ABSTRACT
Alfred North Whitehead’s thought captures and expresses what many religions and theologies have intuited about the creative and compassionate depths of reality while remaining consistently faithful to scientific discovery. An ethical outlook assesses everything in terms of human conceptions of good order, and so it remains baffled and aggrieved by the chaotic consequences of the evolutionary openness to novelty. Pre-evolutionary pictures of the cosmos could all too easily represent the physical universe as a deviation from, rather than as an exciting journey toward, the fullness of being. In a pre-evolutionary universe religious life is, consciously or unconsciously, a longing to restore rather than a creative contribution to the birth of something truly new. In the classical perspective life had a goal, of course, and there was something to look forward to, but the kind of spiritual aspiration that a static universe tended to promote was what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin aptly labelled the “optimism of withdrawal.”
