[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
Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
Alternate: < fortean1 at msn.com >
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