Nature's Powers and God's Energies

Abstract

This is an exploration into the synthesis of Mumford and Anjum's pandispositionalist philosophy with Deacon's emergent dynamics, which when interpreted within the theological framework of Palamas’s essence–energies distinction, it all comes together into a new metaphysics that offers a more satisfactory account of the God–world relation. The argument proceeds in two stages. First, a philosophical framework for establishing a dual‐aspect monistic view of the world in terms of presence/absence (or manifested/unmanifested), acknowledging unmanifested powers as a genuine mode of actuality. Second, a theological consideration for a befitting conception of God within this scheme, according to which nature's powers are equated with God's energies, though God's essence is not exhausted by them. The resulting proposition promises a non‐Whiteheadian process view, a panentheistic (not pantheistic) articulation of divine presence, and an account of reality as the dramatization of God's manifestation in the world and our participation in that cosmic revealing.

Palamism and Dispositionalism: Comment on Raslau's Integration of Orthodox Theology With Contemporary Metaphysics of Science

“…Essence and energy are thus not totally identical in God, even though He is entirely manifest in every energy, His essence being indivisible” [Emphasis in original]. This Palamite method of resolving the seeming tension between transcendence versus immanence results in a strikingly robust, realist sense of divine immanence that has prompted some to identify Palamism as a version of Christian panentheism , an identification welcomed by some Orthodox scholars17 (in company with Raslau 2022, 80).…”

Science, Religion, and Culture

“…This issue of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science furthermore contains four thematic sections. In the "Comment and Response" section, Travis Dumsday comments on Flavius Raslau's article in this year's March issue on the integration of Orthodox theology with contemporary metaphysics of science (Raslau 2022), and Raslau responds. The second section is on "Artificial Intelligence and Religion: Recent Advances and Future Directions," which is introduced by guest editor Andrea Vestrucci.…”

Response to Dumsday's “Palamism and Dispositionalism”

“…But the Achilles heel of substratum theory is the specter of reductionism because it renders strong emergence impossible to sustain. Any property attributed to the emergent whole is already possessed by its fundamental parts at the substratum level, and it is redundant to attribute properties to both whole and parts (Raslau 2022a, 66–67). Therefore, if strong emergence is true, then reductionism is false, and since substratum theory entails reductionism, substratum theory is false.…”

“…In “Nature's Powers and God's Energies” (Raslau 2022a), I offer a theory about the God–world relation that builds on a realism about unmanifested actualities and a view about causation that requires the interplay between manifested and unmanifested actualities. This theory draws inspiration from (1) Deacon's emergent dynamics where absence plays a role in causal work; (2) dispositionalism as the most suitable philosophical tradition for accommodating absence as a mode of being; and (3) Palamism as the most suitable theological framework for articulating the absence of God as presence.…”

“…22For a discussion of Deacon's causal role of absence, see Deacon (2012), Deacon and Cashman (2016), and Raslau (2022a, 2022b). …”