PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

15 Sep PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

Editor’s note: In his doctoral dissertation, Pastor Pat Bailey of Telluride’s Christ Presbyterian Church is claiming the need for a re-visioning of the Christian church’s theology and its understanding of mission, the need for a more natural, integrative theology and for an earth-focused, contextual approach to mission. To that end, he is reviewing the theology of three contemporary theologians whose thought is very integrative of Nature and Spirit from three very different approaches. His current focus is the thought of David Ray Griffin, which is based on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. This blog is part of a weekly series.

Pastor Pat Bailey

An important idea central to process philosophy that must be understood to fully appreciate its integrative depth of God and Nature is prehension. Prehension is a nonsensationist form of perception, and it involves the idea that all actual entities in the natural world are capable of experience. So, for Griffin, experience precedes concepts, or more to the point, the ability to experience precedes both any ability to receive data from sensory organs and the ability to use that data for thought. In the evolutionary process, as soon as actual entities (which include atoms, molecules, and cells as well as higher living beings) formed, they were capable of receiving information from their environment and transmitting information within their environment.

Prehension, then, is a more fundamental form of perception than sensory perception, and it provides an explanation of how higher forms of consciousness could have developed from lower forms of order:

“Experience of some sort does go all the way down, characterizing even the most primitive units of nature.” 

Prehension implies a panexperientialism, not in the sense “that self-determination and a unified experience are enjoyed by literally everything in the actual world, including sticks and stones,” but that experience of a much more limited effect is possible for all actual entities and that there is a thoroughgoing interdependency in all of Nature’s experiencing.

The assertion of prehension has two implications that are especially apropos to this discussion. First, actual entities are receiving and transmitting information within the natural environment on levels that are more fundamental and constant than the ability to sense and conceptualize and in a broader interdependence of experiencing that is beyond, or below, conscious awareness. Second, prehension allows for a bottom-up influence of God in all of Nature.

Do you think that prehension could be a possiblity in Nature? Does the argument that prehension allows a bottom-up influence from God appeal to you, or do you think it assumes too much?