McCall RTCH785C Ingram Book Review:
Paul Ingram in the book entitled Wrestling With God (Cascade, 2006) examines how humanity’s search for God entails a proverbial intellectual ‘wrestling match’ in which humanity attempts to harmonize revealed Hebraic religious tenets in dialogue with the natural sciences and other religious traditions. Ingram posits that through dialogue with these apparent competing beliefs systems a Christian can derive new formulations of their historic faith (x). Coming from an avowed process theology perspective, Ingram attempts to construct a relevant methodology of interaction with said competing systems of belief.
This review will focus on Ingram’s approach to the dialogue between natural science and religious traditions. It is the position of Ingram that the dialogue with natural sciences offers a “common origin” story that is beneficial for interreligious dialogue in general and between Christianity and Buddhism in particular (70-71). While acknowledging that the natural sciences cause no challenge as per se to Buddhist beliefs, Ingram notes that Barbour identifies 5 challenges to the revealed religious traditions that are proffered by the natural sciences: 1) the methods of science have been successful in explaining phenomena in strict naturalistic manners, 2) the cosmology posited by the natural sciences excludes divine activity, 3) the contexts that science provides in relation to the human propensity toward religious articulations regarding creation, 4) the fact of religious pluralism , and 5) the implications of religious belief upon ecological stewardship (68).
Ingram acknowledges that the scientific methodology has become the standard for epistemological modalities of inquiry in the modern world (69). Ingram posits that due to the success in terms of explanatory power of scientific methods of inquiry, it would be beneficial to take the same sort of approach to theological questions (69). It should be noted, then, that this position necessarily entails explicit religious engagement with the natural sciences in order for religious postulations to be taken seriously in the postmodern environment. The rationality inherent within the natural environment therefore behooves religiously minded patrons to engage in rational discourse with the natural sciences.
Ingram, in noting that “God has lured all creatures toward actualizations of greater value”, gives implicit approval to my own in-process hypothesis of Spirit-derived Causation (79). Ingram gives implicit approval also of Denis Edwards’ thoughts regarding the theodicy problem in relation to the evolutionary factuality of the excessive pain and suffering experienced within the created and ordered world (87). Ingram notes that the God of Evolution, according to Edwards, is One that allows the self-creativity of creation (87). Whereas Ingram gives tacit approval to Edward’s understanding of this self-creative-ness of creation to be resultant of divine restraint (i.e. Edwards’ understanding of kenosis), I posit that a more accurate understanding of divine kenosis is one that affirms the divine (particularly the Spirit) ‘pouring into’ that which was created. In that sense, one can perceive the godhead’s lure through the processes of evolution toward greater complexity in the natural environ. God could then adequately be understood as working through evolutionary progress. Similarly, one could then appropriately reckon God’s ‘power’ as that which truly empowers the ‘other’ (i.e. that which is created). So then, the propensities that govern and ‘direct’ biological evolution originate from the kenosis of the Spirit into creation (and thereby are Spirit-derived).