Cobb's pluralism has sometimes been identified as a kind of "deep" pluralism or, alternately, as a "complementary" pluralism. He believes that there are actually three distinct religious ultimates: (1) God, (2) Creativity/Emptiness/Nothingness/Being-itself, and (3) the cosmos/universe. Cobb believes that all of these elements are necessary and present in some form in every religion but that different faiths tend to stress one ultimate over the others. Viewed in this way, different religions may be seen to complement each other by providing insight into different religious ultimates. Cobb's pluralism thus avoids the criticism of conflating religions that are actually very different (for instance, Buddhism and Christianity) while still affirming the possible truths of both. Revitalizing Christianity in a pluralistic world Cobb believed that through at least the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, American Protestant theology had been largely derivative from European (specifically German) theology. In the late 1950s, Cobb and Claremont professor James Robinson decided that the time had come to end this one-sidedness and move to authentic dialogue between American and European theologians. To establish real mutuality, they organized a series of conferences of leading theologians in Germany and the United States and published a series of volumes called "New Frontiers in Theology." After writing several books surveying contemporary forms of Protestantism, Cobb turned in the mid-1960s to more original work which sought to bring Alfred North Whitehead's ideas into the contemporary American Protestant scene. Cobb aimed to reconstruct a Christian vision that was more compatible with modern knowledge and more ready to engage with today's pluralistic world. He did this in a number of ways. For one, Cobb has stressed the problems inherent in what he calls the "substantialist" worldview—ultimately derived from Classical Greek philosophy—that still dominates Christian theology, as well as most of western thought. This "substantialist" way of thinking necessitates a mind–matter dualism, in which matter and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of entities. It also encourages seeing relations between entities as being unimportant to what the entity is "in itself". In contrast to this view, Cobb follows Whitehead in attributing primacy to events and processes rather than substances. In this Whiteheadian view, nothing is contained within its own sharp boundaries. In fact, the way in which a thing relates to other things is what makes it "what it is". Cobb writes: If the substantialist view is abandoned, a quite different picture