Rather than a strange white dead end metaphysic. So can I get a yes for now? And can I

then I want I don't want to derail what this this this trajectory on you look excited about it. And so I

know I really am. It's like a moment that will go down in history. And we're gonna have the time code right now. Slash it on the screen. So here's the position that we hold. We oppose a very strict Dr. Nair Whiteheadian, whose position we might say is consistent. Whatever the metaphysical principles of the world, they're Whiteheadian, and they're true from the beginning of this cosmological epoch and they never change. And that's probably a view that's impossible to falsify, it's set up the principles and it just stays in the strictest without exception presentation and absolutely orthodox whitehead. Right? There are very few of them, but we could we could find a few. And then we are first. We know a lot, but

we know most of them.

Yeah, right. It's true. Our first criticism is to say, there's hardly a process theologian that actually fits in that category, and maybe none. So Cobb has, God is an exception to the metaphysical principles, that's not allowed, according to the beginning of process of reality, because God is an eternal concrescence. Griffin says God is a series of actual occasions, but also breaks certain rules. So some God has some qualities that other actual occasions don't have. So for us, it's not, we don't find examples of a purely consistent white -headed view. So we say, guys, maybe what we need then is a view of the world where genuine novelty happens. And then I would say that our view is consistent all the way through. So the beginning of the world, if it comes not from a more ancient world, but as itself a kind of creation out of nothing, there's obviously a huge novelty. Then that is physical for some 4 billion years. So I'll put in point seven two if that's a universe. So, you know, until let's imagine life is only on this planet, that seems unlikely to me. But if that were true, then until about a billion years ago, so 12 .72 billion years is nothing. And then there's an emergent as life for the first time, self -reproducing cells that as Stuart Kaufman says are out to earn a living in the world. No carbon atom or hydrogen atom is out to earn a living, it interacts. But when a species ceases exist, something that was real in the world doesn't exist anymore. And the drive for self preservation, the drive for experience, the drive to reproduce is basic to this picture. And then at some point, that the nascent mentality that the non self conscious mentality of organisms begins to issue into an organism that can be aware of itself thinking, that can, as we well know, self criticize and self reflect all the way through. And that maybe is yet another major emergent. And if as the Christian tradition says, there's some tell us of the universe, that's yet another emergent. So for us as emergentists, yes, we have a very different view of the history of the universe, with new things happening that weren't already present, actually present at earlier stages. And I would say that that sounds like a really compelling view. Let me pause there and see if that that's the view I'm trying to get. Have you admit that you you would endorse at least for this minute?

Yeah, I think that's I think that's helpful. And and and here here's been my experience showing up at UK related things. The view of process they have is so wrong and backwards that it drives me up a wall. And just for sheer antagonistic purposes, I will perform my best David Ray Griffin with gusto. So like, and here's why, right? What you just described is something like how even what they would name is like the most orthodox for process style theologians have actually modified Whitehead's metaphysics for real reasons connected to what? The fact they're Christian theologians, like a Christian, I'm not saying everyone should be one, I'm just saying that a Christian theologian says whatever the hell the ultimate is, was some way, even it may even like even bolt month, I get the most existential way, uh, defined by an encounter with Jesus as the Christ. Like that's like a rather, I would say even more robust than that, of course. But like if you're doing that and then you find a particular metaphysic, beautiful, compelling, you could even say that the whole freaking fifth part of processing reality is like a philosophical invitation to walk the aisle for an image of God that resonates with the cross. Like yeah. So if you're in that situation and you were to gauge how much effort you have to do to get process philosophy to be compatible with the character and testimony to God in the biblical scriptures versus Aristotle or Plato. I, this is what drives me up a wall. Yeah. If, if I'm like, Oh, I disagree with this part, or I'm going to switch this. They're like, see, you're not really a real process dealer. And then they're like, well, I'm a Thomas. Well, what's that? Well, he's really into Aristotle. And then you ask them all basic modifications they make to what seeming to be straightforward testimony, the people of Israel. And I'm like, that sounds like you put more See, this is the thing that drives me where this issue goes in my head is it a process theologian is somehow supposed to be a fundamentalist about a metaphysic, but a Thomas or a Platonist or whatever gets to change all sorts of stuff because they compelled by God's self -testimony in the history of Israel and the person of Jesus. And I don't know why a Christian theologian that finds Whitehead more compelling and much more promising given the challenges we face as a species on this particular planet, like what's wrong with modifying things based on detailed commitments or that perhaps the metaphysic is better descriptive at the biological account of biological phenomena than for a quirk? Who the hell knows how you talk about a phenomenology of a quirk? I don't know. I

don't know. I don't even know what it's like to be a bat. give you one more argument. There shouldn't be change in thought over time for the Thomas because it's all got to be eternally fixed. Whereas for the process, you would expect the history of Israel and the experience of an incredible prophet to transform our understanding of the divine. The process builds in its own hermeneutic of change, which its opponents can't draw on without self -condescending. And

oddly enough, White had thought the Cappadocians account of the Trinity was the third great breakthrough of Western civilization. He's like, Plato, great, eternal ideas, possibility, and the way it relates to the present. Second one, the best picture of power is Jesus sticking it to the system and dying. Third best idea, interpenetration of identity described by the Cappadocians in Platonist philosophy modified for the Trinity. Are

you saying that in some ways that model of the Trinity is the model for an actual occasion in white? Yeah. Namely being, um, pre -ending all other mentality, all other experience within itself and drawing on it to become a unique individual this realm of experiences or pan experience. Yeah,

and we have physical attachments to our own past that make the prehencheon of the whole different than what happens in the picture, the Cappadocian's account of the Trinity. Right? The son the son, because what? The son is gives the son fully to the father and the spirit and receives the spirit and the father fully into it's precisely by the reciprocal giving and receiving that you then call that network of relations, the God who is love. And so like, if that's the image, right, then, in some sense, I think every contemplative Christian is going to say something like this. One of the ways we break habits of, of, of being inwardly focused, selfishly obsessed, even just personal destructive habits is that we relate to our past in ways that they aren't fully determinative of the present. And, and but that determination, the way determinism comes in has so much to do with the way that we identify ourselves in a moment of becoming with the past in a kind of completeness that is problematizing. And so the reciprocal relations the Trinity are, you know, what happens when that event without, I don't know, what's the image that Whitehead uses where like the water's like, push it out. So now, even though the water's coming in, we just have a habit of putting it

a road. The line or gorge that the river cuts into the limestone or neurons that fire more often are more stable connections and those are used less often. So there's both reason for continuity, so explanation that we do the same, and possibility of change, which is a really cool Christian anthropology based on a broadly processed idea. But my drive, it just seems like a discussion is so obviously proved that the orthodox white head thinkers are wrong and the two of us are right and our allies, then I want to push back. And that's really how we open this discussion, is that what interests us the most is the flow of ideas and not the joy of a dogmatic poem. This is actually what I've been writing on in Tikhov in just the last couple of years. There's something about and Psychism that captures what you just described more fully than a more cautious emergence view. You know, the physical world gives rise to these emergent phenomena, namely fundamental, at least let's just go at least from the point of sales on, let's just bracket, you know, some history of the universe prior to there being any living being whatsoever. Once you have living beings, isn't in some ways the panpsychist answer more attractive? It's it allows us to think that at any moment for any living being, there is a realm of the mental causation of a really existing, experiential dimension to all of life that we're a part of, we share, that we're not just these complex thoughts in our cortex, but we are the responses of every cell and neuron, the hormone releases, neurotransmitters. It's a much more holistic, pan -mental system that we are a part of or the cell or the raccoon are a part of. in the way that say, the Trinity of the Cappadocians was not. Isn't there something really attractive about that? It's boldly metaphysical. It distulates a pervasive mental realm in which we participate and through which our own being in the world is better explained. That's what's happening in the discussion in the last years among theologians across the whole range who didn't talk like this before. And I'd like to wrestle with that with you for a moment. I think

the panpsychic vision is really attractive. And I think within panpsychism that there are so many variations, right? Like even in this book, Go to Heart edited, which he was a part of the mindfulness of nature group. Like if you ask me, his emergent panpsychism is the one I would imagine, like would think is the closest to my, I don't know, intuitions or whatever, but you could, you could spend in that article to be a strong emergent disposition in your theist. So you have an idealist camp.

Sorry, we need a story. A couple of years ago, I said you would go to Hardwood when I was with Penn and Burke in the very beginning of my career, right out of Fuller Seminary. was Pannenberg and Go to Hardbrounterow, a young Jesuit living in the, teaching, or, yeah, teaching already at the Institute for Philosophy, the Jesuit School in Munich. And we became friends and had long coffees and discussions and issues. I'd never met anyone so brilliant. You know, it wasn't just enough to know Hegel inside out. We were taking classes at Dieter Henrich, this great German idealist, but then he would be reading Plotinus along on the side, bring the Plotinus text to class. It was just amazingly brilliant person. So we were both going to be speaking on this topic at Stuttgart, at a Catholic academic house. And my plane from, first note from Lille, Southern France was late, so I missed my keynote on Friday evening. And so Godotard then gave my keynote for me. He said, this is what Phil would have said, and here's why he's wrong. Ha, only an old friend could get away with that. And it was a large audience, 100 people or something like that in this overlooking Stuttgart. And I arrived late that night and heard that what he had done was not particularly happy. And so, but Godard came up to me later that evening and he said, let's take Sunday morning, let's cancel my talk altogether and let's do a dialogue. And in German, because the audience is German, so you know, you'll have a disadvantage, but that's okay, you can do this. So we had an hour and a half debate on the Sunday morning of this conference in Stuttgart. And this picks up on exactly what you just said. Our positions were so close and yet not identical. So for him, it was a panpsychism that had room for different manifestations of the mental, time when it's not manifested in times that it is. My position is called proto -panpsychism, which says that the mental exists as potential earlier on, or it exists a preliminary state. It's, but it has the possibility to be expressed, but it's not yet actually expressed as mental. Now, I'll just stop right there. If you hear those two descriptions, wouldn't you say, hey, that sounds like you guys are saying the same thing. Again, go to hard position is panpsychists, and my position is strictly not panpsychists. And I'd like you to be the arbiter trip. If you can resolve it once and for all, we'll follow them up. All

right. So prior to the emergence of life, Phil, would you say that the movement of the cosmos had a causally closed deterministic trajectory from the event of creation. Right. So that the principle of possibility, the way it was proto or latently present were connected to the initial givens of the cosmos. And so, and for Goda, hard, he's going to say, like, there is an interiority to everything that gets more complex over time, but you would not call, you would not, uh, he would hear, and this is how I have heard it. Cause I hung out with you a lot. Like I always go like, yeah, but is he really just like a determinist till there's life? Because if you, and then if you restarted at the big bang, is it all the same until there's a single cell? Right? Like if the principle of possibility prior to the emergence of biology is settled with the initial, or is it settled So in some sense, the mind of God prior to, if you're thinking theologically, the mind of God prior to the emergence of life is namely conditions that life would emerge, creating the conditions that life would emerge eventually in this process. And that's when creation's able to hear the call, lure, or respond to evaluative possibilities.