Although I would not share as such the perspective of this book, it is a very useful and provocative exploration of many issues current evolutionary theory, as it collides with religion, cannot deal with, because its assumptions of naturalism simply eliminate the problem rather than solving it. Darwinists are often charged thus with naturalistic preconceptions, then judged by a very narrow standard on this score, and we end with miraculous explanations for punctuated equilibrium, and other nonsense. This work by taking a far broader tack stands in the line of a greater tradition of naturalism, that reminds one of the 'evolutionary naturalism' of W. Sellars, and indeed the work summons the philosopher Whitehead to this debate, from which he has been exiled. The author, for example (and this is only a part of the argument) quite audaciously brings in the issue of parapsychology, although this is and will remain problematical. Every culture of man, with the possible exception of various subcultures of the Indian yogic traditions, has been totally confused on this point, and the final confusion is the positivist attempt to declare there is no such subject. It is not surprising that science should take this approach, but the result instantly vitiates the very basis of theory, for the subject has been amputated. However, it is never promising to pursue this area lightly, and it would seem dubious to make it a basis for a new spiritual evolutionism, if the antiquated yet sound traditions of the Buddhist variety always had better sense in their emphasis, not on the marginal parapsychology, but self-consciousness itself. The book generates a kind of constructive dialectical sparring and evokes a side of modernism we forget, from the lost hermetic traditions, to the pantheism, panentheism, and such of many from Leibnitz to Hegel, whose explorations have succumbed to idealist cliches, blinding us to the degenerated condition of the current spectrum of thought. Such issues have traditionally shown little promise however and would not easily resolve the religion-science dilemmas if we consider the great theosophical deviations they would generate. The turtling down of current positivistic evolutionism is a measure of self-defense.

The author's delineation of the types of naturalism with a subscripted terminology, e.g. naturalism-sam and naturalism-ns, and darwinism-1 to darwinism-8, etc,... is clarifying and useful. The retreat to a form of naturalism-ns (no supernatural)is very acute, and would probably relieve the current concealed metaphysics in the Darwinist enterprise, whose flaws the author analyzes at great length. Very provocative book, whatever one's views of its affirmations.

The first book I read of David Ray Driffin's was "Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration". That book was a real eye-opening treat. I later purchased his "Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. Also a terrific text. Now he has continued in his pan-experientialist process mode of thought and brought out this wonderful book. Even though I sound entirely in love with his material, I'm not. It's very good and there is much to agree with, but I'm not convinced that theology (or parapsychology) has to give up the term supernatural. In any case, Griffin's books are intelligent and informative, this one is also no exception. Another, excellent recent text that may interest readers is by Huston Smith and its called "Why Religion Matters". Check them all out.

Through his book, Mr. Griffin has helped me answer one of the big questions that has bothered me since my undergraduate years in Electrical Engineering - how to resolve my sense of mystery in the world around me with my understanding and appreciation of the scientific method of inquiry. In a nutshell, the answer is that both Science and Religion have to give up some long held beliefs and dogmatic statements of "fact." Put succinctly;

"Belief in the supernatural causes problems for religion it can not solve, and supernaturalism makes religion incompatible with science. For both reasons, religion needs to give it up." 

"Belief in materialism causes problems for science it can not solve, and materialism makes science incompatible with religion. For both reasons, science needs to give it up."

In addition to the views on resolution of this de facto conflict between religion and science, Mr. Griffin's book has shed a considerable amount of light on my meager understanding of Alfred North Whitehead's writings around what I refer to as Process Theology. It has encouraged me to study further my own philosophy and theology and to explore how it fits with my understanding of the material world. As a technologist, it seems imperative for me to clearly understand this issue if for no other reason than to have a sound basis for ethical conduct in our increasingly technology dependent society. So to that end, this book is must reading for all of us, since we will all have to make ethical decisions about advancement in technology from creation of "spiritual machines," to genetic manipulation.

David Ray Griffin's essay on Hartshorne is more than worth the price of the book all by itself.

This was almost my first foray into process theology, and it was very rewarding. Several key aspects of Whitehead's thought dropped into place for me while reading it (such as the notion of a person as a sequence of occasions, which I finally grasped as NOT being the destruction of personhood). I was especially impressed by the way in which the difficulties and incoherencies of traditional theism were overcome, and yet the central concerns of Christian faith articulated in a way that made them even more forceful for me than they had been before. But process thought, I am beginning to see, has very deep ramifications; it is so different from the philosophical undergirdings of traditional theism that one has to meditate long and deeply to see all the implications, especially in practical, "concrete" spiritual life. But I am cerainly eager to read more developed writings of the two authors of this book.

This is a superb and forceful presentation of the various reasons why the atheism and materialism that emerged with the scientific spirit is so completely inadequate for describing the fullness of human flourishing...including our moral judgments, our aesthetic experiences, our religious perceptions, and even for our scientific pursuits! This book suggests a new and coherent worldview wherein theologians and scientists are no longer suspicious enemies of one another, but fellow contributors to a more integrated understanding of human existence. Moreover, the book's portrait of a God without miracles, while not for everyone, is presented persuasively, so that even a detractor must appreciate the relevancy, adequacy, and coherence of this more liberal religious perspective. Finally, anyone interested in the philosophy of Whitehead will find that this book is not only a glorious and thorough introduction to process philosophy, but that it contributes significantly to the resolution of some of the mysteries and inconsistencies of Whitehead's own thought and that of his interpreters. This is Griffin at his best!

We live in a world where common sense often is at odds with contemporary theories about mind, body, spirit, consciousness, and freedom. In addition, there are many who feel that our fragmented ideas about the nature of reality underlie the psychological fragmentation which produces incredible psychic distress in a vast number of psychotherapy clients.

Our current conceptual architecture has created a house where the mind, the body, and the spirit each has a separate room without adjoining doors or even widows. Yet our common sense tells us that these are simply different facets of the same reality. What is needed is a new conceptual architecture which can support this deeply felt sense of the unity of reality.

Griffin's latest book goes a long ways toward articulating this new conceptual architecture in a manner that is generally clear and persuasive. Citing both empirical research and numerous contemporary and historical philosophers, he offers up a number of compe! lling arguments which aim at resolving once and for all times the paradox of how mind emerges from a seemingly material or physical universe.

Drawing from his extensive background in the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead's, Griffin makes it clear any number of times that the process cosmology is able to bring physical dynamics and mental dynamics together into each and every core unit of reality.

This is a radical idea which works its way into the reader's consciousness from any number of points of view. For example, most scientific analyses of reality, and the philosophies which build upon them, exclude anything to do with mentality. This means that mental elaborations of direct physical experience are banished from consideration. This, in turn, makes it impossible to clearly understand how mind is in any way connected to the natural world. Whitehead's Process Philosophy, however, understands the physical and the mental as integral aspects of every component of! reality. This alone, if at least tolerated, makes it much ! easier to have an appreciation of how mind can be a part of nature.

Secondly, by reversing the emphasis of the above, Griffin shows how mind also can influence the body built by nature. This challenges the complementary assumption of most scientific analyses of reality, namely that mentality either does not exist, or if it does, it is at best an epiphenomenon without efficacy in the real world. Whitehead's perspective is that all of the events which constitute what we call mind have a physical component and therefore are capable of being causally efficacious in the real world, just as all of the so-called physical world has at least a low-grade mental elaboration of the physical experience.

Thirdly, Griffin shows how the idea of a presiding mentality of the level of the human mind is foreshadowed for many millions of years in the kind of organization to be found in cells, organelles within those cells, and even down to macromolecules, ordinary molecules, and atoms. Whereve! r there is "behavior [which] seems to require a central agent with an element of spontaneity or self-determination," one has the potential for a presiding event which has emerged in response to the necessity of providing organizational unity and flexibility of response (even if very minute). The human mind, while unique in some very important respects, is not at all discontinuous with the natural world.

If there is any significant criticism of this book, it might be that the issues and dynamics of spirituality are not as vigorously developed as the other major themes. The Whiteheadian perspective supports this fully integrated discussion. However, for purposes of this book and its primary audience, a fuller discussion of spirituality could well have been an unnecessary impediment to an already challenging work.

Overall, Griffin's arguments are numerous, varied, both complex and direct. Even the most committed materialist or dualist will find something disturbing ! in this work, will encounter some argument or appeal to dat! a which cannot be easily dismissed. For those of us wishing to be systematically persuaded that we live in a single reality that includes atoms, consciousness, and spirit, his systematically developed book is very helpful.

As one of the poets featured in Will Work for Peace, one might expect me to be a bit biased, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Most poets work in a virtual vacuum, only tenuously connected to each other by the occasional workshop or shared membership in a 'poetry society'. When Brett Axel first approached me for a submission to an anthology he was considering, the names Marge Piercy, Lyn Lifshin, Moshe Bennaroch and so many others were abstractions to me as a fledgling poet. I knew these tremendous writers were 'out there' somewhere, beating down doors with their words and keeping a struggling artform alive. But to think that someday I would ever share a credit with these dynamic modern poets would be a pipe dream at best. It is through the sincere efforts of Brett Axel that many newer voices like mine have an extraordinary opportunity to appear with Pulitzer Prize winners and other poetic heavyweights. By way of an honest review, however, I will say this- not everything in this book will be to your particular liking. I myself came across some works that did not move me in the way the author may have intended. Some imagery can be raw and visceral, using shock value in place of craft at times. But to ignore those voices would be an even more shocking turn of events, so praise be to the editor for not sacrificing his vision to a senseless conformity. As Pete Seeger so aptly put it in his quote, trying to read all these poems at one time would be like trying 'to swallow Manhattan whole'. I say to you- buy this book, read this book, but understand that it's what you do after reading this book that will ultimately define who you could be. Poetry is alive and well, and lives in the blunt pages of Will Work for Peace.

Brett Axel visited my Church and I bought a copy of Will Work For Peace from him, not for poetry, but because I care about working for peace. I started reading through it thinking It'd just go on my shelf and that'd be the end of it, but the book grabbed me and kept me rivited. If I had known that poetry was this alive I'd have been into poetry. I've been reading some of the poems to my friends who also didn't think poetry was important and they are saying the same thing. Fantastic! There's no way to get through this book without having your old mindsets challenged. It's funny, powerful, sad, and uplifting. A book that deserves to be read by everyone. A book that really can make the world a better place!

Just amazing start to finish! I like the disregard for fame used in putting the book together. That great poems got in even if they were writtenby nobodys. Look at Roger Bonair-Agard's poem on page 74. Shortly after Will Work For Peace came out he won Slam Nationals, becoming Slam Champion of 1999, which will be getting him lots of offers. But Zeropanik Press didn't need to be told he was good by an award. They could tell by his writing! Good for them and good for all of us because Will Work For Peace is a literary milestone. It's a new standard for all future anthology editors to try to live up to. Thumbs up to Brett Axel and Thumbs up to Zeropanik Press for their guts and integrty.

Mr.Griffin has very nice ideas and this book certainly deserves to be read .Hard core common sensuality is the nicest look at reality that I know.
But I have not chosen to give 5 stars because of one expression where Mr.Griffin says in order to praise the traditional cultures that they have managed to survive for thousands of years wheras we are not sure if modernity will make next century.This is a very wrong idea ;resistance to time has got nothing to do with truth value and this is something we must care about a lot.Many traditional civilizitions killed the people who criticized them in order to resist time, is this something to be praised? If moderns accepted to change their minds after a paradigmatic scientific discovery does this show their weakness or strength?.Do you accept to believe in sea goddess who does not like her father and whose hair we have to comb in order to get rid of bad luck because it has lasted more then modern science?We need more than gentleness (as well as needing gentleness) to every culture in order to build a meaningful relation with reality.
The idea of a constructive postmodernism and this book are very good but they need further development too.

I have read a number of books on parapsychology and regard this one as the most important I've read to date. Griffin is to be applauded for his courage and originality. I would like to dialogue with anyone (including the author) who might wish to delve deeper into the book's philosphical and political implications.

This book (1991) is a re-examination of the problem of evil as expounded in the author's previous work (David R. Griffin, God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy - 1976). David Griffin responds to various criticisms he received after the publication of that book and reconsiders some of the formulations given there. The critics discussed in this book include Alvin Plantinga, John Knasas, Nelson Pike, John Hick, Philip Hefner, David Basinger, and Peter Hare. Griffin admits to a change of mind on the issue of eschatology, acknowledging now the need for such doctrine in his theodicy, and calls for a stronger doctrine of evil that includes a discussion of the demonic. He also calls for a better understanding of the divine power and suggests that such understanding would show there is hope for overcoming evil.

The problem of evil, as traditionally understood, involves rejecting one the four following elements: rational consistency, worldly evil, perfect divine goodness, or divine omnipotence. Griffin wants to retain all of the four notions. He insists on the possibility of a consistent view as long as the traditional notion of omnipotence is modified in such a way that God is no longer conceived as capable of unilaterally determining everything that happens in the world. If this modification is accepted then the reality of evil will be understood in its proper context, one where God cannot be said to be indictable for evil, even though God is an indirect partner to the existence of evil.

Griffin distinguishes two strands of traditional theodicies: all-determining theism and free-will theism. All-determining theism attributes to God absolute unilateral power in the sense that it does not allow anything besides God to determine what happens in the world. Free-will theism suggests that God has essentially unlimited power but that God voluntarily exercises self-limitation or delegates some power to the creatures. This shows certain advancement over all-determining theism in that it allows for the possibility of genuine freedom in the world. This position may also say that God never interrupts the laws of nature, although it would affirm that God COULD do so. However, one way or another, both forms of theism seem to reject the reality of genuine evil.

Of interest here is the author's distinction between theological freedom and social, political, and economic forms of freedom. To affirm the latter, he says, would not necessarily mean that we have theological freedom, which is freedom vis-à-vis God. Also, whereas traditional free-will theists find the source of moral evil in our theological freedom, not in God, there is a question as to who is responsible for natural evil. For this and other reasons, Griffin rejects the view that genuine freedom of worldly creatures is the result of God's self-limitation. For him, theological freedom is inherent freedom. This means that God's power is essentially persuasive, not voluntarily persuasive. Griffin believes that the idea that creatures inherently have freedom, so that divine power could not be all-determining, is necessarily true, which means that it would be true in any possible universe.

With regard to the reality of genuine evil, Griffin holds that this is a hard-core commonsense notion that does not need proof. He does not think that God is the aboriginal power that existed alone prior to creation, and from which both freedom and evil came about. Rather, he agrees with Whitehead that creativity is the primordial power. This creativity is two-fold: on the one hand, it is exhibited in the self-creation of actualities and, on the one hand, it is embodied in the creative influence between these actualities. All actual entities, including God, manifest this two-fold power. What this means is that power is multilateral and that God is not the only operating agent in the world.

Griffin says there is evidence that God influences the world. The order manifest in the laws of nature and the complexity visible in the evolutionary process are said to be the result of God's luring the world towards beauty and intensity of experience. In addition, the existence of the demonic in the world is an indication that there is resistance to God's power, which suggests that God's power is persuasive, not coercive.

This book is the most elaborate discussion in process thought on the question of evil. Its main merit is that it takes the problem of evil very seriously and avoids such probabilistic arguments in the Swinburnean tradition that turn suffering into a theoretical matter. Although the author seeks to justify the reality of genuine evil by a reworking of the doctrine of divine power, thus running the risk of being accused of neglecting the suffering of those who experience evil, his book is highly recommended for the sheer fact that it gives a meaningful understanding to the notion of power. Griffin operates with a metaphysical perspective in mind, and his theodicy has an element of generality that is sometimes characteristic of theodicists who seem not to have looked at the actual evil in the world to see how people respond to it. But he does look at particular examples, and I invite the reader to search for them in the book in order to see how they fit in the overall theodicy of the author. The discussion in the book shows an astute mind that brings philosophical rigor and imaginative boldness into the discussion of one of the most intricate problems in philosophy.

I read this book hoping to understand the relationship between religion and contemporary worldview a little better, and found myself thoroughly disappointed. The author, despite stating that there is overlapping of ideas between/amongst the chapters, has done little to overcome this - chapters repeat themselves too frequently, and an idea is over-developed to breaking point that one seems to be reading the same old thing all over again with each new chapter. The author also tries too hard to marry religious philosophy and contemporary worldview under his all conclusive concept of `creativity', hence reducing everything living to an extension and expression of creativity. For the author, God is Creativity, who functions as a persuader of, and is persuaded by, other life-forms' creativity - persuasion being the `isness' of existence. This is an interesting concept, but a reader will soon realise that the writer is merely using a lot of jargon to propose his brand of pseudo-pantheism (or, as he calls it, panentheism). Hence, existence is merely the creative force of every living entity (which includes atoms and molecules - yes, even these are living, experiential entities)to connect with the past and shape the future - the `God is Nature, Nature is God' idea. But again, even without God, the world would still carry on rather well if we would follow the book's proposition - after all, everything is essentially creative, able to connect with its past and mould its future, and God is just another, albeit greater, creative being. The author stresses the necessity of God but, unfortunately, reduces God to just one of the many creative entities. But my greatest quarrel with this book, as mentioned earlier, is its repetitiveness, and by repeating this again, you know how annoying it would get.

Yet another well-argued philosophical masterpiece from one of the world's leading Process Theologians, David Ray Griffin. The other reviewer, Andrew Ng, is obviously not familiar with the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, nor with the variety of pre-modern, modern and postmodern theological views. If he were, he would realize that Process Thought is a practical, amazingly thorough, philosophically and ethically sound understanding of God and the world, that's based not on some "ideal", fantasy world, but on the ACTUAL WORLD AS WE EXPERIENCE IT. I've been a "student" of Process Thought for nearly 10 years now, and have yet to find a better, more holistic model of reality.

I Highly recommended this,as well as Griffin's other books, and books by John B. Cobb, Jr, Marjorie Suchocki, and Ken Wilber.