Philip Clayton on the Possibility of a Mormon Process Theology

These are my reactions to “God Beyond Orthodoxy: Process Theology for the 21st Century,” presented by Philip Clayton at the SMPT Conference in Claremont California on May 21, 2009.

Clayton began by saying that substance doesn’t play a major role in LDS theology, which is good because substance doesn’t exist. When I questioned him on this a bit, it became clear that he was talking about substance in the Aristotelian sense. Aristotle held that every object is comprised of a substance or essence unique to that kind of object. The substance of a tree, for example, would have the quality of “tree-ness.” Aristotle argued that we can distinguish between the substance (matter and form) of an object on the one hand and its “accidents” or properties (which have to do with relation and action rather than essence) on the other. Thus the color, weight, texture, location, and motion of the tree are incidental to the substance of “tree-ness” itself. Critics of Aristotle have pointed out that only accidents can be observed, and that to remove all accidents from a substance would leave not the substance itself, but nothingness. In other words, the substance/accident distinction is arbitrary. These critics would thus argue either that substance does not exist at all, or that it is the sum of its properties and cannot in any meaningful sense be separated from them. I think this latter is what Clayton meant by the term “matter,” whose existence he affirmed (as opposed to the Aristotelian concept of “substance” whose existence he denied). When I questioned Clayton a bit more after his session ended, he told me that process philosophy views matter as a sort of “limit” on Events, which it understands to be the basic units of reality. (Process philosophy is based on what’s called an “Event-based ontology” as opposed to the more traditional Western “Being-based ontology”.)

Even if Clayton’s argument against the existence of substance is taken for granted, I was unpersuaded by his statement that substance plays no significant role in LDS theology. One statement from a medieval thinker that Clayton quoted and rejected said that a person is defined as an “individual substance of a rational nature.” This sounds to me like the LDS doctrine of eternal intelligences. Clayton seemed to think the LDS doctrine is acceptable as long as it is spiritual atomism and intelligence is a form of raw matter. But he seemed to think that the idea of eternal egos would be problematic. Then there is also the LDS doctrine that God is anthropomorphic (a far cry from porcess thinkers' transcencent deity), and that there’s no such thing as immaterial “stuff”. Clayton actually claimed to agree with the latter, despite its apparent emphasis on the reality and materiality of matter. I guess even someone who thinks matter is just a function of Becoming can agree that matter is material and real.

If I'm to be completely honest, I have to admit I find this entire discussion about substance- vs. event-based ontologies a bit outmoded. I don't think that either “substances” or “events” are the ultimate components of reality. After all, modern science has found that substance is mostly empty space and atomic force fields, that time is simply the fourth dimension of space, and that there may be multiple parallel universes or the universe may be a giant wave-function equation. Obviously “reality” as we know it is far more complicated and illusory than we ever imagined. I suspect that what we think of as substances and events are simply supervenient properties of some other, more basic monistic unit of reality (like “strings” or “branes” or “quarks” or something like that). I still agree with Parmenides' basic idea that the world of appearances is false and deceitful because in reality change is impossible and existence is timeless, uniform, and unchanging. In that sense, I guess I side with Being-based ontology over Becoming-based ontology. But I wouldn't talk about the basis of reality in terms of “substances”, so when process theologians make that their foil, they aren't talking to modern Parmenidians like me. They're talking to an ancient Aristotelian strawman.