Religion, Revelation and Peace: Approximations between Whitehead and Bahá’í Thought

Abstract

A.N. Whitehead is one of the most interesting philosophers of the 20th century. Being a mathematician (writing the Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, his student and colleague) and a philosopher of science, he became convinced that the scientific materialism underlying 19th century science was not only wrong given the new physical discoveries in Relativity Theory and Quantum Physics, but that it was philosophically insufficient to understand the complexity of the world and to reflect the variety of our experience adequately. Besides reformulating the metaphysical basis for a new understanding of reality through relations, processes and creativity, he was one of the few thinkers to include the divine into this new philosophical endeavor. This presentation will concentrate on Whitehead's view on religion, revelation and peace by which he, later in his life, applied his cosmology to questions of the future of a civilization of peace that does not exclude religion and has found an harmonious understanding of the relationship of philosophical thought and revelatory inspiration on its way to a new level of expressing humanity.