More Wow

A reader writes:

Reading "The Big Wow!" reminded me of two other takes on consciousness, the universe, and connectedness, so to speak. One notion comes from the Tao Te Ching (52):

In the beginning was the Tao.
All things issue from it;
all things return to it.

The second notion is termed "process thought" or "process theology." It is a theory of God formulated in modern times by Alfred North Whitehead around 1925 and carried on by, among others, Charles Hartshorne, student of Whitehead, and David Ray Griffin. My take on it is rudimentary. Griffin states the following:

"[N]ature is comprised of creative experiential events. The term ‘events’ indicates that the basic units of reality are not enduring things, or substances, but momentary events. Each enduring thing, such as an electron, an atom, a cell, or a psyche, is a temporal society, comprised of a series of momentary events, each of which incorporates the previous events of that enduring individual."

My understanding of process theology (also called naturalistic theism) is that God is – and becomes – the repository of all these experiential events. In Hartshorne’s words,

"How can I know what it will mean to posterity that I now listen to Mozart for an hour?  Perhaps nothing of any significance.  And this applies to much of my life.  But there is One to whom it may mean something.  For while God is already familiar with Mozart He is not already familiar with the experience I may now have of Mozart. . .

In this sense we can interpret ‘heaven’ as the conception which God forms of our actual living, a conception which we partly determine by our free decisions but which is more than all our decisions and experiences, since it is the synthesis of God’s participating responses to these experiences.  It is the book which is never read by any man save in unclear fragmentary glimpses; but is the clearly given content of the divine appreciation."

To date, of my studies regarding the problem of evil, process theology comes closest to providing me a view that I can live with – that is, a view of God that I can live with. Otherwise, I once again slip into agnosticism.