All That Is: A Naturalistic Faith for the Twenty-First Century

All That Is: A Naturalistic Faith for the Twenty-First Century. By Arthur Peacocke. Minneapolis, Minn. : Fortress Press, 2007. xvi + 220 pp. $23.00 (paper). The late Arthur Peacocke began his professional career as a biologist, and mid-career turned to theology and was ordained a priest in the Church of England. In the 1960s he was among a handful of pioneers writing at the interface of theology and the natural sciences. After gaining prominence, he founded two important organizations: first, the Society of Ordained Scientists to provide moral and spiritual support for those whose lives straddle religious and scientific vocations; and second, The Ian Ramsey Center, based in Oxford, which became a garnering point for scholarly symposia and for research in theology and science. What inspired many of those influenced by his later writings were his efforts in epistemology. If the world the scientist explores is the same world the theist depicts as God's creation, then one must pursue consonance and intelligibility across theoretical/descriptive domains. To do tins Peacocke developed principles mat mark die continuities/discontinuities in a bottom-up hierarchy of constraint and explanation in interdisciplinary inquiry. What applies to interdisciplinary work in the sciences applies also to the relationship between theology and the sciences. Peacocke then applied himself to building a worldview that could support theology in a post-evolutionary cultural context, while remaining faidiful to die creedal tradition. The perspective he held may be described metaphysically as panentheistic, and it builds upon emergence theory for interpreting evolutionary complexity. All That Is was written up to and including the year of his deadi. It gamers together themes developed in more detail in other places over die past twenty years. In some ways he grew more adventurous with age, stating succinctiy a "naturalistic," emergent, and panentheistic vision of divine reality, and God-world-human relationships. The first part (chapters 1-4), describes the philosophical perspective, from which he develops theological themes (centrally Christology) in die second half (chapters 5-11). Following this are responses and tributes from friends and prominent philosophers and theologians who had worked with Peacocke over the years. Philip Clayton offers an introduction to die volume and Peacocke concludes by acknowledging the responses, and with a beautiful final meditation tided Nunc Dimittis. The whole volume has a sense of "last words" from a great figure in the field of theology and science. Three topics fill die first part: naturalism, emergence, andpanentheism. After rejecting kinds of naturalism that eliminate the theistic option, Peacocke affirms naturalism as a "universal web of cause-effect relations," which God does not violate by interventions. If one assumes a panentheistic outlook - that the world is in God, though divine reality transcends the world - then in effect, the causal web just is God's intentional action. One could find traces of the classic theistic model here as he speaks of an ultimate God-world dualism (p. 9), but then quickly asserts "the profoimd unity of all things in the One who is the personal God" (p. 10). He attempts a resolution of this problem in analogy: God's continuous creativity is to the physical universe what human intentionality is to bodily operations. Finite minds represent specialized capacities not an entity) in persons with downward causal efficacy in the organic systems; we do not need to look for something extra acting on the body. So also, the world's processes, entities, and structures are substrates of divine intentional action. Peacocke pictures theistic naturalism in the context of a vibrant and dynamic natural world, consisting fundamentally of a single physical stuff, which over time shows evidence of transition toward greater levels of complexity, each level instantiating new structures yielding new properties. …