Does God Roll Dice?: Divine Providence for a World in the Making by Joseph A. Bracken

Author:Joseph A. Bracken [Bracken, Joseph A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780814680537
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Published: 2012-04-05T07:00:00+00:00

Many contemporary philosophers and theologians have a deep distrust of classical metaphysics with its strong focus on logical analysis and organized thought systems purporting to give a comprehensive view of the God-world relationship or some other all-embracing topic. This attitude may partly be traced to the impact on the academy of Totality and Infinity by Emmanuel Levinas, in which he laid bare the contrast between “totalizing” rational modes of thought and the potential infinity of human subjectivity as seen, above all, in the “face” of the other.1 Likewise, the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others in “deconstructing” classical texts in philosophy and theology so as to reveal their hidden mechanisms for power and control have made the rest of us alert to the subtle dangers of allegedly objective modes of thought. Yet reliance on subjectivity or a purely first-person perspective does not carry much weight in scientific research, where formal logic and systematic thinking are more or less taken for granted. So there is a tension between particularity, the inevitably subjective character of all human cognition, and the classical ideal of universal objectivity. In what follows I will first indicate how Whitehead and some of his followers (including Reiner Wiehl) may have overemphasized the role of subjectivity in nature through their almost exclusive focus on actual entities as “the final real things of which the world is made up.”2 Then I will sketch the approach to systems theory of the noted sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who seems to have downplayed or even eliminated altogether the role of subjectivity in his strictly objective, purely functional analysis of how nature works. Finally, I will indicate how my own reinterpretation of Whiteheadian societies as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual entities manages to give equal value to the necessary interplay of subjectivity and objectivity both in systems thinking and in the workings of nature.

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