RT Article
T1 Revising Process Metaphysics in Response to Ian Barbour's Critique
JF Zygon
VO 33
IS 3
SP 405
OP 414
A1 Bracken, Joseph A. 1930-
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 1998
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/182795275X
AB In Religion in an Age of Science, Ian Barbour concludes that the contemporary evolutionary worldview with its emphasis on the interplay of law and chance, relationality and autonomy, can be properly accounted for only by something like the process-relational metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. At the same time, he expresses serious reservations about certain features of Whitehead's scheme, notably, his perceived inability to account for the ongoing identity of the human self and for the fact of multilevel organization within organisms and in the world of inanimate compounds. In this article, I suggest that both of these difficulties can be resolved if one adopts a revisionist understanding of the Whiteheadian category of society according to which democratically organized societies possess an ontological unity and exercise a corporate agency proper to their own level of existence and activity. Furthermore, if one applies this revisionist understanding of societies to the Whiteheadian doctrine of God, a Trinitarian understanding of God becomes possible within the overall parameters of process-relational metaphysics. In this way, traditional belief in the doctrine of the Trinity can be reconciled with a scientifically credible worldview.
K1 Trinity
K1 structured field of activity
K1 society of actual occasions
K1 process-relational metaphysics
K1 Agency
DO 10.1111/0591-2385.00157