomena like ESP, PK, near-death 
experiences, mediumistic communications, and reincarnation memories. 
While believing in God, immortality, and the paranormal, calls himself a 
"naturalist" rather than a "supernaturalist," declaring that all 
seemingly "supernatural," "miraculous," or "paranormal" phenomena are in 
fact part of the course of Nature. Griffin attacks both 
"supernaturalism" for attributing an arbitrary coercive willfulness to 
God and "dualism" for positing an unbridgeable mind/matter gap. Griffin 
argues that the 17th century early-modern thinkers of the Scientific 
Revolution--Descartes, Mersenne, Newton, Huyghens, Boyle, 
etc.--advocated a mechanistic world-view in order to bolster a 
supernaturalist theology, defend the uniqueness of Christian miracles, 
and forestall theologically embarrassing natural explanations of seeming 
miracles in terms of what we would now call ESP and PK. Modern 
fundamentalists, Griffin feels, still cling stubbornly to this 17th 
century world-view--which has also always been my own contention! 
Griffin would definitely NOT think that weeping Madonnas, or the 
remarkable coincidences reported by some fundamentalists and 
charismatics, "prove" that God hates abortion, homosexuality, proposals 
to ordain women and active gays as priests, and people who disagree with 
Pope John Paul II or Pat Robertson!

            In _God and Religion in the Postmodern World_ (1989), 
Griffin presents a naturalistic process theism for readers who have 
found standard liberal theology empty or who believe that one cannot be 
religious and fully rational and empirical at the same time. He tries to 
appeal both to people who are intensely interested in religion and 
spirituality who find traditional theology incredible and modern liberal 
theology irrelevant, and to fully modern-minded people who have 
dismissed religious spirituality as well as theology because of the 
assumptions they have imbibed from modern culture. He argues that his 
constructive postmodern world-view is more empirical and rational than 
that of late-modern scientific materialism, more coherent than the 
modern world-view and more helpful ethically. This Whiteheadian 
constructive postmodernism, he claims, is not a return to early-modern 
dualistic supernaturalism. The mechanism and sensationism of Descartes, 
Newton, Boyle, and Huyghens, he feels, precluded a real union of 
religion and science, and unavoidably slid over into the all-out atheism 
and materialism of the 18th century Enlightenment _philosophes_, the 
late Victorians, and the Social Darwinists, Marxists, Behaviorists, and 
Logical Positivists. Griffin believes that his own postmodernism offers 
a deeply religious yet fully scientific theology, providing a new basis 
for spiritual discipline and for a pacific morality that could reverse 
the militarism, imperialism, racism, sexism, consumerism, "rugged 
individualism," and Kissingerian amoral _Realpolitik_ of modernity. With 
what he calls his revisionary and constructive postmodern theology, 
Griffin also challenges the deconstructive or eliminative postmodernism 
inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, 
Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Julie Kristéva,and Richard Rorty  that 
he calls "ultramodernism" and sees as leading to ultra-relativism, 
ultra-skepticism, and nihilism.           

            In _Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality_ (1997), 
Griffin explores the implications of parapsychology for philosophy and 
religion. He examines why most mainstream modern scientists, 
philosophers, and theologians have held parapsychology in disdain, and 
argues that neither_a priori_ philosophical attacks nor wholesale 
rejection of the evidence can withstand scrutiny. After outlining a 
Whiteheadian organicist constructive postmodern philosophy that would 
allow parapsychological evidence to be taken seriously, Griffin examines 
this evidence at length. He identifies and describes the various types 
of repeatable paranormal phenomena that strongly suggest the reality of 
ESP and PK. Then, on the basis of an interactionist but non-dualist and 
non-Cartesian distinction between mind and brain, which makes the idea 
of life after death conceivable, Griffin examines five types of evidence 
for the reality of life after death: messages from mediums; apparitions; 
cases of the possession type; cases of the reincarnation type 
(especially as investigated by the University of Virginia's Ian 
Stevenson); and out-of-the-body experiences. His philosophical and 
empirical examinations of these phenomena, he feels, suggest that they 
provide support for a postmodern spirituality that overcomes the 
thinness of modern "liberal" religion without returning to what he 
considers an objectionable supernaturalism or fundamentalism.

            In _God, Power, and Evil_ (1976), Griffin explores the 
problem of evil, the question "If there is a good God, why is there evil 
and suffering in the world?," from the process perspective of Alfred 
North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, arriving at a view of a good, 
loving, and powerful but limited and non-omnipotent God. He examines the 
sources of the problem and what he sees as the repeated failures of the 
theodicies of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John 
Calvin, Spinoza, Leibniz, Karl Barth, John Hick, Emil Brunner, Emil 
Fackenheim, and others to provide an acceptable solution. Griffin 
discusses the one possibility everybody agrees would resolve the 
problem--the possibility of rejecting the idea of Divine power as 
totally omnipotent and actually or potentially controlling all 
events--and examines the reasons for theologians' resistance to this 
simple, logical, reasonable (as he sees it) solution. Griffin finds 
these reasons fallacious and unconvincing, and goes on to present a 
nontraditional theodicy, showing how the theoretical difficulties posed 
for theism by evil can be handled. Griffin's view is that God _cannot_ 
control everything that happens in the Universe, that there is in fact 
no "problem of evil" because She could _not_ prevent earthquakes, 
hurricanes, AIDS epidemics, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, or the Crucifixion 
though She suffers fully with us in such calamities. It's not a unique 
or original view with Griffin: John Stuart Mill, William James, Alfred 
North Whitehead, and the contemporary Protestant "process theologians" 
John Cobb and Charles Hartshorne have all held the same view. At the 
same time, Griffin presents a view of God as perfect in power and 
goodness (though _not_ literally omnipotent), and thus adequate as a 
worthy object of worship.

            In _A Process Christology_ (1973), Griffin argues that 
Whitehead's process philosophy provides a basis for understanding and 
interpreting Jesus Christ as God's decisive self-revelation, in a manner 
that Griffin feels is consistent with both modern thought and Christian 
faith. He tries to bring together the quest for the historical Jesus, 
the neo-orthodox emphasis on God's self-revealing activity in history, 
and a theology based on the process philosophy of Alfred North 
Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and John Cobb. Griffin discusses the 
basis for making the notion that Jesus was the supreme self-expression 
of God's character and purpose (the Divine Logos) central to 
contemporary Christology. He examines the theologies of Paul Tillich, H. 
Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold Niebuhr's brother), Rudolf Bultmann, and 
Friedrich Schleiermacher to illustrate that the claims of Jesus have 
caused problems for modern theologians. He then tries to offer what he 
sees as a constructive position that solves these problems based on 
process concepts, especially Whitehead's idea that each and every moment 
of experience is provided by God with an "ideal aim." This, Griffin 
feels, allows one to maintain both a formal commitment to rationality 
and a substantive conviction as to the truth of the basic essential 
Christian belief in the self-revealing activity of a personal God.  
Thus, with the help of process philosophy, Griffin hopes, a modern 
Christian could reaffirm basic core Christian beliefs about Jesus 
without adopting an irrationalist approach to truth, ignoring any 
historical evidence about Jesus' fallibility, or claiming a supernatural 
Divine interruption of the normal causal patterns of reality. 

            In the "Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive 
Postmodern Thought" at the beginning of his _God and Religion in the 
Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology_ (SUNY Press, 1989), 
Griffin distinguishes between "deconstructive" or "eliminative" 
postmodernism, which he also calls "ultramodernism," versus 
"constructive" or "revisionary" postmodernism. Griffin begins by noting 
that "the rapid spread of the term postmodernism in recent years 
witnesses to a growing dissatisfaction with modernity," to "an 
increasing sense that the modern age not only had a beginning but can 
have an end as well,"and to a "growing sense" that "we can and should 
leave modernity behind--in fact, that we _must_ if we are to avoid 
destroying ourselves and most of the life on our planet" (David Ray 
Griffin, "Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern 
Thought," in Griffin, _God and Religion in the Postmodern World_, SUNY 
Press, 1989, p. ix). He observes that "a new respect for the wisdom of 
traditional societies is growing as we realize that they have endured 
for thousands of years" while "the existence of modern society for even 
another century seems doubtful." Similarly, modernism_ as a worldview is 
less and less seen as The Final Truth, in comparison with which all 
divergent worldviews are automatically regarded as 'superstitious.'" The 
"modern worldview," Griffin observes, is now "increasingly relativized 
to the status of one among many, useful for some purposes, inadequate 
for others" (Griffin,"Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive 
Postmodern Thought,"p. ix).

.           Griffin also observes that "there have been antimodern 
movements before, beginning perhaps near the onset of the nineteenth 
century with the Romantics and the Luddites"(Griffin,"Introduction to 
SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought,"p. ix). However, "the 
rapidity with which the term _postmodern_ has become widespread in our 
time suggests that the antimodern sentiment is more extensive and 
intense than before." It also "includes the sense that modernity can be 
successfully overcome only by going beyond it, not by attempting to 
return to a premodern form of existence." The term _postmodernity_, he 
feels, refers to "a diffuse sentiment rather than to any set of 
doctrines," to the "sentiment that humanity can and must go beyond the 
modern" (Griffin,"Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern 
Thought,"pp. ix-x). Beyond "connoting this sentiment," Griffin finds 
that "the term     _ postmodern _ is used in a confusing variety of 
ways, some of them contradictory to others." In "artistic and literary 
circles," for instance, "postmodernity" suggests this "general 
sentiment" but "also involves a specific reaction against 'modernism' in 
the narrow sense of a movement in artistic-literary circles in the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries"--in other words, to a reaction 
against doing any more imitations and rehashes of Proust, Joyce, Eliot, 
Pound, Yeats, Kafka, Pirandello, Beckett, Picasso, Braque, Dalí, 
Matisse, Stravinsky, Schönberg, and Hindemith."Postmodern architecture," 
again, is "very different from postmodern literary 
criticism"(Griffin,"Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive 
Postmodern Thought,"p. x).

            In "some circles," Griffin continues, "the term_ postmodern_ 
is used in reference to that potpourri of ideas and systems sometimes 
called _new age metaphysics_, although many of these ideas and systems 
are more premodern than postmodern." Then, he adds, "even in 
philosophical and theological circles" in academia, "the term 
_postmodern_ refers to two quite different positions, one of which is 
reflected in this series" (Griffin, "Introduction to SUNY Series in 
Constructive Postmodern Thought," p. x). Both positions seek to 
"transcend both _modernism_ in the sense of the worldview that has 
developed out of the seventeenth century 
Galilean-Cartesian-Baconian-Newtonian science, and _modernity_ in the 
sense of the world order that both conditioned and was conditioned by 
this world-view." However, "the two positions seek to transcend the 
modern in different ways." (Griffin, "Introduction to SUNY Series in 
Constructive Postmodern Thought," p. x).

       "Closely related to literary-artistic postmodernism," Griffin 
finds a "philosophical postmodernism inspired variously by pragmatism, 
physicalism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida 
and other recent French thinkers." This "can be called __deconstructive_ 
or _eliminative postmodernism._ Griffin feels that it "overcomes the 
modern worldview through an anti-worldview." It "deconstructs or 
eliminates the ingredients necessary for a worldview, such as God, self, 
purpose, meaning, a real world, and truth as correspondence." While it 
is "motivated in some cases by the ethical concern to forestall 
totalitarianism," Griffin feels that "this type of postmodern thought 
issues in relativism, even nihilism." It indeed "could also be called 
_ultramodernism_, in that its eliminations result from carrying modern 
premises to their logical conclusions" (Griffin, "Introduction to SUNY 
Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought," p. x).  This 
"ultramodernism," as Griffin calls it, is of course the "postmodernism" 
associated with figures like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland 
Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. In 
a somewhat revised version of this "Introduction" in his _Religion and 
Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts_ (SUNY Press, 2000), 
Griffin derives "deconstructive" or "eliminative" postmodernism from the 
thought of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and "a cluster of French 
thinkers--including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, 
and Julie Kristéva" (p. x).

             By contrast, the "postmodernism" of Griffin's "SUNY Series 
in Constrictive Postmodern Thought" is a "_constructive_ or 
revisionary_" postmodernism. It "seeks to overcome the modern worldview 
not by eliminating the possibility of worldviews as such," but rather by 
"constructing a postmodern worldview through a revision of modern 
premises and traditional concepts." It "involves a new unity of 
scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions." It "rejects 
not science as such but only that scientism in which the data of the 
modern natural sciences are alone allowed to contribute to the 
construction of our worldview" (Griffin, "Introduction to SUNY Series in 
Constructive Postmodern Thought," p. x).

            Such "constructive activity" is "not limited to a revised 
worldview," but is "equally concerned with a postmodern world that will 
support and be supported by the new worldview" (Griffin, "Introduction 
to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought," pp. x-xi). A 
"postmodern world,' Griffin feels, will "involve postmodern persons, 
with a postmodern spirituality," and also a "postmodern society, 
ultimately a postmodern global order." Going beyond the "modern world" 
involves "transcending its individualism, anthropocentrism, patriarchy, 
mechanization, economism, consumerism, nationalism, and militarism." 
Griffin believes that the "constructive postmodern thought" he advocates 
"provides support for the ecology, peace, feminist, and other 
emancipatory movements of our time," but adds that "the inclusive 
emancipation must be from modernity itself." Griffin adds that the "term 
_postmodern_, however, by contrast with _premodern_, emphasizes that the 
modern world has produced unparalleled advances that must not be lost in 
a general revulsion against its negative features" (Griffin, 
"Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought," p. 
xi). Thus, Griffin does not want to restore the "good old days" of the 
feudal Middle Ages, Puritan New England, or the ante-bellum Southern 
plantation, to drive women back to the kitchen, Blacks back to the 
cotton-fields, or Jews back to the ghetto, to force women to 
wear_chadors_ and Jews to wear yellow Stars of David, or to bring back 
witch-burning and the Holy Inquisition! Despite his critique of 
"modernity," Griffin does not want to do away with democracy, 
penicillin, smallpox vaccination, birth control, telephones, and 
computers, or return the Bourbon, Habsburg, and Romanov dynasties to 
their thrones!

            Griffin admits that from the viewpoint of the 
"deconstructive postmodernists" like Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, 
Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty, his "constructive 
postmodernism" is "still hopelessly wedded to outdated concepts" like 
God, soul, truth, meaning, and purpose, "because it wishes to salvage a 
positive meaning not only for the notions of the human self, historical 
meaning, and truth as correspondence, which were central to modernity, 
but also for premodern notions of a divine reality, cosmic meaning, and 
an enchanted nature." From the viewpoint of its "advocates," however, 
Griffin sees his "revisionary postmodernism" as "not only more adequate 
to our experience" than the deconstructive postmodernism of Derrida, 
Baudrillard, and Rorty, "but also more genuinely postmodern." Griffin's 
constructive postmodernism "does not simply carry the premises of 
modernity through to their logical conclusions" like the followers of 
"but criticizes and revises those premises." Through its "return to 
organicism" and its "acceptance of nonsensory perception," Griffin's 
constructive postmodernism "opens itself to the recovery of truths and 
values from various forms of premodern thought and practice that had 
been dogmatically rejected by modernity." It "involves a creative 
synthesis of modern and premodern truths and values"(Griffin, 
"Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought," p. xi).

            One of Griffin's most interesting observations is his view 
that the mechanistic world-view of early modern science, as formulated 
in the 17th century by thinkers like Galileo, Descartes, Newton, 
Huyghens, and Boyle, was developed and propagated for basically 
religious reasons, to prop up what we would call a fundamentalist 
approach to theology against what we would now call "New Age" trends! I 
think Griffin is probably correct, and he seems to confirm what I myself 
have suspected! In _God and Religion in the Postmodern World_ and       
_Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality_, Griffin finds it an 
ironic fact that the modern scientific world-view was initiated by 
thinkers who wanted to forestall materialism and to protect a particular 
type of Divine action. It has long been recognized, Griffin notes, that 
the central feature of the modern scientific worldview inaugurated in 
the 17th century is its mechanistic account of nature.  But it has not 
been so widely known, he feels, that this account was directed not only 
against the Aristotelians, as most histories of science note, but also 
against Hermetic, Neoplatonic, holistic, "magical" views of nature 
popular in the Renaissance. Griffin notes that it has been 
conventionally assumed that the modern scientific worldview, which first 
emerged in the 17th century, was based on reason and experience and was 
inherently hostile to theology. However, he feels, it was in fact  
originally based more upon theological and ecclesiastical than upon 
empirical reasons.

            The culturally, sociologically, and philosophically most 
important characteristic of the modern scientific worldview, which was 
originally known as the "new mechanical philosophy," was that it was an 
anti-animistic philosophy. It was opposed  not only to Aristotelian 
animism (which made organisms paradigmatic, even seeing a falling stone 
as "seeking a state of rest") but still more emphatically to an 
assortment of Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and Cabalistic  "magical" 
Renaissance philosophies, some of which were strongly animistic. In 
these animistic philosophies, matter was seen as having both the power 
of self-motion and the power of perception. Each unit was a microcosm, 
reflecting the whole universe within itself. Action at a distance was 
considered to be a quite natural phenomenon: if all things are living, 
perceiving organisms rather than blind chunks of dead matter, there is 
no reason to believe that all influence must be by direct contact. The 
"magical" or "miraculous" could thus occur without supernatural 
intervention into the natural order of things. Also, God was understood 
more as the _anima mundi_ than as an external, supernatural creator. 
Sometimes this "soul of the world" was understood pantheistically, 
sometimes more panentheistically (as we would nowadays put it).

            These Renaissance animisms, it was widely feared by 17th 
century orthodox Catholic and Protestant theologians and clerics, could 
lead to atheism or, what was generally considered the same thing, 
pantheism. If matter was self-moving, the universe could perhaps be 
self-organizing. If so, it was feared, the order of our world would 
provide no evidence for an external creator God. An atheistic philosophy 
was seen as dangerous to the Church's authority. So also was a 
pantheistic or panentheistic philosophy, insofar as it implied that God 
was immediately present to everybody, rather than being mediated only 
through the doctrines and sacraments of a hierarchical Church. Also, the 
Church could threaten the disobedient with Hell no more in the name of a 
pantheistic or panentheistic God than in that of  a nonexistent one. The 
mechanical, antianimistic philosophy was thus seen as the answer. 
Newton, and many other 17th century intellectuals, argued that a natural 
world composed of inert bits of matter demanded an external God who 
created matter, set it in motion, and imposed the laws of motion upon 
it. Newton also argued that neither the cohesion between the atoms in a 
rock nor the gravitational attraction between heavenly bodies could be 
inherent to matter itself. These phenomena therefore proved an external 
God who imposed the appearance of mutual attraction upon matter. A 
mechanistic view of nature, far from being viewed as hostile to theistic 
belief, was considered the best defense for it.

            These Renaissance animisms, because they allowed action at a 
distance, threatened the Church's belief in supernatural miracles. If 
events like reading minds, healing by prayer, and moving physical 
objects by thought alone could occur without supernatural intervention, 
then the miracles of the Bible and the later history of the Church  no 
longer proved that God had designated Christianity as the one true 
religion. Because the "argument from miracles" was a main pillar of the 
Church's evidence for its authority, this naturalization of the Church's 
"miracles" was a serious threat to the Church's authority. The 
mechanistic philosophy thus seemed a godsend to both Catholic and 
Protestant defenders of orthodoxy in Church and State. The Catholic 
priest, theologian, mathematician, and natural philosopher Marin 
Mersenne (1588-1648), Descartes' predecessor in popularizing the 
mechanistic philosophy in France, at first relied on Aristotle in his 
battles against the Hermetic, animistic philosophers like Robert Fludd 
(1574-1637) and against the alchemy, astrology, and related arcane arts 
fashionable in the Renaissance, because Aristotelianism forbade action 
at a distance. Upon learning of Galileo's mechanistic philosophy, 
Mersenne embraced it, as it stressed even more clearly the impossibility 
of action at a distance--in a machine, all influence is by direct 
physical contact.

            Thus, when events occurred that could not be explained in 
terms of the principles of natural philosophy--and Mersenne and most 
other people in the 17th century had no doubt that such events 
occurred--then a supernatural agent had to be involved: these events had 
to be the work of God--or of Satan, if they involved witches or pagans. 
The Christian miracles were thus really _ miraculous_, that is, 
supernaturally caused. The mechanistic philosophy, far from being 
opposed to belief in the miraculous, was originally adopted in part to 
support this belief.  The 17th century view that extraordinary events 
have to be the work of God--or of Satan, if they involve New Agers, 
occultists, pagans, witches, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or 
agnostics--is still the view of many late 20th century fundamentalists 
and charismatics. It's the explicit teaching, for instance, of 
charismatic writers Dennis & Rita Bennett's _ The Holy Spirit and You_, 
long a favorite book of a tongue-speaking charismatic friend of mine. 
Griffin himself notes that the world-view of contemporary conservative 
and fundamentalist Christians is largely a continuation of the 17th 
century early-modern world-view of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Mersenne, 
Boyle, and Huyghens.

            Peace,
            T. Peter tpeterpark at erols.com <mailto:tpeterpark at erols.com>
            Garden City South, LI, NY


-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


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