


“The concept of God,” write Whitehead,



“God’s role,” writes Whitehead,







As Stengers’ suggests,


Stengers’ then quotes Whitehead at length:



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19 thoughts on “Science, Art, Religion: The Role of Speculative Philosophy in the Adventure of Rationality

      • Thanks, I guess.

        “Religion in the Modern World” brings no hits here, but I guess your category-tagged posts give me a fairly clear indication.

        Where did the idea of “God” come from?
        God is not (or at least was not originally) a (bad) scientific hypothesis meant to explain some natural phenomenon, but a symbol of the human psyche’s need for and experience of transcendence. God is a word which today might be said to represent the object of the ecstatic experience of a few mystics, but which originally was the common experience of all primal peoples.

        Belief in a Personal God
        The notion of our relationship to God being only interior feels lacking to me. My relationship to the exterior cosmos as God incarnate is no less revelatory (indeed, perhaps it is more so).

      • What is your concept of Nature, John? Tell me how you think of the relationship between the reality of Nature and the subjectivity of knowing scientists… What is Nature doing to itself inside the skull of a scientific materialist?

      • My concept of Nature?
        The physical universe.

        The relationship between the reality of Nature and the subjectivity of knowing scientists?
        Subjectivity comes from Nature, rather than the other way around.

        I don’t reify Nature, so I consider the concept of it “doing to itself” a category error.

      • Do you think it is necessary to ‘do philosophy’ to uncover the essence of “physical” and “universe,” as concepts, or is the scientific method sufficient for the understanding of nature? I ask since even among scientists there are many different conceptions of the universe. And across time, the meaning of these concepts has evolved. The Greeks understanding of “physis” is unlike our modern understanding, since for them physics was the study of the life of matter, its coming-into-form and its growth. Now “physical” no longer has its original meaning, but refers to the ultimately law-like motion of insensate stuff. (an essay on the history of the concept of Nature:

        I agree with you that subjectivity comes from Nature, and not the other way around. The properly philosophical quest is not to explain away Nature as an appearance in Mind, but to understand what must be true of Nature such that it can become Mind. (an essay on Schelling’s philosophy of nature, which has been classified by some a form of “transcendental materialism”:




        Change “The properly […]” to “A properly […]” and I cannot dispute this.
        The endeavour is philosophical, the epistemology is scientific (i.e. grounded by empiricism).

        So — how does any of the above relate to a god-concept?

        PS I know you know I technically misused ‘reify’ above (I should have related it to volition), so thanks for understanding to what I referred).

      • How does it relate to the metaphysical necessity of a god-concept? What are you asking, exactly? I think the essay above is a description, abridged obviously, of why Whitehead’s attempt to provide a cosmological account that lined up with actual experience and scientific theory required “God.” For us to speak coherently about “the physical universe,” we have already assumed that it is a cosmos and not a chaos (i.e., that it is an ordered whole, and not an incoherent mess). If we observe this ordered wholeness, how did it come about? And if we only infer this ordered wholeness, upon what basis do we infer it? Whitehead’s god-concept is an attempt to provide answers to these questions.

  1. “truth is what works”

    A rather utilitarian idea of truth, wouldn’t you say?

    The Chinese beat a gong whenever the Moon dog would eat the Sung god during a solar eclipse, Every time they did it, it worked. The coherence theory of truth has its limitations as you can see.

    Whitehead’s or your conception, or anyone’s conception of God is always lacking in one essential ingredient. It is not God’s. So many people may give their conception of you. But have they ever questioned, what is your conception of yourself. Would that not be a more valid way to reach a proper conclusion.

    To speak of God, as if God were merely an infinitely pliable creation of our own inventions is really to ignore God and any real understanding of what God is or means. Religion accepts God as the Supreme Person, or Personality. To deny agency to God and repose it completely within ones own subjectivity is only atheism in the name of God. God means Who is giving agency to all creation and creatures, as well as all being.

    Whoever has not studied the songs of God in the Bible, the Bhagavad-gita, the Upanisads, the teachings of the Avatars. or of God’s genuine devotees — what can they know of God? Most are simply impersonalists. And they are the greatest offenders of God. Imagine if everyone were to talk of you as if you were an object of their speculation only, with no personality of your own!
    Would it not be a great offense?

    Are you smarter than a fifth grader? I think even a fifth grader would know the answers here.

    Sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt your erudite discussion. Just sayin’

    I like you Matt, and all the others here who are trying to deal with the big questions. That takes a lot of courage and dedication and real hankering after the truth — philo-sophia. I am just trying to be helpful, I guess you can say, in a down to earth way.

    • Will, James’ pragmatism is not utilitarianism. The test of experience could have been conducted on the practice of sounding the gong to show that it was not magically causing the eclipse. Pragmatism does not mean you take things for granted as true that only seem to work, it means you make sure your truths are relentlessly put on trial and forced to prove their worth in the court of everyday life.
      As for Whitehead’s theology, and my own, for that matter, my problem with the idea of a personal God is that it seems to separate divinity from creation/creatures. My experience tells me that divinity is immanent in every human being, every hawk, every worm, every tree, every cloud, every grain of sand…. Unless the “personality” of God is the Universe itself, or is the Higher Self of humanity, I find no experiential correlate or intellectual reason to believe in such a thing. Thanks for your thoughtful comment. -Matt

      • OK. Then pragmatism holds that truth is what has practical application. Does that sound like a validting concept to you? It seems to be more like technology or skill rather than knowledge of what is. It may be practical to assume we are just a bag of molecules so that doctors can treat us based on scientific analyses. Yet that does not address the question of whether that assumption is true or not.

        Suppose for a minute your experience and knowledge is limited. It seems that this is the first thing we should know if we have had any experience. No? Outside our limited range of knowledge and experience there is the unknown and unexperienced. Newton wasn’t afraid to admit this. And Socrates went even further and said he didn’t know anything. Apparently, he may have thought that if knowledge is based on something well beyond whatever could be experienced or known then what kind of knowledge can we claim to have?

        How do we account for the possible influence in our finite lives of the unknown and unexperienced (let’s call it the Infinite, or God). It is impossible for the finite to comprehend the Infinite, so where does that leave us? On the other hand, it is quite feasable that the Infinite can be influencing us and even comprehending us. Why not? How can we limit what the Infinite can or cannot do or be. And most importantly, why can the Infinite not communicate in infinitely many ways with the finite, if it is truly infinite.

        One may believe whatever they like. But I think it is exactly at those points where our beliefs lie (we can call it the boundry conditions [and they are lies]) that we may actually come in contact with the Infinite, by grace of the Infinite alone, for our own finite efforts/work will always be insufficient. We just have to be willing to hear the song of God.

        That is my humble understanding.

  2. Mr. Segal, over all I very much like your post. However, you do make one statement that is quite demonstrably false: “Whitehead, at first a mathematician and a physicist, became a philosopher only after Gödel’s incompleteness theorem unhinged logic and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle delocalized material particle.”

    Gödel’s work did not appear until the early 1931, and it was some years after that before it became widely known. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was published only a few years earlier in 1927.

    Harvard had already hired Whitehead to work in their philosophy dept. in 1924, but Whitehead had been engaged in philosophical inquiry quite a bit longer than even that. His tryptich of works in natural philosophy/philosophy of science had already come out in 1919 — 1922. By the time of Heisenberg, his segue into metaphysics was well under way (driven, I would argue, by the failure of the scientific and philosophical communities to grasp the more epistemological orientation of the tryptich.) Whitehead is clearly operating in a scheme in which localized, punctiform material entites are at best high-abstractions — this is quite evident in the tryptich, and is formulated into the twin fallacies of simple location and misplaced concreteness by the time of Science in the Modern World, 1925. Process and Reality was not published until 1929, but the work that led up to it was clearly long underway by the time Heisenberg published his thesis.

    Moreover, Whitehead’s philosophical concerns go much deeper than what appears when one ennumerates his publications. He was a regular attendee at philosophy meetings at all of his various universities from his days as an undergraduate onward. His interests in pedagogy — among some of his earliest writings — are a continuous thread of argument all the way through to his last major publication (Modes of Thought) where he explicitly associates mathematical and philosophical thought.

    That said, this slip does not strike me as in any way undermining any of your principle arguments. With that in mind, I would just say, “trust a specialist to cavil over the details.”

  3. @Will:

    “truth is what works”

    A rather utilitarian idea of truth, wouldn’t you say?

    No. One needs to read the statement in context, and follow the full length and breadth of William James’ thinking to achieve any sort of appreciation for the meaning of that quip. But the author of The Varieties of Religioius Experience was no utilitarian.

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  7. As a recent ‘convert’ to naturalistic panentheism and new student of Whitehead’s process philosophy, I really enjoy your posts on these issues. Curiously, I was forced to abandon my previous atheism that was very much aligned with PZ, Dawkins, and the rest not out of a rejection of science and reason, but by following science and reason passed the point where most atheists stop (for what its worth, I don’t think most of what the new atheists say is wrong, it is just incomplete and misleading). You, along with Whitehead, consider this speculative philosophy, but is it any different than pushing the boundaries of natural science where the seeds of empirical truths are first planted in mental concepts, concepts which possibly seem foreign or outright hostile to the previous scientific consensus and worldview that came before them? Reading Whitehead, William James, CS Peirce, Aldous Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin, and others who were trying to grapple with the reality of the religious or spiritual impulse along scientific lines, I can’t help but feel dismayed that the current crop of atheist writers have ignored these attempts by these great thinkers and have closed off that line of inquiry completely, reducing these experiences and ideas to artifacts of faulty epistemology or spandrels of evolution that we must overcome and cast aside.

    Personally, I don’t think the process framework of god and divinity should stay purely within philosophy, if they really are true, then there should be scientific evidence for them and I think I have several routes leading up to such empirically reasoned verification.

    • I’d say there is plenty of evidence for the process panentheist position. But it all depends on how we interpret the evidence, which is where philosophy comes in. Scientists do philosophy all the time when they interpret their data, but often they deny this. Typically they have little respect for philosophy (especially the PZ Myers/Dawkins types) because they’ve never seriously studied it. Nor have they even studied the history of science. This are major gaps in science education today, which has become extremely specialized.

      I look forward to talking to you more about your “conversion.” But I have to sleep now!


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