What do you think?
Rate this book
Two Great Truths: A New Synthesis of Scientific Naturalism and Christian Faith
Furthering his contribution to the science and religion debate, David Ray Griffin draws upon the cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead and proposes a radical synthesis between two worldviews sometimes thought wholly incompatible. He argues that the traditions designated by the names "scientific naturalism" and "Christian faith" both embody a great truth--a truth of universal validity and importance--but that both of these truths have been distorted, fueling the conflict between the visions of the scientific and Christian communities. Griffin contends, however, that there is no inherent conflict between science, or even the kind of naturalism that it properly presupposes, and the Christian faith, understood in terms of the primary doctrines of the Christian good news.
152 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2004
1 person is currently reading
37 people want to read
About the author
David Ray Griffin
70 books86 followersDr. Griffin, a retired emeritus professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology at the Claremont School of Theology, has published over 30 books and 150 articles. His 9/11 books have been endorsed by Robert Baer, William Christison, William Sloane Coffin Jr., Richard Falke, Ray McGovern, Paul Craig Roberts and Howard Zinn.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 27, 2024
GRIFFIN EXPLAINS THEOLOGICAL CONCEPTS ACCORDING TO PROCESS PHILOSOPHY
Retired theologian David Ray Griffin (b. 1939) has written/cowritten other books such as Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition; Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology; Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion; God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology; Varieties of Postmodern Theology, etc. [He has more recently become well-known for his skeptical views on 9/11: e.g., Debunking 9/11 Debunking.
He wrote in the Preface to this 2004 book, “In the generic or minimal sense, scientific naturalism is simply the denial of supernatural interruptions of the world’s basic causal processes. Naturalism in this sense is not a new idea… Scientific naturalism in this sense does, to be sure, conflict with many forms of Christian faith that have appeared through the centuries, but it is not obvious that it conflicts with Christian faith itself or even rules out a robust version of Christian faith. I argue that it does not. Indeed, I suggest that scientific naturalism in the generic sense is a great truth that should be enthusiastically adopted by Christians… My perspective suggests that there has been about the same amount of error on both sides of the debate but that there is also a very great truth being defended by each side… By sorting out the truth from the error on both sides, we can develop a worldview that can be held in common.” (Pg. xxi-xxii)
He argues, “There are a number of our hard-core commonsense beliefs to which modern scientific naturalism cannot do justice. One of these is our belief that we have experience… materialist philosophers have been unable to explain how experience could have emerged out of the insentient (nonexperiencing) matter that they believe… to constitute the bottom layer of nature… Materialists still face the problem of how a brain consisting of nonexperiencing neurons could produce conscious experience… The other side of the mind-body problem is how our conscious experience can affect the brain and thereby bring about bodily behaviors.” (Pg. 23)
He observes, “having distinguished between doctrines that are true only mythologically and those that are simply false, I now add that there are some doctrines that arguably could be classified either way. The idea of Jesus as ‘the son of God’ provides an example. On the one hand, the idea that Jesus was in some sense simply God---in particular, that Jesus was the incarnation of the second person of the Divine Trinity in such a way that Jesus shared in the divine omniscience---should be discarded as simply false… On the other hand, one could claim that this gives poetic or mythological expression to a deep truth about Jesus, which is that God was present in him and acted through him in an extraordinary way. I myself accept this idea, partly because in my view … God does… influence us by, in one sense, entering into us… If the idea that a woman could give birth to God is not to be put in the category of the simply false, what should be?” (Pg. 35-36)
He asserts that Free Will Theism “provides no answer to the problem of what is usually called ‘natural evil,’ meaning the forms of evil that are not due to human volition, such as earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, and disease… A second problem with traditional free will theism is that according to its hypothesis, God could intervene to prevent any specific instance of evil. God could have diverted every bullet headed toward a human being ‘too young to die.’ God could have prevented any of the massacres that have occurred. God could, in fact, prevent any sinful human intention from producing its intended effects. And God could prevent any disease or any natural disaster from producing permanent injury, agonizing suffering, or premature death.” (Pg. 54-55)
He says of the concept of life after death, “I have recently examined various kinds of evidence… and concluded that it is persuasive. For Christians, therefore, the evidence provided by Jesus’ resurrection can be supplemented by more recent evidence, some of which has been rigorously investigated and documented by parapsychologists and physicians… although the evidence for life after death is strong, a change from naturalism to the kind of naturalism suggested by [Alfred North] Whitehead is important if the belief in life after death is again to become a respectable belief in intellectual circles. The empirical evidence can be convincing only if people will study it, and thus far more intellectuals have been unwilling to do so… But insofar as people see the superiority of Whitehead’s form of naturalism, with its nondualistic interactionism and its prehensive doctrine of perception, these a priori objections are overcome, so that the evidence can be taken seriously.” (Pg. 82)
He says of ‘Panentheism and the problem of evil,’ “in creating our world, God evoked a contingent form of order out of a situation that already embodied certain principles of order---principles that are not contingent but necessary, lying in the very nature of things. We have looked at the most basic of these principles: that in addition to God there is always a multiplicity of finite actual occasions embodying creativity, with creativity involving the twofold power of self-determination and efficient causation on future events. Another necessary principle is that this twofold power of the finite actual occasions cannot be overridden by divine power. The ‘cannot’ here is not merely a MORAL ‘cannot’… but a METAPHYSICAL ‘cannot.’ The idea that there are certain things that God cannot do is, of course, not a new idea… Free will theists … [say] that God cannot wholly determine the actions of creatures with freedom because that would be self-contradictory. Whitehead… added the further point that, because ALL individuals necessarily have at least an iota of freedom and this freedom is inherent in the nature of the world, God cannot fully determine the activities of ANY creatures.” (Pg. 88)
He continues, “The uniquely human capacity for evil has led many antitheistic philosophers to ask their theistic friends, ‘Why didn’t God create rational saints?’ by which they mean beings who are like us in most respects… but guaranteed not to sin. The Whiteheadean answer to this question is obvious: God could not have created such beings, because God could guarantee that creatures otherwise like us would not sin only by creating them devoid of freedom, and that was impossible… According to process theism… To bring about creatures who can enjoy the values we do was necessarily to bring about creatures as dangerous as we are… Given this perspective, we can criticize God for the world’s evil only if we can honestly say that human evil is so bad that the world would have been better off without human beings… process theists say that … the possibility of such evils could have been prevented only in a world devoid of human-like beings… Even God cannot have the good without the risk of evil.” (Pg. 91-92)
He points out, “The question before us now, I suggest, is whether we can, without returning to supernaturalistic interpretations of Christian faith, with their arrogance, move beyond this timidity to respectful confidence. That is, can we recover confidence in the universal truth and importance of the primary doctrines of Christian faith while, at the same time, accepting the great truth of scientific naturalism and manifesting respect for the other great religious traditions? … can we develop a theology that, while being both naturalistic and pluralistic, is robustly Christian?” (Pg. 101)
He suggests, “The next question is whether we can understand the incarnation of God in Jesus as having occurred through persuasion rather than as requiring a supernatural exception to God’s normal way of acting in the world… In process philosophy, this kind of incarnation could have resulted from Jesus’ experience of… God’ influence on him. Causation between two individuals … involves an internal relation, in which the cause enters, in a sense, into the effect… because God influences all events, God is present in all events… The only question is how God could have been present in such a way as to make Jesus a decisive revelation of God… God always presents initial aims toward the best possibilities open to the individual… the best possibilities for a human being differ radically… the aims for some individuals will reflect the general divine aim more directly than the aims for other individuals… a devout person such as Jesus, growing up in [the Jewish] tradition, would be well suited to receive divine aims highly reflective of the general aim of God for the world… we can understand Jesus as one in whom God was incarnate in such a way that it is appropriate for us to apprehend Jesus as a decisive revelation of God’s character, purpose, and mode of operation.” (Pg. 109-110)
He concludes, “we can perhaps now, through a new form of naturalism combined with the empirical evidence provided by parapsychology, think of the end of our present life not as the end of our journey with God but simply as the beginning of its next phase. If so, we can conceive that divine grace, working entirely through the attractive power of love, might sanctify us all. There would be no need for the divine violence of casting sinners into hell. God would, instead, love the hell out of us.” (Pg.
This book is an excellent exposition of Griffin’s theological views, and will be “must reading” for anyone seriously studying him, Process Theology, or other forms of liberal/progressive Christianity.
Retired theologian David Ray Griffin (b. 1939) has written/cowritten other books such as Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition; Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology; Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion; God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology; Varieties of Postmodern Theology, etc. [He has more recently become well-known for his skeptical views on 9/11: e.g., Debunking 9/11 Debunking.
He wrote in the Preface to this 2004 book, “In the generic or minimal sense, scientific naturalism is simply the denial of supernatural interruptions of the world’s basic causal processes. Naturalism in this sense is not a new idea… Scientific naturalism in this sense does, to be sure, conflict with many forms of Christian faith that have appeared through the centuries, but it is not obvious that it conflicts with Christian faith itself or even rules out a robust version of Christian faith. I argue that it does not. Indeed, I suggest that scientific naturalism in the generic sense is a great truth that should be enthusiastically adopted by Christians… My perspective suggests that there has been about the same amount of error on both sides of the debate but that there is also a very great truth being defended by each side… By sorting out the truth from the error on both sides, we can develop a worldview that can be held in common.” (Pg. xxi-xxii)
He argues, “There are a number of our hard-core commonsense beliefs to which modern scientific naturalism cannot do justice. One of these is our belief that we have experience… materialist philosophers have been unable to explain how experience could have emerged out of the insentient (nonexperiencing) matter that they believe… to constitute the bottom layer of nature… Materialists still face the problem of how a brain consisting of nonexperiencing neurons could produce conscious experience… The other side of the mind-body problem is how our conscious experience can affect the brain and thereby bring about bodily behaviors.” (Pg. 23)
He observes, “having distinguished between doctrines that are true only mythologically and those that are simply false, I now add that there are some doctrines that arguably could be classified either way. The idea of Jesus as ‘the son of God’ provides an example. On the one hand, the idea that Jesus was in some sense simply God---in particular, that Jesus was the incarnation of the second person of the Divine Trinity in such a way that Jesus shared in the divine omniscience---should be discarded as simply false… On the other hand, one could claim that this gives poetic or mythological expression to a deep truth about Jesus, which is that God was present in him and acted through him in an extraordinary way. I myself accept this idea, partly because in my view … God does… influence us by, in one sense, entering into us… If the idea that a woman could give birth to God is not to be put in the category of the simply false, what should be?” (Pg. 35-36)
He asserts that Free Will Theism “provides no answer to the problem of what is usually called ‘natural evil,’ meaning the forms of evil that are not due to human volition, such as earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, and disease… A second problem with traditional free will theism is that according to its hypothesis, God could intervene to prevent any specific instance of evil. God could have diverted every bullet headed toward a human being ‘too young to die.’ God could have prevented any of the massacres that have occurred. God could, in fact, prevent any sinful human intention from producing its intended effects. And God could prevent any disease or any natural disaster from producing permanent injury, agonizing suffering, or premature death.” (Pg. 54-55)
He says of the concept of life after death, “I have recently examined various kinds of evidence… and concluded that it is persuasive. For Christians, therefore, the evidence provided by Jesus’ resurrection can be supplemented by more recent evidence, some of which has been rigorously investigated and documented by parapsychologists and physicians… although the evidence for life after death is strong, a change from naturalism to the kind of naturalism suggested by [Alfred North] Whitehead is important if the belief in life after death is again to become a respectable belief in intellectual circles. The empirical evidence can be convincing only if people will study it, and thus far more intellectuals have been unwilling to do so… But insofar as people see the superiority of Whitehead’s form of naturalism, with its nondualistic interactionism and its prehensive doctrine of perception, these a priori objections are overcome, so that the evidence can be taken seriously.” (Pg. 82)
He says of ‘Panentheism and the problem of evil,’ “in creating our world, God evoked a contingent form of order out of a situation that already embodied certain principles of order---principles that are not contingent but necessary, lying in the very nature of things. We have looked at the most basic of these principles: that in addition to God there is always a multiplicity of finite actual occasions embodying creativity, with creativity involving the twofold power of self-determination and efficient causation on future events. Another necessary principle is that this twofold power of the finite actual occasions cannot be overridden by divine power. The ‘cannot’ here is not merely a MORAL ‘cannot’… but a METAPHYSICAL ‘cannot.’ The idea that there are certain things that God cannot do is, of course, not a new idea… Free will theists … [say] that God cannot wholly determine the actions of creatures with freedom because that would be self-contradictory. Whitehead… added the further point that, because ALL individuals necessarily have at least an iota of freedom and this freedom is inherent in the nature of the world, God cannot fully determine the activities of ANY creatures.” (Pg. 88)
He continues, “The uniquely human capacity for evil has led many antitheistic philosophers to ask their theistic friends, ‘Why didn’t God create rational saints?’ by which they mean beings who are like us in most respects… but guaranteed not to sin. The Whiteheadean answer to this question is obvious: God could not have created such beings, because God could guarantee that creatures otherwise like us would not sin only by creating them devoid of freedom, and that was impossible… According to process theism… To bring about creatures who can enjoy the values we do was necessarily to bring about creatures as dangerous as we are… Given this perspective, we can criticize God for the world’s evil only if we can honestly say that human evil is so bad that the world would have been better off without human beings… process theists say that … the possibility of such evils could have been prevented only in a world devoid of human-like beings… Even God cannot have the good without the risk of evil.” (Pg. 91-92)
He points out, “The question before us now, I suggest, is whether we can, without returning to supernaturalistic interpretations of Christian faith, with their arrogance, move beyond this timidity to respectful confidence. That is, can we recover confidence in the universal truth and importance of the primary doctrines of Christian faith while, at the same time, accepting the great truth of scientific naturalism and manifesting respect for the other great religious traditions? … can we develop a theology that, while being both naturalistic and pluralistic, is robustly Christian?” (Pg. 101)
He suggests, “The next question is whether we can understand the incarnation of God in Jesus as having occurred through persuasion rather than as requiring a supernatural exception to God’s normal way of acting in the world… In process philosophy, this kind of incarnation could have resulted from Jesus’ experience of… God’ influence on him. Causation between two individuals … involves an internal relation, in which the cause enters, in a sense, into the effect… because God influences all events, God is present in all events… The only question is how God could have been present in such a way as to make Jesus a decisive revelation of God… God always presents initial aims toward the best possibilities open to the individual… the best possibilities for a human being differ radically… the aims for some individuals will reflect the general divine aim more directly than the aims for other individuals… a devout person such as Jesus, growing up in [the Jewish] tradition, would be well suited to receive divine aims highly reflective of the general aim of God for the world… we can understand Jesus as one in whom God was incarnate in such a way that it is appropriate for us to apprehend Jesus as a decisive revelation of God’s character, purpose, and mode of operation.” (Pg. 109-110)
He concludes, “we can perhaps now, through a new form of naturalism combined with the empirical evidence provided by parapsychology, think of the end of our present life not as the end of our journey with God but simply as the beginning of its next phase. If so, we can conceive that divine grace, working entirely through the attractive power of love, might sanctify us all. There would be no need for the divine violence of casting sinners into hell. God would, instead, love the hell out of us.” (Pg.
This book is an excellent exposition of Griffin’s theological views, and will be “must reading” for anyone seriously studying him, Process Theology, or other forms of liberal/progressive Christianity.
October 12, 2013
Griffin has managed in this little book to whet my appetite for reading at least two of his other works: Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism and Unsnarling the World-Knot. And he's certainly presented panentheism and process theology adequately enough to make me very curious indeed to read more about it. I have both major reasons to accept it and many reasons to hesitate to do so because of this short work. In any case, Griffin shows that a process theology can not only break the false dichotomy of naturalism and Supernaturalism, but inform cosmology and science.
July 7, 2008
Excellent treatment of panentheism, rather absurd treatment of the life of Jesus Christ. It's a slender hundred pages, but length is deceiving.
Currently reading
January 20, 2009for class. like it so far. focus is using process theology mainly to reconcile science and christian theology.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews