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My understanding is that I was asked to address myself to this topic because of interests and questions arising from the Isthmus Institute Lectures this past year, especially the first of these lectures by Ilya Prigogine, in the discussion of which I had occasion to participate. As I gather, some of the things I said or implied either in my response to Professor Prigogine or during the ensuing question and answer period led someone to suppose that that discussion might well be followed up by the sort of roundtable round table planned for today.

Those of you who were present on that earlier occasion may recall Professor Prigogine's remark that, were it up to him, he would prefer to speak of "convergences of science and philosophy" rather than of "convergences of science and religion." I myself had a good deal of sympathy with what I took to be the point of this remark, even though on my own, very broad, strictly functional definition of "religion" the contrast of religion with philosophy could hardly be anything like as sharp and clear as on the conventional understanding of "religion" that Professor Prigogine evidently presupposed. In any event, on my view of philosophy, it would certainly be involved-and necessarily involved-in involved—and necessarily involved—in any discussion I could imagine of convergences between science and religion.

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On my understanding, science and religion are alike, in that, at bottom, each is a mode of inquiry, a way of asking and answering a question that is significant, given our vital interests as human beings in not only living, but living well, and, so far as possible, living better. At the same time, I understand religious inquiry to be different-in different—in fact, logically different-from different—from scientific, insofar as the question that it pursues and attempts to answer is the existential question about the ultimate meaning of our existence as such, given the ultimate reality with which we must somehow come to terms in our understanding of ourselves.

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Notwithstanding the essential difference of this religious question from the typical question of the special sciences, however, I understand it to be possible for religion and science to converge at two main points. Because the existential question to which religion seeks an answer has two aspects, metaphysical and moral, religion necessarily has both properly metaphysical and properly moral implications. It has properly metaphysical implications because, in its metaphysical aspect, the existential question is the question about the meaning of ultimate reality for us; and any answer to this question necessarily implies some answer to the properly metaphysical question about the structure of ultimate reality in itself. Unless ultimate reality in itself had one structure rather than another, it could not have the meaning for us that it is asserted to have by any answer to the existential question as such as is given by religion. But, then, religion also has

*A statement opening the Isthmus Institute Roundtable, 8 May 1983.

properly moral implications because, in its moral aspect, the existential question to which religion gives an answer is the question about our own self-understanding in relation to ultimate reality; and any answer to this question necessarily implies some answer to the properly moral question about how we are to act and what we are to do in relation to others. Unless it were morally right for us to act in one way rather than another and to do some things instead of others, the self-understanding implying such moral action could not be the authentic understanding of ourselves that religion asserts it to be.

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In sum, then, as I understand them, science and religion converge at these two points--in points—in the one case through the mediation of metaphysics, in the other, through the mediation of morality. But this is tantamount to saying that science and religion converge through the mediation of philosophy; for, on the classical understanding of all of these concepts, metaphysics proper and morals proper are both comprised in what is properly called "philosophy." Literally, or etymologically, of course, "philosophy" means "love of wisdom," or, alternatively, perhaps, "the wisdom that is worth loving." In a more contemporary idiom, one could make the same point by saying that philosophy is the critically reflective form of integral, secular self-understanding. By critically reflecting on all the primary cultural forms, secular as well as religious, philosophy seeks to make fully explicit the ultimate meaning of human existence. It seeks an answer to the same existential question to which religion claims to give an answer, only for it neither anyone any one particular religion nor even all religions together has any kind of privileged status among the data on which this answer has to be based. Despite this essential difference from religion, however, which explains why I speak of philosophy as "secular," the existential question to which it seeks an answer has the same two aspects as when this question is asked and answered by religion. Thus philosophy's question, like religion's, has both a metaphysical and a moral aspect, in that it asks about both the meaning of ultimate reality for us and the authentic understanding of ourselves. And here, too, any answer to the metaphysical aspect of its question has properly metaphysical implications, while any answer to the moral aspect of its question has properly moral implications.

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Like most such terms, "process philosophy" can be said to have three related, but different, senses: (1) a very strict, or proper, sense; (2) a broad sense; and (3) a very broad, or improper, sense. In its very strict or proper sense, "process philosophy" should be understood to apply primarily, if not exclusively, to the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and certain of his followers, most notably, Charles Hartshorne. In its broad sense it may be taken to apply as well to the work of any number of predecessors and contemporaries of Whitehead and Hartshorne, particularly those whom Douglas Browning has described in the title of his excellent anthology of primary sources as "philosophers of process," i.e., the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, and the English philosophers, Samuel Alexander and C. Lloyd Morgan, as well as the American philosophers, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. Some students of these matters would no doubt wish to add the French scientist-theologian-theologianphilosopher philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, although I suspect myself that he more properly belongs in the group referred to by the third, very broad or improper sense of the word, which could be said to also include German philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Max Scheler as well as any number of still more remote antecedents going all the way back, presumably, to Heraclitus.

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Let us consider, first, the metaphysical position expressed or implied by process philosophy in this strict sense of the words. At the risk of oversimplification, I think one way to describe the basic metaphysical axiom of process philosophy is to say that it is process rather than substance, becoming rather than being, that is the inclusive category or transcendental concept for understanding anything real. Please note that I have spoken of process or becoming as the inclusive category, not as the exclusive category. any Any supposition that process metaphysics simply replaces substance with process, being with becoming, thereby assuming a position that would be at least equally one-sided with doing the opposite, is woefully wide of the mark. As a matter of fact, the gravamen of process philosophy's charge against classical metaphysics is not that it simply denied process or becoming, but that it failed to give a consistent account of this essential aspect of experience and reality, what with its assumption that it is substance or being which is the inclusive category. Granted that being and becoming both are somehow real-and real—and on this assumption classical and neoclassical metaphysics are agreed-—the serious question is as to the reality of their conjunction. Is the whole comprising being and becoming together being, or is it, rather, becoming? In this sense, which is the inclusive category?

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At this point, the process metaphysician agrees with the existentialist philosopher in taking our own human existence as temporal, changing, and really related to be what is ultimately real. But, unlike the existentialist, or, at any rate, many existentialists, the process philosopher by no means conceives of metaphysics to be exhausted merely by a new philosophical anthropology. On the contrary, the process metaphysics of Whitehead and Hartshorne takes our experience of ourselves to be paradigmatic of reality as such, and so generalizes the insight into our own existence as temporal and relative selves who are continually changing as also to develop both a new cosmology, or theory of the world, and a new philosophical theology, or theory of the strictly ultimate reality that in theistic religious traditions is called "God," as well as a new ontology, or theory of reality itself. Thus process metaphysics is able to understand all that is actual, from the most insignificant particle of so-called matter all the way up to the God than whom none greater can be conceived, in terms of the same set of fundamental categories or transcendental concepts--namelyconcepts—namely, as an instance of process or becoming of which time, change and relativity, are more concrete and inclusive features than eternity, changelessness, and absoluteness.

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As for the moral position that is taken by process philosophy, it can be readily characterized, given what has now been said about its metaphysics. As the express denial of any form of metaphysical dualism or pluralism that would assert an irreducible difference or differences between kinds, process metaphysics undercuts the metaphysical justification for any homocentric self-understanding and morality. All actual things, from the least to the greatest, are ultimately of one and the same kind, and so there can at most be a relative, not an absolute, difference between one level of actual things and another with respect to how one is to act and what one is to do. Because anything actual is really related to other real things, which can make a difference to it, for better or for worse, it has an intrinsic as well as extrinsic, or merely instrumental, value. At the same time, because process metaphysics allows for the recognition of different emergent levels of actual things, which differ from one another in their degrees of variety and unity, and thus in their degrees of internal harmony or complexity, it enables one to make all of the relative differences that a sound morality requires between one level of things and another--sayanother—say, between human beings and the other nonhuman animals who coinhabit our planet.

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It is also worth noting that, for this philosophy, it makes perfectly good sense, as it hardly does on a classical metaphysical position, to talk about loving and serving God as well as all other beings who can be affected by one's actions. Because even God is not only eternal, unchanging, and absolute, but also temporal, changing, and really related to others-in others—in fact, to all others-{}Godothers—God, too, is such that other things- namelything—namely, all other things-can things—can make a difference to God, for better or for worse. Thus God is the eminent intrinsic value, as well as the eminent extrinsic or instrumental value. God is instrumentally valuable, namely, insofar as God's decisions ever and again re-establish the fundamental limits of cosmic order, thereby setting the optimum conditions for the decisions of all other actual things. Recognizing this, however, the process philosopher can rightly call attention to the moral importance of human actions directed toward maintaining and/or transforming the fundamental limits of social-cultural order. In other words, from the standpoint of process philosophy, the broadly "political" aspect of our moral responsibility comes clearly into focus, insofar as it becomes clear how we in our way, like God in God's way, must so act as to set the optimum conditions for the actions of all.

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But, as I have tried to show, it is just these implications, metaphysical and moral, that process philosophy makes explicit. In doing so, it plays an irreplaceable role in the convergences of science and religion in our time. Neither science nor religion simply is either a metaphysics or a morality, even if each of them, in its way, necessarily implies both. Consequently, it is precisely to philosophy that we must look if we are to find either an explication of the metaphysical and moral implications of science that science itself does not and cannot explicate or sufficient reason to affirm the truth of the convergent metaphysical and moral implications of religion for which religion alone fails to provide a sufficient ground.

*A statement opening the Isthmus Institute Roundtable, 8 May 1983.

Works Consulted

Birch, Charles and Cobb, John B., Jr.

          1981                      1981                   The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Browning, Douglas (ed.)

         1965                      1965                     Philosophers of Process. New York: Random House

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Hartshorne, Charles

         1983                     1983                     Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. Reprint; Lanham, MD: University Press of America

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Whitehead, Alfred North

         1978                    1978                     Process and Reality: As Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed.; New York: The Free Press