An Ecological Theology in two senses:

1. A theology which is a Christianization of an ecological world-view = the process-relational metaphysical vision(s)

Based in a broad metaphysical vision:

Based in a broad metaphysical vision which is process-relational, i.e. inherently ‘ecological’ in its thinking and in the conception of reality which it projects.

2. A theology which gives strong support to an ecological ethics

Because of its background theory

Because of the strong Christian Trinitarian Theism which it can enable (esp. Joseph Bracken, but also Peter Forrest and John Bretz)

Structure of this paper:

1. Brief exposition of the Process-Relational Metaphysical Vision

 

2. ‘God’ in Process-Relational Thought

 

3. Getting Ethics out of it: ways of doing so:

A process-relational version of the ‘no-self’ doctrine
A much broader assignment of ‘intrinsic value’ as motivated by the metaphysical vision

4. Facing up to some of the problems,

Giving intrinsic value to ecosystems as such
‘The problem of marginal cases

Some specifically theological problems

5. Process-Relational Trinitarian Theism and its advantages over Naturalism and other kinds of Process Theism for ecological purposes

1. Brief exposition of the Process-Relational Metaphysical Vision

• A re-visionary metaphysics (versus merely descriptive)
• Compatible with and inspired by contemporary sciences, without being scientistic: it attempts to take account of all our experience, including ethical, aesthetic and religious experiences

• A revisionary metaphysics which thinks of reality in terms of connected events,
• a web consisting of strings of related happenings, nested processes, rather than things or enduring substances with changing properties: a unity of process or project rather than a unity of substances

• A revisionary metaphysics which is strongly relational, without being holistic or totalizing:
• everything takes account of its environment, to a greater or lesser extent but also in its own peculiar way and more or less creatively.

• A revisionary metaphysics which is into creativity in a fairly big way, everything a little bit creative, to be at all is to make a difference, however slight. There are no vacuous actualities,
• though one needs to distinguish between genuine ‘individuals’, e.g. electronic happenings, human happenings, and ‘aggregates’, e.g. stones, telephones, which may give the appearance of ‘vacuity’.

• Not necessarily ‘pan-psychist’ or ‘pan-experientialists’, though it comes also in panpsychists and panexperientialist versions. The key ingredient here is the denial of vacuous actualities, on which all sides agree.
In Summary, so far:

• A revisionary metaphysics which thinks in terms of different levels of natural event, as proportional to:

• The quality and extent of reception and transformation,

• And the likely effectiveness, into the future environment, of the transmission.

• A revisionary metaphysics which thinks of Human beings, in this context, as high grade natural events, different in degree, not in kind, from the others, which emerge more or less naturally in certain complex environments (under the lure of the Goodness, Truth and Beauty which is God).

• The difference from other such natural events, including (most, almost all?) other high grade natural events, is that we human beings are among that part of nature which knows itself as an emergent, creatively interacting part of nature, and with that knowledge comes responsibility for the quality of that more or less creative interaction.

• This opens up the serious need for an environmental ethic to guide the human project conceived as an emergent, creatively interacting part of nature.

• But before we look at that, we need to look a little at process thinking on God, and also at the difference which Christian theology makes.

2.‘God’ in Process-Relational Thought

Whitehead
Cobb/Suchocki
Hartshorne/Griffin
Van der Veken
Joseph Bracken

Generally Agreed by all Process Theists:

• A God Who Affects All and is Affected by All, Who Persuades rather than Determines

Usually alleged, by process theists inspired by either Whitehead or Hartshorne:

• A God with a two-fold or sometimes three-fold Nature: i.e.

Consequent, and

Projective/Superjective.

• Primordial: the element within God’s affecting the universe which is unconditioned, primordial and self-chosen: God as Principle of Limitation (or focus) and Principle of Possibilities and of Novelty, = God as Creator (usually not creatio ex nihilo)

• Consequent: the universe received in its completeness by God, creatively taken up into God’s life = in the Christian mystery, the passion and death of the Christ, followed by the resurrection and ascension of the crucified Christ into the life of God.

• Projective or Superjective: the flowing-back into the universe, the Divine Creative Response = in the Christian mystery, the descent of the Holy Spirit, in consequence of the passion, death, resurrection and ascension of the Christ.

But that God is ground of the Cosmic Process, without which there would be no Cosmos, not just creative receiver and moulder of the Cosmic Process as it happens.

Attitude on the Doctrine of the Trinity varies quite a lot, in a spectrum from

• Unitarianians like Hartshorne or Whitehead,

• To sometimes tri-theistic sounding Eastern Church like Trinitarians (Bracken)
• Also a variation between people who stick close to the metaphysical base in their theology, and other people who are prepared to renovate the metaphysical base for the sake, among other things, of better theology.
• Buddhistic versions of the metaphysics have also been deployed to good effect, in the construction of Trinitarian theologies: each Person is constituted by the self-gift of the others, each is what it is in relation to the others. The Trinity is an example of Realized Emptiness, the perfect realization therefore of completeness and fulness of life.

• Cf. John Bretz, for details

3. Getting Ethics out of it: two common ways of doing so:

Process ecological ethics, is contingent, initially, on the on the re-visioning of ourselves promoted by the metaphysics, i.e. of us human beings as among that part of nature which knows itself as an emergent, creatively interacting part of nature, and which strives, in that knowledge, to take on responsibility for the quality of that more or less creative interaction.
Beyond this, there are, initially, two main ways we might go:

Option I:  We might try to lean on the process-relational version of the (Buddhist) ‘No-Self’ doctrine

‘Self’                                     ‘Self’
 

:all boundaries are relativised – I don’t end with my skin

:all boundaries are permeable.

In rather less ego-centric, more theological terms, all reality is as the Body of God (Hartshorne’s image for expressing his pan-en-theism: God is in everything and everything is in God).

In such circumstances, loving the Lord my God with all my heart and soul and strength and mind, and loving neighbour and everything else as myself are inevitably part of the same story.
 

Advantage

Easy to communicate, and good on the motivational level
Sounds ‘Eastern’ and mystical and ‘New Age’ (if these are advantages)
Easy to reconcile with David Suzuki, and also with some versions of Deep Ecology (notably Arne Naess).

Tends to lack respect, i.e. respect for real difference and genuine otherness, by merging everything into the same pot. (Cf. Val Plumwood).

It seems to indicate an insufficiently differentiated ontology, reflected into an insufficiently differentiated deontology.

3.Getting Ethics out of it (continued): the more usual way =
 

Option II: the more usual way: a much broader assignment of ‘intrinsic value’ as motivated by the metaphysical vision

• Relying on the fact that we are very much natural beings in the midst of other natural beings to motivate an extension of ‘Intrinsic Value’ well beyond the human sphere.

• Relying on the differentiated ontology to motivate differential assignment of value.

Intrinsic Value versus merely Instrumental Value, assigned more widely

Intrinsic: value in and of itself, not just because of its value to humans.
Also, value as an end, not just as a means: this aspect determines what may have instrumental value, namely anything that enhances the ‘life’ of something with intrinsic value.

Extrinsic or Instrumental: value because of and in proportion to its contribution to other processes.

• Some Process theoreticians assign intrinsic value potentially to all genuine individuals (versus just aggregates). That is, the ontology projects directly onto a de-ontology.
• Others, in the interests of sanity and conceivability, introduce a cut-off point, e.g. anything which feels, or has life.

Degrees of Intrinsic Value

= individual human beings, dolphins, monkeys etc. have higher intrinsic value than individual ants and worms

This leads to a number of problems:

Problem 1: in the history of human ethics, this is very unusual: for all previous ethical theory whether virtue theory, divine command, deontological, utilitarian, every creature with intrinsic value, that is, value as an end, not just as a means, counts as one.

Problem 2: within the context of respecting the environment: how to avoid reverting to Anthropocentrism? Won’t human beings inevitably end up on top of the hierarchy of intrinsic value? Once again, as always...

Two Considerations for problem 2:

• A high degree of instrumental value can and usually does go with low degrees of intrinsic value: e.g. creatures at the bottom of the food chain
• Not just A has greater intrinsic value than B, Therefore A can do what it likes with B.
• No, in addition, B has to be necessary for the life of A.
• This is not even enough to justify meat eating – at least not in affluent western cultures, maybe in indigenous cultures.

• It helps if one is willing to admit that some values are incomparable –

it’s not as if everything is on the same spectrum (an impression sometimes given by some versions of process eco-ethics).

On some spectra we may not be at all superior. And in other places there may not be a ‘spectrum’, merely a creature with unique, incomparable value.

This will mean that we cannot expect mathematical calculability in our ethical judgements.

The recognition of genuine difference is an advantage overall, however, even if at this cost.

4.Facing up to some of the problems, including

Giving intrinsic value to ecosystems as such

‘The problem of marginal cases'

Some specifically theological problems

Problem One: Individuals and Ecosystems

= a problem with classical Whiteheadian and Hartshornian Process

• According to this, only individuals have intrinsic value (where 'individuals' = individual actualities and 'compound individuals' such as individual koala and individual human beings)

• Ecosystems as such have only instrumental value: as providing a context or home for the thriving of the various individuals

• Biodiversity also, in and of itself, has only instrumental value, to the extent to which it is 'a good thing' for the various constitutent individuals

• A lot of people think that this is counter-intuitive

There are versions of Process metaphysics which may alleviate the problem, esp. the Joseph Bracken version:
For Bracken, fields' are equiprimordial with events
No events without fields
No fields without events
Fields carry contributions made by events from past to future
Events clue into fields rather than past events directly

Provided we are willing to continue to allow 'de-ontology' to map ontology, eco-systems as such, including non-living components, might be given intrinsic as well as instrumental value.

Except that fields, even if ontologically 'equiprimordial' are not subjects…

Lots of Process people have problems with the revised metaphysics anyway

Maybe we can do better, by relying on the Theism - see later!

Problem Two: the Problem of Marginal Cases

• babies and pigs thought of in their actuality are at about the same level
• so we should be prepared to treat babies as we treat pigs (at least as far as intrinsic value is concerned)
(Singer introduces a notion of ‘person’ versus just human being. Only persons have rights. But babies and some other human beings fall below the level of persons... That is, the notion of persons cuts across the human species: anything else, for Singer, would be a version of ‘specieism’.)

More recently, Danial Dombrowski(Hartshorne and the Metaphysics of Animal Rights, Babies and Beasts) has striven to demonstrate that the argument can go and ought to go the other way, i.e.

• pigs and babies, in their actuality, are at about the same level
• so we should treat pigs like babies!

Principle: use marginal cases only to extend, rather than restrict, moral concern??
 

Charles Birch, Living with the Animals (p. 56):

Is careful not to commit himself, regarding it as a complex and contentious issue, which it is not his purpose to go into.
 

My own attitude:

it's a needless complication, which tends to bring the environmental movement into disrepute among otherwise sympathetic people, derived mostly from taking our theories too seriously.

Also, there are certain Process considerations which may alleviate the problem anyway, including the following:

• Potentiality is of the essence of an event:

Reverence is rarely for individual events anyway, more usually for a continuing project, a connected series of such events taken in total context. Babies are the beginnings of continuing human projects, old people are the endings of such projects…

Babies, old people etc. are part of the web of human life: Singer and, less forgivingly some process people, get altogether too individualistic in this matter sometimes.

It is not necessary to be able to rationally reconstruct in a proof of some kind in order for people to be able to continue to engage in it.

(E.g. burying dead people.)

But perhaps we can do better with this problem: See Part 5!

PROBLEM THREE: SOME THEOLOGICAL ISSUES

• Process theism seems to have won the 'battle' in favour of a God who affects all and is affected by all
• However, some classic forms of Process theism push this to the point of making God dependent on the world in order to be God, esp. Whitehead:
• As with Hegel, God becomes, in a manner, 'parasitic' on the universe in order to fulfill Godself as God.
• This tends to take away the graciousness of Creation, a rather central experience in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

5. Process-Relational Trinitarian Theism and its advantages over Naturalism and other kinds of Process Theism for ecological purposes

Firstly, process relational trinitarian theism considerably enhances the process relational metaphysics:

A process-relational trinity provides a fundamentally process-relational base to a process-relational universe
As in classic neo-platonic panentheism, 'Exemplary Causality' is added to the Efficient and Final Causality

Secondly, it provides some argument for giving considerable value to eco-systems as such, and not just to their ingredients:

There is Someone for whom reality as a whole is valuable
To impoverish the whole, either in respect of its eco-systemic complexity or in the variety and diversity of its inhabitants, is to impoverish God.

Thirdly, a process trinitarian theology enables us to maintain the graciousness of creation while still having a God who not only affects everything but is affected by everything:

For Process metaphysics, to be is to have power.
Creating therefore involves a gracious, freely chosen self-limiting, creation is already a kind of Divine Kenosis (cf. Peter Forrest)
The Creative Process, then, is an overflow and a flowing back, which, given already a Primordial Trinity, is metaphysically not necessary, though given the Divine Goodness perhaps probablistically inevitable! ("Goodness diffuses itself: the gods are not jealous…" cf. Plato and Aristotle.

Fourthly, Process trinitarian Theism (indeed any Christian/Jewish/Islamic Process Theism) may provide us with some subtle ways of dealing with the Problem of Marginal Cases:

It is no longer necessary to base all our ethics in our general metaphysics
We may be able to make some kind of argument in favour of the non-replacability of individual human beings, including babies: individual human beings, as such, have irreplacable intrinsic value. (cf. Peter Forrest).
The theism comes in over the top to give a kind of 'sacralization' of pre-existing already discerned intrinsic value.
Finally, we can use our theism in a kind of reversal of the Euthrypho dilemma: because we know God values even (and even especially) the marginal ones, we know them to be intrinsically valuable, valuable in and of themselves.
As we gradually put on the mind of Christ, come to see people and all God’s creatures as God sees them, we may well ourselves come to experience them as valuable in and of themselves...
Neither of the previous two moves need commit us to Divine Command Ethics!
(of course this is not going to help atheistic non-Christians like Peter Singer - but we are not atheistic non-Christians. Eventually, it is their problem, a serious weakness in their system, if they can't find a way of reverencing the marginal members of our own species).

Finally, the religions world and indigenous provide one of two still existing sources to align ourselves with

in our fight to take back control and responsibility for our lives and for the lives of the ecosystems of which we are a part
to subordinate economy to communities, themselves considered as creatively and artistically interacting parts of total environments
Religions are good at individual and communal character formation and sustinence, via various kinds of transformative practice
To broaden concern
To minimize the confining and limiting influences of ego
I.e. to improve the how, the element of transformative creativity in our creative responsiveness
And to open ourselves to the immanent and transcendent resources in the total created/creative process

Or at least they can do this, if they are operating well, and once they have been purified of their sometimes too much anthropocentric bias…

In the direction of a truly God-centred world view, which properly understood is also Earth Centred and Life Centred, and which takes account and helps to guide the peculiar responsibilities humans have as creatures who know themselves as emergent, creatively interacting parts of all this...