Michael asked:

Can you think of any bridges between naturalism and spiritualism? So many people that I associate
with claim to subscribe to a vague "spiritualism" which I take to mean a veiled theistic belief.

I regard myself as a naturalist and pantheist as well. It seems to me that these two beliefs constitute a
naturalist and spiritualist viewpoint and aren't contradictory. However, as a pantheist, it seems to me
that some matter, such as organisms, contains more spirit, or god? than others. Do you have any
thoughts on this to sort things out?

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Certainly you might look into the philosophy of Baruch (or Benedict) Spinoza (1632-1677), for whom
God isNature. But I would recommend the more contemporary philosophy of panexperientialism
(panpsychism, panentheism), especially that of David Ray Griffin (born 1939), who has written
several books in answer to the question you raised. As a student of the thought of Alfred North
Whitehead (1861-1947), he locates the bridge between nature and spirit in the "actual occasion," a
subatomic and momentary "drop" of experience. Everything is either an occasion of experience or is
comprised of such occasions. In every actual entity there is an alternation between physical (efficient)
and mental (final) causality in the same entity.In this categorical scheme, the age-old strife between
monism and dualism is laid to rest. In certain beings that are superorganizations of such occasions,
the mental poles of all the relevant entities coalesce into the conscious mentality that characterizes
the higher animals, including homo sapiens.

Griffin's naturalism rejects supernaturalism root and branch, and categorically outlaws miraculous
interruptions of the natural order. As Whitehead put it in Process and Reality(1929), God is not an
exception to the categorical scheme, but its chief exemplification. But Griffin repudiates materialism
and atheism no less absolutely. There is an actual entity that influences, and is influenced by, all
others. This actual entity provides every other with its initial aim, having selected it from the realm of
pure possibilities — a metaphysical necessity for which materialism makes no satisfactory provision.
That entity is God.

Materialism affirms that, at bottom, all fundamental entities are "all outsides and no insides," purely
vacuous beings, from which premise atheism is a simple inference. But when our hardcore common
sense — which we cannot help but presuppose in practice — tells us that at least wehave insides
(perspectives, points of view), the materialist balks and insists on explaining that fact away. Griffin
suggests that we instead make it our model of reality. In his view, all the alternatives have been tried
and found wanting.

The above hardly does Griffin justice so, please, track down his Unsnarling the World Knot:
Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem(1998); Reenchantment without
Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion(2000); and Religion and Scientific Naturalism:
Overcoming the Conflicts(2000).

Tony Flood

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