Abstract
Philip Clayton is teaching at Claremont University in the departments of Religion, Philosophy and in the School of Theology. In the last few years Professor Clayton has published in the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, history of philosophy, philosophy of religion, and theology. The central focus of his work for the last three decades has been the relationship between science and religion, and he is recognized as an important figure in the field. Adventures in the Spirit is a very complex research endeavour in which the author tries to integrate theology within science. This work is a very bold personal approach and many authors are used to back up his ideas, including Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, Karl Barth, Peter Berger, Charles Darwin, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Alfred North Whitehead, etc.
The book is divided into five parts: (i) “The Methods of Philosophy and Theology”; (ii) “Emergence,” which deals with the logic behind the theology of emergence; (iii) “Panentheism”; (iv) “Divine Action,” concerning what God does, what difference the existence of God makes; (v) “The Theological Adventure Applied.”
Clayton starts from the assertion that today’s mentality is scientific, pluralistic and existential; today’s game is diversity and we have no choice, except to deal with it. Up to now, science has provided more convincing arguments than theology and this has led to a certain scientific reductionism. One of the greatest challenges to an honest faith is to acknowledge the possibility of the impossibility of religious belief, to accept that even the question of the existence of God must be subjected to scrutiny; its status as controversial in our time must be acknowledged.
The author brings a dialogical method, which can be brought into the conversation between science and theology. Some ideas are: One has to be willing to submit one's theological thought to the experts to see if it fits other domains. Every discussion should aim at the truth, even when the truth may not be attainable. A link will be created between the truth and the consensus of the experts. Theology remains open ended and one will never fully know when the truth is attained or what it looks like. Everyone's goal should be public and one should not refuse to debate.
Clayton brings systematic theology into the discussion, to make the interconnection between traditional doctrines and contemporary knowledge, between what we know and what we do not know. His thinking is directed more at what “events” are drawing attention. Clayton compares religious and theological truth, asking what the unique methods of theological inquiry are and how we know what we know about God. He addresses a tough question for the contemporary dialogue between religion and science: Is it really a “new adventure for theology” or merely an attempt to hijack science in a quest for religion’s legitimacy? The scientist and the religious believer can share the same motivation: to extend human understanding as far as it will go. If the mystery of reality is infinitely deep, no progress in understanding threatens it.
Clayton focuses on the human intellect as a potential place to be filled with the divine agent. The human being consists of body and mind, which are interconnected but distinct. Organisms have free choice, which differentiates them from the non-living. When there is a communication between humans and the divine agency, no law of physics is broken. God is the one who prepares and suggests, and is not the one who brings about human actions. Agency refers to the divinity of God. God is luring humanity and encourages some form of action. Clayton suggests that the body is to the mind what the human person is to the divine, and struggles to find out if the divine influences the mind.
The idea of the emergence is very much on Clayton’s mind. What is emergence? This is a potent question in contemporary philosophy of science and now in theology. It refers to the appearance of something more; increasing complexity leads to newness and quantitative increase can lead to qualitative change; the idea culminates in the appearance of the genuinely new. Clayton describes God as the foundation of the world, who is not in conflict with science; however, describing God as active in the cosmos encroaches on what we have come to understand scientifically. The author reminds the reader that the human being is more than its chemical processes (i.e., hormones do not explain human beings’ hunger for meaning in their life); the integrated human being is a combination of body, environment, relationships, and the overall mental state, which includes the social, cultural, historical, and religious context.
It has been common for theologians through the ages to use science to reconceive God, but in fact allowing science to dictate what one can and cannot say about God is a mistake. It is important to take the scientific perspectives and data completely seriously, but that does not mean treating science as though its results lead without further reflection or consideration to certain theological conclusions. There is a version of emergence theory, which Clayton himself defends, which argues that natural history produces new “things” and not merely new properties, and that these new levels of existence can exercise downward causation in their own right. Downward causation can be defined as a converse of the reductionist principle; the behavior of the parts (down) is determined by the behavior of the whole (up), so determination moves downward instead of upward. To give an example, human minds can be regarded as influencing the chemistry of the brain and the behavior of the body, and not merely as resulting from brain and body components.
Emergence does better justice to what we find in nature, allowing that new mental capacities, like new physical ones, can arise as peaks out of the evolutionary process. What humans call “God” is just the emergent property of spirituality in the universe, and God is simply the universe becoming aware of itself.
Another topic which fascinates Clayton is the idea of “panentheism.” Panentheism is the idea that the world–universe exists within God, and yet God transcends the universe. Unlike in pantheism, God and the universe are not one thing. Panentheists believe in a God who is present in everything but also extends beyond the universe. Clayton uses a classical definition provided by Charles Hartshorne which maintains that God is not just all of the other things; but yet that all other things are literally in him. He is not just the whole of ordinary individuals, since he has unity of experience, and all other individuals are objects of this experience, which is no mere sum of its objects. The mere essence of God contains no universe. We are truly outside the divine essence, though inside God.
Clayton wants to be a liberal Christian, and to be a liberal Christian is to return continually to the scriptures and traditions in the attempt to understand what are genuinely Christ-like responses. But to be a liberal Christian is not to take the inherited traditions as complete in themselves. He accepts the traditional Trinitarian view that God is internally self-sufficient, God has always existed as trinity, three persons in community.
The work is very detailed and complex, and Clayton founds his thought on various theories. One is the Theory of Causation – Aristotle distinguished several types of causation: efficient, material, final, and formal. For David Hume, the focus was on analyzing efficient causation and, in particular, on understanding the kinds of substances that might interact causally. A second is Coherence Theory, which regards truth as coherence with a set of sentences, propositions or beliefs. There is no single coherence theory of truth, but rather an assortment of perspectives that are commonly collected under this definition. Here Clayton expresses the idea that the multitude of theories can be accommodated with the truth (as an ideal) but that their internal coherence is falsified. A third is Complexity Theory: in essence a complex system is a functional whole, consisting of interdependent and variable parts. Complexity Theory states that critically interacting components self-organize to form potentially evolving structures exhibiting a hierarchy of emergent system properties. A fourth is the Theory of Consciousness, which tries to explain how it is that the physical system that we are, this multitude of cells and organs and nerves, can have subjectivity, can behave independently, can do things for itself and can respond to input in a way that takes account of impulse and ideology rather than simply reacting to current conditions. A fifth is Process Thought. The term comes from the theistic metaphysics developed by Whitehead and modified by Hartshorne, both quoted in the book. The intention was to develop a metaphysical “theory of everything” which considers reality as a dynamic evolutionary series of events. These events, which occur temporarily, are interconnected in such a way that they influence each other and partially are self-created.
The whole work is a real quest and an adventure in the spiritual realm, and anyone can use the material to achieve more knowledge and ideas of how to integrate religion and theology with science or other domains.