Primordial Truth & Postmodern Theology

by David Ray Griffin, Huston Smith

In this book, Huston Smith and David Ray Griffin propose religious philosophies to succeed the waning worldview of modernity. Huston Smith proposes the perennial philosophy or primordial tradition, and David Ray Griffin offers postmodern process theology. The ultimate issue debated is whether we should return to a traditional religious philosophy or seek a new never-before-articulated worldview. The debate covers the following the relation of Christianity to other religions; the ultimate reality of a personal God in relation to a transpersonal absolute; the ultimate reality of time and progress; the problem of evil; the nature of immortality; the relation of humans to nature; the relation of science to theology; the relation of upward to downward causation; and the possibility of nonrelativistic criteria for deciding between competing worldviews.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1989

About the author

Dr. 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.

Reviews

[Dan Lawler · Rating 3 out of 5]

On Being and Becoming

David Griffin (for process theology) and Huston Smith (for perennial philosophy) debate the pros and cons of their respective worldviews with the hope that mankind will adopt one or the other and thereby prevent the imminent collapse of civilization portended by philosophical postmodernism. In a Joint Statement, the two men insist that "we must, for individual, social, and planetary health and even survival, move beyond the modern worldview, including the relativistic, nihilistic postmodern mind-set." They go on to say that each of their own positions "is far superior to any version of the modern worldview and to any of the fully relativistic, nihilistic stances, sometimes called postmodern, that have resulted from taking certain modern presuppositions to their logical conclusions."

A key difference between the two men's views is the preferences given to the concepts of being and becoming. Smith's perennial philosophy (a/k/a primordial truth a/k/a Advaita Vedanta) privileges being over becoming. Aldous Huxley, quoting Plotinus, wrote that the completely illuminated perennialists "see all things, not in process of becoming, but in Being, and see themselves in the other." The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West (P.S.) By contrast, a defining characteristic of process theology is "the rejection of metaphysics that privilege 'being' over 'becoming'". (Wikipedia.) The being/becoming dichotomy has a significant influence on the gods of perennial philosophy and process theology.

For Smith, the ultimate reality is the Absolute which is unchanging and undifferentiated. The reality we think we perceive as having time, space, dimension, change and definable characteristics such as good/bad, true/false, beauty/profanity are mere illusions that all disappear in the Absolute like drops in the ocean. Things that appear to be in the process of becoming are also illusions and this, presumably, includes process theology and its God.

For Griffin, there are two ultimates. The axiological ultimate is God who is morally good and influences other entities in the universe (like humans and lesser beings) toward goodness, but cannot effectively bring about good outcomes. In other words, the process God is not omnipotent. There is also a metaphysical ultimate that Griffin calls Creative Experience which is not a being or entity, but rather, is an agency or process. It is the ultimate process of becoming. Every entity in the universe, from atoms to man, participates in the process through their individual creative experiences by which they impact everything they encounter, including God who is also in the process of becoming.

Besides the being/becoming distinction, another key difference between the two views is the preferences given to reason and intuition (or mysticism). Smith and Griffin both recognize that Modernism failed because neither rationalism nor empiricism provided a basis by which man could derive meaning or value for himself or the world in which he lived. Modernism had hit an epistemological brick wall: on one side was finite man and his world of particulars, and on the other unreachable side - if there was anything at all - were the infinite, the eternal, and the universal. The modernist hope of finding universals for truth, value and meaning had given way to postmodern pessimism, relativism and nihilism. Nowadays, if you want truth, value and meaning you must create it for yourself, but all you will have are subjective mental constructs, not objective reality, truth or meaning.

Modernism could not break on through to the other side of the epistemological barrier. For Smith and Griffin, however, the Other Side breaks through to man via intuition and mysticism. Gurus, mystics, spiritual geniuses (Smith's term), and other sensitive souls can communicate with the Great Beyond and enlighten the rest of us as to what its all about. But Smith and Griffin disagree on a critical point.

For Smith, mystical revelation trumps reason and rationality. Perennialists "rise above" logical coherence, he says. "To make religion rational is to sound its death knell" and "religion needs impossibilities and faith believes contrary to reason." What this means in practice is that spiritual geniuses can make antithetical statements about reality and that's all well and good with Smith. Why shouldn't it be given that the Absolute has no categories. It has no "good" and "evil", no "true" and "false", and no "A" and "not A". The law of non-contradiction is just an illusion as far as the Absolute and Smith are concerned.

Griffin, while acknowledging that a satisfactory worldview requires a non-rational religious vision, nevertheless demands that all such visions be subjected to reason. If its not logically coherent, its not true. No "mystery mongering" for Griffin!

So who wins this debate? Well, if you're into logical coherence, Griffin pummels Smith who barely fights back and essentially concedes the irrationality of perennial philosophy. Griffin also outscores Smith on the "livability" of their respective worldviews by pointing out that while Smith claims evil is ultimately just an illusion, he lives as if it were real and actively opposes it; and once again Smith concedes. Though Smith is way behind on points, he has a secret weapon, a metaphorical Five-Point-Palm-Exploding-Heart-Technique, if you will, and he delivers a lethal blow to process theology by book's end.

Griffin's process theology is built upon what he calls "hard core common sense beliefs." These are ideas that cannot be denied in practice though one might deny them in theory. They include the belief in the existence of an external world, the principle of cause and effect, and the law of non-contradiction. While someone might deny these things in theory, they necessarily affirm them in practice by living as if they were all true.

Smith exposes the Modernist presuppositions underlying Griffin's hard core common sense beliefs and lets loose a version of Descartes' Evil Genius on them. Granted we perceive these things to be true and act as if they were, how do we know that what we perceive is ultimately real? How does Griffin know that his hard core common sense beliefs are not temporal illusions that will ultimately dissolve into an undifferentiated, unchanging Absolute? He doesn't know and he can't know. He loses. But so does Smith.

Given their respective "ultimates," neither perennial philosophy nor process theology can rescue mankind from the relativism and nihilism of postmodern philosophy as both views are relativistic and nihilistic in their own right. Good and evil, truth and falsity, beauty and profanity have no ultimate meaning or value in Smith's Absolute. Hitler and the Holocaust, Christ and the Cross, and everything else are really all one with the undifferentiated Absolute. If that's not relativistic and nihilistic, what is?

Griffin believes that goodness, truth and beauty are real and enduring and desirable, but process theology has no objective standard to give content to these happy sounding words and provides no guarantee that good will ultimately prevail. While the process God desires good, it has no power to effect it. The efficacious ultimate, Creative Experience, is amoral and takes no sides. If the universe comes to an evil end and God's will is thwarted, Creative Experience's response, if it has one, will simply be "sh*t happens!" That's the process. You bets your money and you takes your chances. God may not play dice with the universe, as Einstein surmised, but in process theology the universe plays dice with God, and there is no assurance whatsoever that Creative Experience's crap-shoot will give us a world or a God we can ultimately live with.

The book has a five star presentation of two worldviews by two guys who seem to really care about their fellow man. Its dinged two stars because neither view is an adequate response to postmodernism.

[Matija V · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a very intriguing attempt to contrast and (potentially) synthesize what is known as "process theology" (mainly Whitehead's concepts, advanced by men like Hartshorne, Cobb, and Griffin) and "perennialism" (expounded by men like Lovejoy, Huxley, Wilber, and Smith).

I wish there was ultimately more to be synthesized here, but Griffin and Smith hit a conceptual road block almost immediately, spending the rest of the book trying to pinpoint where the fundamental differences lie. In a major way the difference came down to epistemological/formal technicalities; Griffin's hardcore commonsense truths vs. Huston Smith's constant re-orientation to the transrational truth of the Absolute.

Substantively the disagreements came with how to relate science to religion (I do believe Griffin was more correct and coherent here) and how each theory accounts for the problem of evil (for Griffin, it's an inevitable feature of a self-determining plurality of actualities; for Smith, evil is ultimately an illusion... in the eye of Spirit everything is perfectly harmonious).

Ken Wilber is briefly mentioned in the book, by Griffin, as a Perennial Philosophy thinker who does not share the same thoughts on the science/religion divide that Smith does (it was hard to tell on first read whether the disagreements here were just semantic). Wilber is a thinker who seems to synthesize the insights of these two traditions very successfully, something unfortunately "unachieved" in this book. But the greatness in the book is highlighting the places where differences do lie and where the problems for each tradition lay. I think Wilber has a sophisticated system which acknowledges many of the problems posed by Griffin. I do suspect that Griffin ultimately sees the Perennialist claims as unfounded and merely speculative. What should of been emphasized is the transrational states and stages of development that bring forth these kind of insights. This is supported by Griffin's expanded role for science.

It's a little awkward to ponder this and certainly to pose the possibility to Griffin personally but maybe Griffin just doesn't have much experience with meditation and mystical states? This was Whitehead's limitation I think, theologically. His God is mostly metaphysical-rational rather then metaphysical-transrational. The Perennialist resorts to all of these paradoxes that Griffin finds absurd, but they hit the nail on the head as far as language can carry us; the Creativity, the Natures of God, the Creatures themselves; all of these process categories, as they are related for Griffin, carry a subtle dualism/trialism, never quite finding the unity that the Perennialist experiences as fundamental. ONE Taste.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A SEMI-“DIALOGUE” BETWEEN TWO PROMINENT RELIGIOUS THINKERS

Retired theologian David Ray Griffin (b. 1939; he has more recently become well-known for his skeptical views on 9/11: e.g., Debunking 9/11 Debunking; has written/cowritten other books such as Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition; Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology; Two Great Truths: A New Synthesis of Scientific Naturalism and Christian Faith; Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion]], etc. Huston Cummings Smith (1919-2016) was a famed religious studies scholar, who wrote pathbreaking books such as The World's Religions]].

They wrote in the Introduction to this 1989 book, “This book is a dialogue between two people, both of whom are highly critical of the modern worldview. Both are keenly interested in the relation between science and religion, and between Christianity and other religions. And both, at some point in their odysseys, abandoned the position the other now holds for the one he presently espouses. This puts us in a favorable position, we felt, to work on the deep-lying differences between our two positions---one perennial, the other postmodern. Our discussion also held the prospect, it seemed to us, of bringing the outlines of our two positions into sharper relief by virtue of the contrasts we would be mainly focusing on. We agree on far more than divides us, but in this book we only allude to our commonalities so we can get on with the differences.”

Later, they explain, “the major value of this book, we expect, is that it provides readers who are dissatisfied with modernity and relativistic postmodernity an inside look at two alternatives, or, we should say, two versions of two of the major alternatives available today. Each position is presented and defended by an advocate and criticized by sympathetic critic---one who affirms its basic intention and wishes it well---in fact, wishes to help make it better!... Through this back-and-forth process of presentation, critique, clarification, defense and countercritique, the reader should have a sufficient basis to evaluate the respective viability of these two alternatives to the dominant worldview of modernity.” (Pg. 14)

Griffin summarizes, “I present a postmodern theology as an alternative way to recover these postmodern truths and values that are at the center of Smith’s concerns. These truths and values are: the rootage of all finite existence in divinity; and enchanted universe in which values, qualities, and purposes are primary; downward causation… nonsensory experience; the direct experience of values; the intuition of primordial universal truths; a noble self-image; present meaning; and hope for immortality. I suggest that these truths and values can better be recovered not by a return to a premodern vision but by an advance to a postmodern vision, in which truths and values of the modern tradition are included… because it includes modern as well as premodern truths, but also because it is devoid of the problems of inadequacy and incoherence inherent in Smith’s premodern vision.” (Pg. 43)

Smith says of life after death, “As for what actually happens after death, I agree with Griffin’s tentativity. What I SUSPECT is that at some point the Beatific Vision becomes ‘ecstatic’ in the etymological sense of that word; which is to say, it causes us to stand outside ourselves… so completely that literally zero attention remains for self-reflection. If this were to happen, would we deplore the relinquishment of self-consciousness---our attention to ourselves as the individuals who were HAVING the Beatific Vision?... [Griffin] is prepared to accept the possibility that our subjective awareness continues after death. But traces of self-centeredness seem to persist in that he wants to retain his finite ego. It would suffice for him that he be brought to the Beatific Vision. That vision must be HIS in the sense that, when it dawns on him, he must be conscious not only of its content, but of David Griffin as its observer.” (Pg. 67)

Griffin states, “just as the divine love is free from the imperfections of our loving which are due to finitude and sin, while yet being genuinely analogous to our love, so the divine temporality is free from the imperfections of our temporality … The divine temporality belongs among the divine perfections. Temporality, like love and knowledge, is capable of perfect and imperfect embodiments, God as concrete exemplifies perfect temporality, while the abstract essence of God exemplifies perfect timelessness.” (Pg. 124-125)

Smith concludes, “For me the presiding unity is ontological. Its referent is an actuality—the One, Absolute, Ultimate, Infinite, Reality---from which all else proceeds. Griffin and I both have our one and our many. In fact… both of our unities are fourfold. His four are the categories of God, creativity, eternal objects, and the structure of actual occasions, which are united by mutual entailment, while mine are four levels of reality, which are united because the greater include the lesser and attenuate the divisions between them.” (Pg. 185)

Griffin concludes, “In my vision, which is pan-en-theistic, the relation of God and the world is analogous to that of the human soul or mind to its body, with the mind and body understood as distinct and equally real while being intimately related. God and a world presuppose each other and are intimately interrelated but they are not simply identical. Not only does the divine soul of the universe transcend the multiplicity of finite things, having a unity of creative experience in response to the world; each finite unity also transcends God, in the sense of having a partially self-determining unity of experience that is influenced but not wholly determined by God. Because God and the world are really distinct in the sense that each has its own creativity by which it partially transcends the other, worldly freedom, evil, and time can all be taken as ultimately real without impugning God’s goodness and unity.” (Pg. 200-201)

As a “dialogue,” I frankly didn’t think this book worked very well; their respective viewpoints are really quite different from each other, and their “common ground” somewhat limited. But as an expression by two prominent theological thinkers, their individual expositions are quite interesting and unique.

[Kris L · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the best part of this book was the beginning where they defined their usage of postmodernism and their respective backgrounds. The rest was (and probably still is) misspent energy. I’m not a better Christian from having read this book. If anything, I now feel true evil actually exists, but I can’t tell you who that thought more aligns with?