It would be impossible to do justice to recent theological conversation about creation and creativity without giving serious attention to the offerings of process theology. Characterised by a privileging of creativity within both the world and the godhead, and offering an attractive connection between human and divine creativity, process theology provides what seems to be a promising avenue for the theological work required. Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep represents the most compelling and influential recent articulation of a process theology of creation and creativity. Its careful, daring, and imaginative engagement with scripture, and the literary and philosophical traditions presents the best of the process theological tradition. By a close examination of Keller’s Face of the Deep, however, I demonstrate how, despite its manifest attractions to a theology of mythopoiesis, Keller’s process theology is unable to account for the novum of human making while preserving the witness of the creedal tradition of Christian faith or falling into a dangerous nihilism.

Never-resolved problems of seventeenth-century metaphysics – the mind/body divide, nature conceived as alive or as a great, dead machine, and attendant questions about life and agency – have returned to haunt contemporary science. Siri Hustvedt demonstrates the ways in which these persistent philosophical dilemmas connect Cavendish’s monist, dynamic, organicist philosophy to much later thought in phenomenology, contemporary critiques in the philosophy of biology, and to Whitehead’s radical process philosophy.

In this chapter the author considers Aesthetic Theodicy, according to which selectedforms of cosmic beauty are valuable enough to justify natural evils suffered by animals. He begins by defending the use of aesthetic values in theodicy on the ground that aesthetic goods often have moral value. He then examines the classical versions of Aesthetic Theodicy, in which one appeals to cosmic harmony, balance, and overall fittingness of all parts into a beautiful and morally valuable whole. This approach fails to account well enough for the extreme disharmony, imbalance, and dysteleology in the Darwinian World, as unveiled by science. Next, he examines post-classical versions, in which one appeals to “major beauty” (so Whitehead) created by cosmic conflict and disintegrative elements of nature. He examines the specific appeal to the tragic moral beauty of evolution, particularly in predation. He argues that these approaches identify morally valuable forms of beauty, but they do not contain scenarios in which God defeats tragic evils for the victims. Nor can the appeal to tragedy account for the existence of Darwinian horrors. He concludes that perhaps sacred canonical sources can help.