In 2012, SVS Press published a volume entitled Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith. The book compiles essays from philosophers who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in which they share how and why they became Orthodox. The press has decided to compile a second volume in which I will be included. I recently finished the essay, and I posted the first half of its contents here for my readers. The following is the second half, available to only paid subscribers. Enjoy!
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A Philosophy of Process
For those unfamiliar with process philosophy, the view is a form of panentheism, neither conflating God and world (pantheism) nor fully separating them (theism). Instead, God and world are both open systems, each in development and in reciprocal relationship, affecting and being affected by one another. Not surprisingly, then, the view rejects the classical divine attributes, accepting that God does in fact change, that his knowledge grows with the world, that his control of cosmic events and free creatures is limited, and so on.1
Two things drew me to process thought. The first was the dissonance between the God of the Scriptures and the God of Latin theology, explained above. The process God seemed to me much closer to the God I read about in the Bible, especially the Old Testament (OT). And I discovered I was far from alone in this conclusion. A great many OT scholars also had process sympathies. Many saw a very different God in these Ancient Near Eastern texts than the God of Plato or Aristotle, and a number of these scholars, such as Terence Fretheim and Robert Gnuse, explicitly embraced process philosophy as a more accurate model for OT theology.2 Such trends vindicated my findings and endeared me to process thought.
The second was the problem of evil. The classical formulation is David Hume’s summary of Epicurus: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”3 The problem attempts to demonstrate an incompatibility between the existence of evil, on the one hand, and the divine attributes of omnipotence and omnibenevolence (and tacitly the other omnis), on the other. While ample literature exists on the compatibility of evil and classical theism, process philosophy has an easier time resolving the tension because it rejects the classical divine attributes.
Throughout my philosophical-religious journey, I took the problem of evil extremely seriously.4 Evident to me was the problem’s status as the chief anti-proof for the existence of God. Less evident to me, however, was the success of this anti-proof. I do not mean that the horrific evils of our world are without force in causing one to question whether God is watching or cares. They have such force. But it was clear to me that good and evil in the moral sense that the problem presumes cannot exist in the world of the atheist. A material world of chance and chaos cannot include justice, fairness, good, or evil.5 It may produce sentient beings who experience pleasure and pain; such beings may label the desirable “good” and the undesirable “bad”; they may feel entitled to the desirable and to freedom from the undesirable, calling such entitlement “fair” or “just.” But all of this can indicate nothing more than preferred experiences. The notion that things ought to be a certain way and ought not be another way has no place in such a world. Yet, the central premise of the problem of evil is that evil exists. The indictment of God by the problem presumes duties of goodness incumbent upon a good God. In short, the problem requires transcendent values, the very sort of values it undermines if it succeeds in proving atheism. Hence, I saw the atheistic use of the problem as incoherent. But this is not its sole use. The problem can just as well be used to problematize classical theism, showing that the reality of evil requires a God who is not of the kind posited by the omnis. This conclusion was what sent me into the arms of process philosophy.