How Non-Toxic Concepts of God Can Still Satisfy with Don Viney (Part 1)

In this episode of Hunger for Wholeness, Robert Nicastro sits down with philosopher and musician Don Viney to trace his journey from the arts to philosophy—and the unexpected conversion that led him to process thought. Together, they explore the creative tension between art and thought, and how beauty, music, and literature often touch places philosophical language cannot reach.

Don shares formative moments from studying with Charles Hartshorne and his early fascination with Teilhard de Chardin—unpacking how Teilhard’s evolutionary mysticism resonates with those seeking meaning in a fragmented world. Along the way, the conversation wrestles with non-toxic, life-giving concepts of God and what makes a metaphysical vision truly satisfying in a scientific age.

Later in the episode, Viney reflects on Teilhard’s radical hope, personhood at the heart of the cosmos, and the power of process thinking to awaken a fresh sense of spiritual responsibility.

ABOUT DON VINEY

“True love unites in such a way as to augment rather than to diminish the personalities of those caught in its Fire.”

Donald Wayne Viney, Ph.D. received degrees in philosophy from Colorado State University (1977) and the University of Oklahoma (1979, 1982). He is a three-time recipient of the title “University Professor” at Pittsburg State University (Kansas) where he taught from 1984 until his retirement in 2022. He is the author of Charles Hartshorne and the Existence of God (1985), senior editor of Hartshorne’s Creative Experiencing: A Philosophy of Freedom (2011), and co-author, with George W. Shields, of The Mind of Charles Hartshorne: A Critical Examination (2020). He has written extensively on the nineteenth century Breton philosopher, Jules Lequyer, and published two books of translations of Lequyer’s writings. In addition, he is the author of dozens of scholarly articles and reviews on a variety of topics, including six articles on Teilhard de Chardin and an annotated translation of Marcel Brion’s 1951 interview with Teilhard. He serves on the editorial boards of Process Studies and the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy. Viney is also a singer-songwriter.

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Transcript

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness. I’m Robert Nicastro, and today I’m speaking with Don Viney—philosopher, process thinker, and musician. We begin with his journey from art to philosophy, exploring how art can reach us in ways philosophy sometimes cannot. Don studied with renowned philosopher of religion Charles Hartshorne, focusing on the work of mathematician and process thinker Alfred North Whitehead. Our conversation turns to the vision of Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and later, Don shares how Teilhard’s insights speak to our hunger for wholeness in a fragmented world.

Well Don, thank you for joining us on our Hunger for Wholeness podcast. You are certainly one of the foremost interpreters of process thought in our time. And just for the sake of our listeners, it probably would be helpful just to give them a bit of your background and your own journey. I know that you were originally involved in music before philosophy, and I know you're still a singer-songwriter, so what drew you from the formal discipline practice of music to this more speculative, philosophical landscape?

Don: Something pretty mundane. I struggled with music theory, first of all, and I was a terrible student early in my college career, just a terrible student with no discipline. And though I had sort of a natural talent for singing and I could play the guitar reasonably, that just was not to be. You know, I went to Europe with some friends, tried to sell some music, and that didn't go anywhere. So when I came back from Europe in 1972, I was really basically flunking out of school at that point. And my father suggested a philosophy course. And it's the closest thing I've ever had to a conversion experience. 

Within one semester, I decided that I'm gonna do philosophy for the rest of my life, come what may. And I think it was my father also who first suggested that I read Teilhard de Chardin because he knew of my interest in French stuff. You know, I was kind of a Francophile even at that point. Teilhard was really my first love, I suppose, in philosophy broadly construed. So that's really how it happened originally, music to philosophy.

Robert: So before we get into Teilhard, because you're bringing up another interesting question that's very much connected with philosophy, the relationship between art and philosophy. And to what degree do you think that music and art more broadly can actually help communicate better more philosophical truths than, say, purely abstract reason can?

Don: I had a conversation with a French teacher here at Pittsburgh State where I used to teach, and I asked her why I had so much trouble reading French novels, but I didn't have that much trouble reading French philosophy. And her explanation was that the language of philosophy tends to be more abstract. The language of literature tends to be more concrete and richer because it's more concrete. You're talking about actual things in the world, whereas in philosophy, you're often talking in a very general sort of way. I mean, logic, for example, is one of the most general things you can teach. Now, it ends up being incredibly practical. But it's like geometry or abstract mathematics, it's very, very general. The light went on when I was talking to Carol, her name is Carol McKay, and she told me that. I said, "Yeah, okay, that's why reading French philosophy is a little easier than reading keeping a dictionary nearby so I can read a French novel." But I think the same goes for music. and the visual arts. There's something more concrete in this sense, more concrete even the language, or maybe just another expression of human feelings that one gets through music and through the visual arts and through drama, I might add as well, through dance. So these things bring to our, then they give a richness to experience that philosophy maybe misses out on precisely because of its abstractions. I mean, I don't want to downplay philosophy, I love it dearly, but I do think that there's this symbiosis between them.

Robert: This kind of artistic sensibility that you're speaking about is so important for understanding someone like Teilhard really tried in his own artistic way to bridge science and religion, or maybe more broadly, science and mysticism. And your work certainly bridges this kind of more abstract philosophical way of speaking about the world and Teilhard's evolutionary mysticism. So, how did studying someone like Charles Hartshorne, whom I think was your dissertation director, or was he on your committee? 

Don: He was on my committee. Technically, the dissertation advisor was, or director, was a fellow at the University of Oklahoma, Tom Boyd. Very good man. But Hartshorne was also on the committee. And, you know, in essence, he really did direct it because it was about him. And Tom was very, very, very nice about that. One time I received a letter from Hartshorne that said that if Hartshorne's for you, who's against you? Because you're writing about him. So I appreciated Dr. Boyd's willingness to allow Hartshorne to sort of direct the thing. Even though Hartshorne was at Texas, University of Texas, I was at the University of Oklahoma.

Robert: Keeping with Hartshorne then, how did maybe studying with Hartshorne or studying Hartshorne's philosophy help prepare you for tackling Teilhard's injunction that we need a new philosophy and a new metaphysics and necessarily then a new way of understanding science and spirituality in our contemporary world.

Don: So for me, this goes back to undergraduate school, actually, before I met Charles Hartshorne, my professor in undergraduate school who taught me whitehead, basically, was Donald Crosby, who is well known in the community of process thought. And Don, I was taking his course on philosophy of religion, and as I said, at the time, I was reading a lot of Teilhard, and I asked, towards the end of the semester, asking if I could write my term paper on Teilhard de Chardin as a process thinker, because I was familiar with Ewert Cousins edited book, Process Theology, which contains a bunch of stuff on Hartshorne. Don kind of hemmed and hawed and he said, "Well, Teilhard's not really a process thinker, is he?" It took me back. I thought, "Well, yes, he is." But I didn't have a good response. So he suggested I read Whitehead. I did. Later on, I met Charles Hartshorne by sheer accident. 

That defined my trajectory of study for about 30 years. I was seriously studying Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne's work and some others, I mean, David Griffin, John Cobb, and others, Louis Ford. At the end of that, about 2005, Jay McDaniel mentioned that there was going to be a conference in Claremont about Whitehead and Teilhard. I got all excited. Well, Teilhard was my first love in philosophy. I'd like to go back and study him again. And so Jay talked, apparently talked to John Cobb and got me invited to this conference, which I loved. I dearly loved the conference. I met all these big white headians like, you know, Ursula King and John Hutt. And I think Kathy Duffy was there too, actually. So it was a very exciting time. 

But in preparation for that, I started buying as many of the French editions of Teilhard's work I could find and really threw myself into it. And what I discovered, and I was also reading Teilhard's letters a lot to his various friends and family. And what I discovered there, looking at through the lens of Whitehead and Hartshorne, I discovered another process philosopher. And so I told Don Crosby later, sort of kidding with him, I said, "It took me 30 years to refute you." I don't think I could have appreciated Teilhard's process, the dimensions of process in Teilhard as much as I did unless I had had that background in Whitehead and Hartzarn. It really, for me, it was an eye-opener, a very pleasant eye-opener, I should say. I read your essay in the Iliadilio and Davis volume, Andrew Davis volume on Whitehead and Teilhard. And what you say there really resonates with what I found actually when I read Teilhard as well, very much a process thinker. There are dimensions where he toys with a kind of classical thinking that disturbed me a little bit, I have to say. But in the end, I think he's definitely process. That metaphysic of creative union is just processive through and through.

Robert: Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I think you're hitting on something very important here too, something that made Teilhard not only revolutionary but so controversial, that he was straddling the fence in many ways between outgrowing that scholastic to mystic philosophy and trying to do something entirely new to engage what evolution as a metaphysical framework means in terms of understanding all of life as development, change, process, relationship, seems to be the key language. I know at one point you've said you either see the entire economy of Teilhard's thought or none of it at all. So for someone encountering Teilhard for the first time and really trying to grapple with his key insights, how would you recommend someone unlock his vision?

Don: When I was at the University of Oklahoma, I had the opportunity to teach what they called intercession courses. I got to teach one that I called process theology twice. They're only little six-week courses, I think. They were three-week. I mean, they were very brief courses, but I would have them read. I'd try to find the easiest whitehead stuff. I had them read "The Function of Reason," which might've been a mistake. I had them read Charles Hartshorne's "A Natural Theology for Our Time," but then also we read "Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes" by Hartshorne. For Teilhard, I had them read "The Heart of Matter." I got that volume that has his autobiographical statement that he wrote towards the end of his life, which is called "The Heart of Matter." So I would have them read that. I think that's pretty good. It's biographical, so it's maybe easier to grasp. Yeah. I'd have them read that.

Robert: What do you think makes Teilhard really radical? And when I ask this question, I'm thinking of Teilhard in terms of his metaphysics. So he really turns scientific materialism on its head, right? He argues that there's something about consciousness that drives the entire process of evolution. And in that sense, at least in scientific circles, that's very radical. It's very anathema. But what about in terms of religion? What would really make Teilhard more radical today?

Don: It probably depends upon the religious community, whether he's radical or not. I mean, here I am in little Southeast Kansas, in Dinkyburg, you know, Southeast Kansas, but there are still quite a few people where I go to church that would resonate to Tayartian themes. It's not a Catholic church to be sure, it's Methodist, but they would be open. I know that some of them are open to this sort of thinking. On the other hand, my relatives back in Wichita, Kansas and elsewhere who are religious would find it quite radical. It's quite a few, I guess you could say conservative evangelicals. But some of the ones I know would be more friendly to a kind of a literalism with respect to scriptures, one that is tied to sometimes even a short-term, you know, 4,000 year, 6,000 year creation story and take the flood story literally or take the Garden of Eden story literally. You know, Teilhard definitely got in trouble because of that. He said the idea of an Adam-born adult or an Eve-born adult is contrary to everything we understand about science. Everything, to understand something was to understand its developmental process. And creation, taken in that sort of literal fashion of, you know, God fashions the man out of the dust or the mud and breathes life into him and then takes a bone out or a rib and forms the woman, that's highly unscientific. For whatever lessons one may learn from it, Teilhard was not ready to learn a scientific lesson. I think it depends, in other words, on the scientific-- or excuse me, the religious community that you're talking to.

Robert: Like art and music, philosophy resonates most deeply when it connects with us on a human embodied level. Next, I ask Don how Teilhard's vision speaks to our hunger for wholeness, and how placing personhood at the center of the universe becomes a source of hope. Let's just take it a step further because you mentioned that in order for Teer to understand anything, it has to be understood within that developmental process. And for him, it was even God, right? God must also be understood to evolve through relationships with the world. So, in your estimation, how might that vision, particularly of God being within the world and rising through the world's complexification or evolutionary process, how might that vision help address a hunger for wholeness in a fragmented world?

Don: I want to draw a distinction. Yeah, to draw a distinction with Teilhard, but he doesn't think that the existence of God evolves. I don't interpret him that way. You know, I mentioned that I saw him, I began to read him through the lens of Whitehead, but also especially Hartshorne. And Hartshorne draws this distinction between the existence of God, which is abstract, but also a necessary existence. It's not contingent, it's not subject to the whims of causation. It simply is. And so there's a difference between the existence of God and the, what he calls the actuality of God, which is God's concrete relations to the creation. The example he would use would be a woman listening to a bird at noon. So does she hear the bird? Yes, she hears the bird. Does God know she hears the bird? Yes, God knows she hears the bird. God hears the bird too, I suppose. But that bird singing is a contingent fact about the world. It did not have to be. And so in one sense, God's knowledge of that did not have to be. If something else had occurred, it doesn't mean God would not be omniscient. It would mean that whatever else was there at the time, if the woman didn't exist, if it was a cricket instead of a bird, that's what God would have known. 

So there's a contingency about God's experiences, which is what Hartshorne calls God's actuality. And that, Hartshorne would say, does have to grow. It grows as the universe evolves. So it's a growth not in, it's not even a growth in omniscience, in a sense, because no matter what world God has, God knows what it is. So God has perfect knowledge of the past, of what is going on in the present and what may happen in the future. So the future being a bundle of maybes and mustbes. So I interpret Teilhard through that lens. I don't know if I'm right about that, but it seems to make most sense to me of the things that he says. He does not, after all, tackle the question of omniscience to my knowledge. He's more interested in asking the question of omnipotence, actually, and thinks, I think he would agree with Hartshorne that in some profound sense, Omnipotence is a theological mistake. That really perfect power is power in relation to others that have some degree of power. That is a very relational kind of philosophy.

Robert: Understanding God's experience growing through relationship in and with the world, how do you think that vision could help satiate a contemporary hunger for wholeness, especially in a world that seems so fragmented, even if only illusory?

Don: Yeah, that's a very good question. Is there such a thing as a scientific view of the world? Some people think there is. I mean, Whitehead spoke of the scientific view of the world that came out of the 17th century, well, the 16th and 17th centuries. And he speaks of it as scientific materialism, and he thinks it's an alienating philosophy. And Teilhard is right there. He also speaks of what he calls logicism and physicism. And logicism is the idea that the world is just composed of these sort of puzzle parts, or sometimes he uses the analogy of a garden where you could plant anything in the garden anywhere in the garden. And he says, but the world isn't really like that. The gardens themselves evolve. And so the wholeness of creation is in the process itself and not a completed fact. So one way in which I think it addresses some of our anxieties is, well, we have anxieties about the future and we're worried about the unpredictability of the future. And for Teilhard, for Whitehead, for Hartshorne, it is to some extent unpredictable. and you have to, in Hartshorne's words, part of religion is to learn how to live with that fragmentariness. 

But to recognize our limits, but also to recognize the promise of our, you know, the possibilities that are there. So for anyone who still takes religion seriously, who thinks it's not just a bunch of fairy tales, and who thinks that maybe the theologians are onto something, it provides a different kind of picture of the concept of God. What is it somewhere Teilhard says that, I can't remember the expression he uses, sort of partial or unsatisfied believers or something along those lines? Unsatisfied theism. Yes, an unsatisfied theism. Thank you. And I think that's where a lot of people are. I have one relative that I respect very much and he reads my stuff. He's got a philosophical background. And he says, "Well, if I was a theist, I'd be a process theist." But he's friendly to all these process themes, you know? 

So I think it does answer some of the anxieties that we face. It certainly seems to me more compatible with what we know about ecology, what we know about the interrelations of things. That scientific materialism bothered Whitehead and Teilhard and Hartshorne as well, just doesn't seem to hold up to what we know about the world. A little more controversial is the rejection of strict determinism. I know that there are still people around who argue that determinism is true. Whitehead, Teilhard, and Hartshorne are not there, of course. Not that they deny causation, they don't. But as you know, they think of the world or the cosmos as an open process. Although for Teilhard, it is converging eventually on the Omega. So I think it does help a little bit. It gives a different conceptuality. 

Hartshorne asked the question, "How many people are atheists simply because they never came across a decent concept of God?" Absolutely. Yes. Or a non-toxic concept, because there are such things as toxic concepts of God. I started out my career, my graduate career, I wrote on Hartshorne for the dissertation. And the book I wrote was about his arguments for God's existence. But over the course of my career, I more and more thought that that was not nearly as interesting a question as the question of what would God like be if God existed? What is the best concept of God? What are bad concepts, good concepts, etc.? And I find in Teilhard something that is very attractive as a concept of God, as well as my other two heroes.

Robert: And you mentioned on the Omega, can you say a little bit more about that for our listeners? What is Omega and how is Omega, what is Omega's relationship to these images of God? Or to the image of God rather.

Don: Yeah, what does he call it? He calls Omega a center of centers. One of the reasons I'm attracted to Teilhard is because I interpret him as a personalist in this sense. He thinks that personhood is not just an accident of the universe. He thinks it's at the very center of things. One way of beginning to see that is to ask oneself, Am I part of the furniture of the universe? Or am I not? I mean, I will die. My elements will be scattered again to the winds and the waters and the dust. So in some sense, I will cease to exist. But as I exist now, I'm a person. And that's a reality. And you're a person. And those that we interact with, they are persons. 

Sometimes I even think that the other animals that we interact with at least have personal characteristics. I used to look at my dog and my dog would look back and I would think, "Well, there's a little doggy consciousness there looking back at me." That's a reality. And to simply say we've got consciousness is not real or consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon, Teilhard is not there, I'm not there. So what makes Omega interesting is that God is also a person for him, but a person who incorporates other persons. As you know, what is in the book of Acts, it says God is, or you know, Paul's talk to the Athenians, you know, "In God we live, move and have our being," or he's quoting a Stoic poet. And that Teilhard I think takes that seriously. I interpret him as a panentheist, all is in God. But “all” includes persons. And so that's why a center of centers, that's why he speaks of the center of centers. I have not made my peace with the idea of a kind of ultimate culmination in Omega, but what attracts me most is this idea that God is not separate. Well, let's be careful. God is separate in the sense that God exists whether I do or not. But if I exist, then I become part of God and at least at my death, part of the memory of God. is an attractive form of immortality to my way of thinking. Yeah, and Teilhard offers that. He does offer that.

Robert: You mentioned that you haven't come to terms with that kind of idea of Omega representing the ultimate convergence of complexity and consciousness. Do you think that rather than maybe using the language of ultimate, it's similar to Whitehead, that there's this endless horizon of horizons that the world or worlds will constantly be drawn toward. 

Don: Yeah, that may work. These kinds of ultimate questions escape my conceptual schemes, the ones that I'm attracted to. It's hard to imagine that, what Whitehead calls it, that far-off event towards which all creation and it's more white, or excuse me, Teihardian, and Whitehead denies such a thing exists, but maybe it's an asymptotic curve towards this, you know. That's attractive as well. Or maybe it's a question of a succession of cosmic epochs or something. As I said, I haven't any grand opinion on that.

Robert: And it would certainly speak to somebody like David Bohm's philosophical perspective that there's a hole in movement that's constantly growing and deepening throughout the process and never really reaching a point of ultimate fulfillment. I can see that certainly aligning with Teilhard's vision and I know there have been some who have written on that, Ilia being one of them. You're also mentioning something, Don, that's key too to understanding Teilhard and what many of his critics level against him, the idea that the Omega is deterministic and/or too optimistic given the way that human nature tends to always lose the grasp of what God truly wills for the good of the other or the good of the world. So, how would you respond to those critics or those concerns that they view for Omega and for the human community?

Don: Yeah, is it too optimistic? Peridot always took the long view, didn't he? I mean, this is a man who saw the worst of human nature, I think, during the First World War especially, because he was right there in the trenches and he didn't win those two French medals of bravery for nothing. And at times even his cousin, Marguerite—he would write her letters and she was concerned about his safety. He didn't know whether he was going to survive the next battle. And so he saw in those days, I think he was eager to put something down on paper that would survive him because he didn't know if he would survive. But he also saw it during the second world war, although he was less informed of what was going on in Europe during that time because he was sort of isolated in China. But he saw the worst of things, but he always took the long view. And I think when you take the long view, you tend to be more friendly to an optimism. I don't think you're necessarily friendly to an optimism. 

My wife and I went to see the new Jurassic Park film, and the whole film was worth one single scene. And it's where one of the scientists is talking to the guy who's more of a business fellow. And the business guy says, "Well, human intelligence has made us superior to everything else." And the scientist responds and says, "No, it hasn't." He says, "The dinosaurs lasted for millions of years." He says, "How long have we lasted?" "Not very long." He says, "And most of the species that have lived on the earth are now died off? What makes you think that human beings are going to be different? It's an interesting conversation because it shows that our own pride in our intelligence actually could be our undoing. And I take that seriously. 

And I think that Teilhard took it seriously. You know, he talks about building the earth. He's more ecologically minded than most philosophers of his time. And he saw promise in human intelligence in research. And when we come together, when he talks about the mysticism of science, he's talking about doing research where we're just trying to make life better for ourselves and to learn about the universe. So he saw a certain hope in science. And I don't think that hope is misplaced. Yes, scientists are human beings and they do very bad things sometimes. They've done some very bad things. Their record is shorter than the record of religion. Maybe if you give science long enough, It'll have just a, you know, have the dark side that religion has had where human relationships are concerned. But there is also hope. There is hope. I see it all around me, even when I read the news and I'm not so hopeful sometimes.

Robert: Sounds like what you're saying too, if I'm understanding you correctly, that there's a realism in Teilhard's optimism.

Don: Yeah, I think so. He understands what science can do. He understands that it can be, yes, a force for our destruction, actually. Once we hit upon the knowledge of, you know, nuclear bombs, hydrogen bombs, and worse, yeah, we can destroy ourselves. We can be, at least in the current climate, people can be sort of ignorant of, almost willfully ignorant of the crises that we face. But you also see lots of examples of people who are caring about the creation, who are caring about the world and caring about each other. Those people exist even if they're not always reported about in the news and their organizations exist. So I'm thinking about a local place here in Pittsburgh where, you know, it's called Wesley House. And it's a place, Pittsburgh would not be Pittsburgh without Wesley House. It's a place that has a food pantry and it's been going since for, gosh, how many years? 47, I think, years. It's transformed what Pittsburgh is because some pastor had the vision to say, we've got too many homeless people around here. We've got too many people not being fed. people, you know, that need fans during hot weather and before. So those people working through the nooks and crannies of our society, not the big news, but sometimes the little news is what we need to hear.

Robert: So the moral here, I think you're saying is human responsibility is necessary for shaping the future direction of evolution. That there's not a blind determinism going on here. What we do really matters and we can either advance the process or fail the process. But it's up to us to take the reins.

Don: Yeah, the problem I find with determinism is that it doesn't really give guidance for what we should do. I mean, in a practical sense, we all believe in some kind of freedom. We certainly believe the person who, well, let's just question, what is an explanation? You know, Aristotle really believed that explanations come at least in four forms. You know, this is the explanation in terms of what a thing is made of. So we have, you know, courses on strength of materials because you can't build a bridge that lorries go across that are, it's made of cream cheese. We've got explanations in terms of the structures of things, the formal qualities of things. We've got an explanation, which, I mean, that's what DNA is. It's the formal qualities of things. Explanations in terms of the, more or less, the physical causes of things, and those are important. but also explanations in terms of why we do things and why we believe the things that we do. 

There's no way I can know of to reduce the relation between premise and conclusion to the relation between cause and effect. That's not the way they're related. They're related in terms of evidential value. And so when you evaluate an argument for global warming, when you evaluate an argument for feeding the poor or the undernourished, when you make an argument for peace in Gaza, you presuppose a certain freedom of thought, at the very least. And I've never been able to reconcile that with a purely causal story that determinism gives us. So at some point, freedom enters in a very practical way. We have to do this. The question is, how are we going to do it? And Teilhard at least gives us a vision of things where it's possible.

Robert: Next time, we move from Teilhard's Omega to his vision of the noosphere. Is it the digital mind emerging today, or are we simply worshiping technology? Join Don and me for part two as we continue our deep dive into Teilhard de Chardin. As always, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.