## 1. Life



Charles Hartshorne was born in the nineteenth century and lived to
philosophize in the twenty-first. He was born in Kittanning,
Pennsylvania (U.S.A.) on June 5, 1897. He was, like Alfred North
Whitehead, the son of an Anglican minister, although many of his
ancestors were Quakers. After attending Haverford College he served in
World War One in France as a medic, taking a box of philosophy books
with him to the front. After the war Hartshorne received his
bachelor's degree and doctorate in philosophy at Harvard, and there he
met Whitehead. Most of the major elements of Hartshorne's
philosophy were already apparent by the time he became familiar with
Whitehead's thought, contrary to a popular misconception. From
1923-1925 a postdoctoral fellowship took him to Germany, where
he had classes with both Husserl and Heidegger. But neither of these
thinkers influenced his philosophy as much as C.S. Peirce, whose
collected papers he edited with Paul Weiss. In addition to many
visiting appointments, Hartshorne spent his teaching career at three
institutions. From 1928-1955 he taught at the University of
Chicago, where he was a dominant intellectual force in the School of
Divinity, despite the fact that he was housed in the Philosophy
Department, where he was not nearly as influential. He was at Emory
University from 1955 until 1962, when he moved to the University of
Texas at Austin. Hartshorne eventually became a long-term emeritus
professor at Austin and lived there until his death on October 9,
2000. His wife, Dorothy, was as colorful as her husband and was
mentioned often in his writings. Hartshorne never owned an automobile,
nor did he smoke or drink alcohol or caffeine; he had a passion for
birdsong and became an internationally known expert in the field.


## 2. Method



Three primary methodological devices or procedures are at work in
Hartshorne's metaphysics. First, he very often uses a systematic
exhaustion of theoretical options--or the development of position
matrices, sometimes containing thirty-two alternatives(!)--in
considering philosophical problems. This procedure is evident
throughout his philosophy, but it is most apparent in his various
treatments of the ontological argument. To take another example, he
thinks it important to notice that regarding the mind-body problem
there are three options available to us, not two, as is usually
assumed: some form of dualism, some form of the materialist view that
psyche is reducible to body, *and* some form of the panpsychist
(or, as he terms it, psychicalist) view that body is in some way
reducible to psyche if all concrete singulars (e.g., cells or
electrons) in some way show signs of self-motion or activity. Thomas
Nagel famously considers this third option, but Hartshorne actually
defends it. The recent surge of interest in panpsychism indicates that
Hartshorne was ahead of his time by several decades in his ideas in
philosophy of mind.



Second, Hartshorne frequently uses the history of philosophy to see
which of the logically possible options made available by position
matrices have been defended before so as to avail ourselves of the
insights of others in the effort to examine in detail the consistency
of these positions and to assess their consequences. Nonetheless,
those logically possible options that have not historically found
support should be analyzed both in terms of internal consistency and
practical ramifications. It should be noted that Hartshorne's
use of the history of philosophy often involves lesser known views of
famous thinkers (like Plato's belief in God as the soul for the
body of the whole natural world, or Leibniz's defense of
panpsychism) as well as the thought of lesser known thinkers (such as
Faustus Socinus, Nicholas Berdyaev, Mohammed Iqbal, or Jules
Lecquier).



Third, after a careful reading of the history of philosophy has
facilitated the conceptual and pragmatic examination of all the
available options made explicit by a position matrix, the (Greek)
principle of moderation is used by Hartshorne as a guide to negotiate
the way between extreme views on either side. For example, regarding
the issue of personal identity, the view of Hume (and of Bertrand
Russell at one stage in his career) is that, strictly speaking, there
is no personal identity in that each event in "a person's
life" is externally related to the others. This is just as
disastrous, Hartshorne thinks, as Leibniz's view that all such
events are internally related to the others, so that implicit in the
fetus are all the experiences of the adult. (This Leibnizian view
relies on the classical theistic, strong notion of omniscience,
wherein God knows in minute detail and with absolute assurance what
will happen in the future.) The Humean view fails to explain the
continuity we experience in our lives and the Leibnizian view fails to
explain the indeterminateness we experience when considering the
future. The truth lies between these two extremes, Hartshorne thinks.
His view of personal identity is based on a conception of time as
asymmetrical in which later events in a person's life are
internally related to former events, but they are externally related
to those that follow, thus leading to a position that is at once
partially deterministic and partially indeterministic. That is, the
past supplies necessary but not sufficient conditions for human
identity in the present, which always faces a partially indeterminate
future.



Only the first of these methodological devices or procedures supports
the widely held claim that Hartshorne is a rationalist. His overall
method is a complex one that involves the other two methods or
procedures, where he does borrow from the rationalists, but also from
the pragmatists and the Greeks. It must be admitted, however, that
Hartshorne was educated in a philosophic world still heavily
influenced by late nineteenth and early twentieth century
idealism.


## 3. The Existence and Actuality of God



Philosophers commonly use a metaphor that suggests that the chain of
an argument, say for the existence of God, is only as strong as its
weakest link. Hartshorne rejects this metaphor on Peircian grounds. He
replaces it by suggesting that various arguments for the existence of
God--ontological, cosmological, design, etc.--are like
mutually reinforcing strands in a cable, as detailed by the Hartshorne
scholar Donald Viney.



He argues that Hume's and Kant's criticisms of the
ontological argument of St. Anselm are not directed at the strongest
version of his argument found in *Proslogion*, chapter 3. Here,
he thinks, there is a modal distinction implied between existing
necessarily and existing contingently. Hartshorne's view is that
existence alone might not be a real predicate, but existing
necessarily certainly is. To say that something exists without the
possibility of not existing is to say something significant about the
being in question. That is, contra Kant and others, Hartshorne
believes that there are necessary truths concerning existence. To say
that absolute nonexistence in some fashion exists is to contradict
oneself; hence he thinks that absolute nonexistence is unintelligible.
It is necessarily the case that *something* exists, he thinks,
and, relying on the ontological argument, he also thinks it true that
God necessarily exists.



On Hartshorne's view, metaphysics does not deal with realities
beyond the physical, but rather with those features of reality that
are ubiquitous or that would exist in any possible world. And he does
not think that it is possible to think of a preeminent being that
existed only contingently since if it did exist contingently rather
than necessarily, it would not be preeminent. That is, God's
existence is either impossible (positivism) or possible, and, if
possible, then necessary (theism). He is assuming here that there are
three alternatives for us to consider: (1) God is impossible; (2) God
is possible, but may or may not exist; (3) God exists necessarily. The
ontological argument shows that the second alternative makes no sense.
Hence, he thinks that the prime task for the philosophical theist is
to show that God is not impossible.

 A Hartshornian version of the
ontological argument can be put as follows: (1) Even if Kant was
correct that existence is not a predicate, modality of existence is a
predicate in the sense that saying that X exists necessarily or
contingently or impossibly, rather than merely saying that X exists,
is to say something or to predicate something significant about X. (2)
There are three (and only three) modes of existence: (a) impossible
(cannot exist); (b) contingent (may or may not exist--i.e., being such
that it exists but might not or being such that it does not exist but
might); and (c) necessary (must exist). (3) To say that God exists
contingently (as in 2b) is to contradict the logic of perfection
(which is Anselm's great discovery) because a being that existed
only contingently would not be the greatest conceivable. (4)
Therefore, the existence of God--the greatest conceivable being or a
perfect being--is either impossible or necessary (preliminary
conclusion). (5) The existence of God is not impossible (which is the
conclusion from other theistic arguments and from the history of
religious experience). (6) Therefore, the existence of God is
necessary; or, at the very least, the nonexistence of God is
inconceivable (ultimate conclusion). Hartshorne also offered a version
of the argument in formal logic (perhaps the very first to do so).


In addition, Hartshorne's detailed treatment of the argument
from design is connected to his view of biology. It is hard to
reconcile the idea of an omnipotent, classical theistic God with the
fact of the monstrosities and chance mutations produced in nature, but
the general orderliness of the natural world is just as difficult to
reconcile with there being no Orderer or Persuader at all. Belief in
God as omnipotent, he thinks, has three problems: (1) it is at odds
with the disorderliness in nature; (2) it yields the acutest form of
the theodicy problem; and (3) it conflicts with the notion from
Plato's *Sophist*, defended by Hartshorne, that being
*is* dynamic power (*dynamis*). An *omni*potent
being would ultimately have all power over others, who would
ultimately be powerless. But any being-in-becoming, according to
Hartshorne, has *some* power to be affected by others and to
affect others; this power, however slight, provides counterevidence to
a belief in divine omnipotence. In contrast, God is ideally powerful,
on the Hartshornian view. That is, God is as powerful as it is
possible to be, given the partial freedom and power of creatures.



Hartshorne's dispute with traditional or classical philosophical
theism concerns not so much the *existence* of God, but rather
its assumption that the *actuality* of God (i.e., *how*
God exists) could be described in the same terms as the existence of
God. A God who exists necessarily is not necessary or unchanging in
every other respect (e.g., in terms of divine responsiveness to
creaturely changes), he thinks. Although Hartshorne believes that the
medieval thinkers were correct in trying to think through the logic of
perfection, he also thinks that this logic has traditionally been
misapplied in the effort to articulate the attributes of a being
called "God," roughly defined as the greatest conceivable
being. The traditional or classical theistic logic of perfection sees
God as monopolar in that regarding various contrasts
(permanence-change, one-many, activity-passivity, etc.) the
traditional or classical philosophical theist has chosen one element
in each pair as a divine attribute (the former element of each pair)
and denigrated the other.



By way of contrast, Hartshorne's logic of perfection is dipolar.
Within each element of these pairs there are good features that should
be attributed in the preeminent sense to God (e.g., excellent
permanence in the sense of steadfastness, excellent change in the
sense of preeminent ability to respond to the sufferings of
creatures). In each element in these pairs there are also invidious
features (e.g., pigheaded stubbornness, fickleness). The task for the
philosophical theist, he thinks, is to attribute the excellences of
both elements of these pairs to God and to eschew the invidious
aspects of both elements. However, it should be noted that
*some* contrasts are not fit for dipolar analysis (e.g.,
good-evil) in that "good good" is a redundancy and
"evil good" is a contradiction. The greatest conceivable
being, he thinks, cannot be evil in any sense whatsoever.



Hartshorne does not claim to believe in two gods, nor does he wish to
defend a cosmological dualism. In fact, we can see that the opposite
is the case when we consider that, in addition to calling his theism
*dipolar*, he refers to it as a type of *panentheism*,
which literally means that all is *in* the one God. This
inclusion of the world in God occurs by means of omniscience (as
Hartshorne defines the term) and omnibenevolence. All creaturely
feelings, especially feelings of suffering, are included in the divine
life. God is seen by Hartshorne as the mind or soul for the whole body
of the natural world (see above regarding Plato's World Soul),
although he thinks of God as distinguishable from the creatures.
Another way to categorize Hartshorne's theism is to see it as
*neoclassical* in the sense that he relies on the classical or
traditional theistic arguments for the existence of God and on the
classical theistic metaphysics of being as *first steps* in the
effort to think through properly the logic of perfection. However,
these efforts need to be supplemented, he thinks, by the efforts of
those who see becoming as more inclusive than being. God is not
outside of time, as in the Boethian view that is influential among
traditional philosophical theists, but rather exists through all of
time, on Hartshorne's view. On the neoclassical view,
God's permanent "being" consists in steadfast
benevolence exhibited through everlasting becoming.



God is omniscient, on Hartshorne's view, but
"omniscience" here refers to the divine ability to know
everything that is knowable: past actualities as already actualized;
present realities to the extent that they are knowable according to
the laws of physics (e.g., what is present epistemically may very well
be the most recent past, given the speed of light); and future
possibilities or probabilities *as possibilities or
probabilities*. On the traditional or classical conception of
omniscience, however, God has knowledge of future possibilities or
probabilities as already actualized. According to Hartshorne, this is
not an example of supreme knowledge, but is rather an example of
ignorance of the (at least partially) indeterminate character of the
future.



The asymmetrical view of time, common to process thinkers in general
(e.g., Bergson, Whitehead, Hartshorne), in which the relationship
between the present and the past is radically different from the
relationship between the present and the future, also has implications
for Hartshorne's theodicy. A plurality of partially free agents,
including nonhuman ones, facing a future that is neither completely
determined nor foreknown in detail, makes it not only possible, but
likely, that these agents will get in each other's way, clash,
and cause each other to suffer. On this view, God is the fellow
sufferer who understands.


## 4. Axiology



Hartshorne views the cosmos as a "metaphysical monarchy,"
with God as the presiding, but not omnipotent, head, and he sees human
society as a "metaphysical democracy," with each member as
an equal. This makes him a liberal in politics if
"liberalism" refers to the egalitarian belief that none of
us is God. That is, due to the fact of pervasive pluralism of
comprehensive doctrines that citizens affirm, none of us should
presume to act like the classical theistic God by unreasonably
imposing our view of the world on others. Although Hartshorne and
Whitehead are both political liberals, Hartshorne is, despite his view
of panpsychist reality as thoroughly social, more of a libertarian
liberal and Whitehead more of a redistributive liberal. In axiology as
well as in metaphysics/theodicy, freedom is crucial, on
Hartshorne's view.



Hartshorne's panpsychism (or psychicalism) entails the belief
that each active singular in nature, even those like electrons and
plant cells that exhibit feeling if not mentality, is nonetheless
a center of intrinsic, and not merely instrumental, value. As a
result, Hartshorne's metaphysics is meant to provide a basis for
both an aesthetic appreciation of the value in nature, as well as for
an environmental ethics where intrinsic and instrumental values in
nature are weighed. In fact, Hartshorne was one of the first
philosophers to write in detail on topics in environmental ethics.



As a published expert on bird song, Hartshorne is the first
philosopher since Aristotle to be an expert in both metaphysics and
ornithology. He writes specifically of the aesthetic categories
required to explain why birds sing outside of mating season and when
territory is not threatened--two occasions for bird song that are
crucial to the behaviorists' account. Birds *like* to
sing, he concludes. His discovery of the "monotony threshold"
regarding bird song is still cited by ornithologists.
Hartshorne's ornithology thus serves to highlight the crucial
role that aesthetic categories play in Hartshorne's philosophy
(from the ancient Greek word for feeling: *aesthesis*), from
the minuscule feelings of microscopic reality to divine feelings.



Hartshorne's criticism of anthropocentrism is due not only to
his concern for God, but also for beings-in-becoming who experience in
a less sophisticated way than humans. To say that all active singulars
feel--leaving out of the picture abstractions like
"twoness" or insentient composites of active singulars
that do not themselves feel as wholes--is not to say that they
are self-conscious or that they think. As before, however,
Hartshorne's axiology is ultimately theocentric in
character.


## 5. Critical Evaluation



It seems fair to say that analytic philosophers, in general, even
analytic philosophers who are theists, have largely ignored
Hartshorne's philosophy. (The point is debateable. There has
been a move among many analytic philosophers who are theists, as in
Richard Swinburne, away from the eternal, Boethian God who is outside
of time altogether. Might it be that Hartshorne's influence is
greater than initially appears to be the case when the temporality, or
the sempiternity, of the God of many analytic philosophers is
concerned?) This is in contrast to his wide influence among
theologians, which is odd when it is considered that he is not a
theologian and does not rely on sacred scripture or religious
authority for his insights. Another oddity is the fact that
Hartshorne's influence among theologians is due to the defense
he offers of the *rationality* of belief in a neoclassical
God.



There is at least one important philosopher whose work indicates the
sort of debate that has occurred between Hartshorne and analytic
theists, who tend to rely on traditional or classical versions of the
concept of God. That is William Alston. There are two reasons why an
evaluation of Hartshorne's philosophy is facilitated by a
consideration of Alston's critique. First, Alston is as
important a theist as any among analytic philosophers and his
criticisms of Hartshorne's thought are like those of other
analytic philosophers like Thomas Morris, Richard Creel, Michael
Durrant, and others. And second, Alston is a former student of
Hartshorne's and is thoroughly familiar with Hartshorne's
arguments. Alston is a philosopher who is not scandalized by
Hartshorne's panentheism, nor by his neoclassical theism. But
Alston thinks that the contrast that Hartshorne draws between his
neoclassical theism and the classical theism of Thomas Aquinas is too
sharp.



Alston thinks that Hartshorne presents neoclassical theism and
classical theism as complete packages, whereas it would be better to
be able to pick and choose among individual items within these
packages. Alston seeks some sort of rapprochement between Thomism and
neoclassical theism, a rapprochement that Hartshorne himself would
like to bring about to the extent that he is a neo*classical*
thinker, but that is difficult to accomplish to the extent that he is
*neo*classical.



A consideration of ten contrasting attributes will best facilitate an
initial understanding of Hartshorne's view of God. Consider the
first group of attributes treated by Alston.




|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| CLASSICAL ATTRIBUTES | NEOCLASSICAL ATTRIBUTES |
| 1. absoluteness (absence of internal relatedness) | 1. relativity (God is internally related to creatures by way of
knowledge of them and actions toward them) |
| 2. pure actuality (there is no potentiality in God) | 2. potentiality (not everything is actualized that is possible
for God) |
| 3. total necessity (every truth about God is necessarily
true) | 3. necessity and contingency (God exists necessarily, but
various things are true of God contingently, e.g., God's
knowledge of what is contingent) |
| 4. absolute simplicity | 4. complexity |



Alston distinguishes two lines of argument regarding absoluteness and
relativity, which he sees as the key contrast. Alston thinks that only
one of these is successful. As indicated in the diagram above, what
Hartshorne means by absoluteness is absence of internal relatedness. A
relation is internal to a term of a relation just in case that term
would not be exactly as it is if it were not in that relationship.
Hartshorne's view is that God has internal relations to
creatures by way of knowing and acting towards them and receiving
influence from them.



On Alston's interpretation, Hartshorne's first line of
argument is to say that if the relation of the absolute to the world
really fell outside the absolute, then this relation would necessarily
fall within some further and genuinely single entity that embraced
both the absolute and the world and the relations between them. Thus,
we must hold, according to Hartshorne, that the God-creature relation
is internal to God; otherwise we will have to admit that there is
something greater or more inclusive than God. Alston does not find
this argument convincing because it includes the claim that God
"contains" the world due to the internal relations God has
with the world. Alston's view is that the entity to which a
relation is internal contains the terms only in the minimal sense that
those terms enter into a description of the entity, but it does not
follow from this that those terms are contained in that entity in an
organic way.



Divine inclusiveness, for Hartshorne, is sometimes like the inclusion
of thoughts in a mind, but usually it is described as like the
inclusion of cells within a living body. It is never like the
inclusion of marbles in a box. The inorganic and insentient character
of a box is inadequate as a model for divinity, he thinks, and divine
inclusiveness is never like the inclusion of theorems in a set of
axioms, as it might be for certain idealists. Divine inclusiveness in
Hartshorne is *organic* inclusiveness.



Hartshorne's second argument against absoluteness fares much
better, according to Alston. He agrees with Hartshorne's stance
regarding the cognitive relation God has with the world; in any case
of knowledge, the knowledge relation is internal to the subject,
external to the object. When a human being knows something, the fact
that she knows it is part of what makes her the concrete being that
she is. If she recognizes a certain tree she is different from the
being she might have been if she had not recognized the tree. But the
tree is unaffected by her recognition. Likewise, according to Alston,
one cannot maintain that God has perfect knowledge of everything
knowable and still hold that God is not qualified to any degree by
relations with other beings.



One might respond to Alston and Hartshorne on this point by saying
that since creatures depend for their existence on God, their
relations to God affect *them*, but not God. Richard Creel
seems to make this very point. But even if beings other than God
depend for their existence on God, it still remains true that if God
had created a different world from the one that exists at present,
then God would be somewhat different from the way God is at present:
God's knowledge would have been of *that* world and not
this one, according to both Alston and Hartshorne.



Alston's concessions to Hartshorne's concept of God extend
to contrasts 2-4. The above argument for the internal
relatedness of God (as cognitive subject) to the world presupposes
that there are alternative possibilities for God, and if there are
alternative possibilities for divine knowledge then this implies that
there are unrealized potentialities for God. *Pure* actuality
and *total* necessity cannot be defended as divine attributes,
according to Alston and Hartshorne. Alston's version of
Hartshorne's argument goes as follows:



> 
> (1) (a) "God knows that W exists" entails (b) "W
> exists."
> 
> 
> (2) If (a) were necessary, (b) would be necessary.
> 
> 
> 
> (3) But (b) is contingent.
> 
> 
> 
> (4) Hence (a) is contingent.
> 
> 
> 



We can totally exclude contingency from God only by denying God any
knowledge of anything contingent, a step that not even traditional or
classical theists wish to take. Contrast 4 must also be treated in a
dipolar way in that the main support for a doctrine of pure divine
simplicity is the absence of any unrealized potentialities in God.



In sum, Alston and Hartshorne agree on contrasts 1-4, except for
the fact that Hartshorne's concept of divine inclusiveness, in
contrast to Alston's, is organic in character.



Regarding a second group of attributes, however, Alston and many other
theists who are analytic philosophers diverge from Hartshorne rather
significantly:




|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| CLASSICAL ATTRIBUTES | NEOCLASSICAL ATTRIBUTES |
| 5. creation *ex nihilo* by a free act of will; God could
have refrained from creating anything | 5. both God and the world of creatures exist necessarily,
although the details are contingent |
| 6. omnipotence (God has the power to do anything God wills to do
that is logically consistent) | 6. God has all the power one agent could have given
metaphysical, in addition to logical, limitations |
| 7. incorporeality | 7. corporeality (the world is the body of God) |
| 8. nontemporality (God does not live through a series of
moments) | 8. temporality (God lives through temporal succession, but
everlastingly) |
| 9. immutability (God cannot change because God is not temporally
successive) | 9. mutability (God is continually attaining richer syntheses of
experience) |
| 10. absolute perfection (God is eternally that than which no
more perfect can be conceived) | 10. relative perfection (at any moment God is more perfect than
any other, but God is self-surpassing at a later stage of
development) |



Concerning contrast 5, Alston takes creation *ex nihilo* to be
fundamental to theism because it has deep roots in religious
experience. He thinks that to say that God has unrealized
potentialities and contingent properties is not to say that God
*must* be in relation with some world of entities other than
God. Alston admits that Hartshorne legitimately points out some of the
internal contradictions contained in the classical theistic version of
creation *ex nihilo*, but he claims that there is no connection
drawn by Hartshorne between divine creation and metaphysical
principles regarding relativity, contingency, and potentiality.
Alston's belief seems to be that those who accept creation
*ex nihilo* are not saying that there is absolutely nothing at
any stage: there is God. Rather, creation *ex nihilo* only
means that there is nothing out of which God creates the universe.
Here Alston seems to agree with Norman Kretzmann, Eleonore Stump, and
most other theists who are analytic philosophers.



Alston's stance here is problematic for two reasons, from
Hartshorne's point of view. First, although belief in
*some* sort of divine creativity has deep roots in the history
of religious experience, it is not clear that these roots have to tap
into creation *ex nihilo*. For example, it is not clear that
creation *ex nihilo* is the sort of creation described in
Genesis, in that when the Bible starts with the statement that the
spirit of God hovered above the waters, one gets the impression that
both God and the aqueous muck had been around forever. If one believes
in creation *ex nihilo*, however, as Alston does, one might
nonetheless claim that creation *ex nihilo* does not
necessarily mean a temporal beginning to the act of creation. But even
on this hypothesis there are problems, and this would seem to be
Hartshorne's second point. If Plato and Hartshorne are correct
that being *is* dynamic power, then the sort of unlimited power
implied by creation *ex nihilo* is impossible. Hartshorne would
argue, contra Alston, that there is a connection between belief in
creation *ex hyle* (as opposed to creation *ex nihilo*)
and the metaphysical principle that being is dynamic power. Creation
*ex nihilo*, Hartshorne thinks, is a convenient fiction
invented in the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E. in order to exalt
divine power, but it is not the only sort of creation that religious
believers have defended, nor is it defensible if being is dynamic
power.



Concerning contrast 6, Alston claims that belief in creation *ex
nihilo* and belief in divine omnipotence are separate beliefs such
that to argue against the former is not necessarily to argue against
the latter. Hartshorne tries to do too much, he thinks, with the claim
that being is power when he uses this claim to argue against divine
omnipotence. According to Alston, God can have *unlimited*
power, power to do anything that God wills to do, without having
*all* power in that, if being is power, the creatures also have
some power.



On Hartshorne's interpretation of Alston, however, God can have
ideal power, but not all power, because in addition to divine
power there are the existences of others with powers of their own.
Although God does not have all power, Hartshorne thinks that on
Alston's view God *could* have all power. In effect, what
Alston has done, according to Hartshorne, is reduce his stance
regarding divine omnipotence to that regarding creation *ex
nihilo* in that the claim that God could have all power is due to
the prior belief that God brings everything into existence out of
absolutely nothing, a belief that Alston thinks has to be the
traditional one and in point of fact is intelligible. It is not quite
clear to Hartshorne, however, that it is unquestionably the
traditional one, nor is it clear to him that we can develop an
intelligible concept of "absolutely nothing."



Hartshorne's Platonic or Bergsonian argument against creation
*ex nihilo*, in simplified form, looks something like this: one
can in fact imagine the nonexistence of this or that, or even of this
or that class of things, a fact that gives some the confidence to
(erroneously) think that this process can go on infinitely such that
one could imagine a state in which there was "absolutely
nothing." However, not every verbally possible statement is made
conceptually cogent by even the most generous notion of
"conceptual," according to Hartshorne. At the specific,
ordinary, empirical level negative instances are possible (e.g., this
corkscrew is not a dog), but at the generic, metaphysical level only
positive instances are possible (e.g., something must exist), on this
view. The sheer absence of reality cannot conceivably be experienced,
he thinks, for if it were experienced an existing experiencer would be
presupposed.



Contrast 7 deals with divine embodiment. Alston is willing to grant
that God is embodied in two senses: (1) God is aware, with maximal
immediacy, of what goes on in the world; and (2) God can directly
affect what happens in the world. That is, Alston defends a limited
version of divine embodiment, similar to that defended by Richard
Swinburne. However, Alston is sceptical regarding a stronger version
of divine embodiment wherein the world exists by metaphysical
necessity such that God *must* animate it. Alston is willing to
accept the idea that God has a body, but *only if* having such
a body is on God's terms. It seems that this weaker version of
divine embodiment defended by Alston, as opposed to Hartshorne's
stronger version wherein there is essential corporeality in God,
stands or falls with the defense of creation *ex nihilo*. In
fact, despite Alston's desire to examine each contrast
individually, as opposed to Hartshorne's stark contrast between
classical theistic attributes (all ten of them) and neoclassical
attributes (all ten of them), he ends up linking his criticisms of
Hartshorne regarding contrasts 5-7, at the very least. All three
of these classical theistic attributes stand together only with a
defensible version of creation *ex nihilo*.



Contrasts 8-9, concerning nontemporality and immutability, are
also linked by Alston. He concedes that if God is temporal, Hartshorne
has offered us the best version to date of what divine temporality and
divine mutability would be like. Alston dismisses as idle the view
that God could remain completely unchanged through a succession of
temporal moments, but this admission still leaves us, he thinks, with
the following conditional statement: "God undergoes change
*if* God is in time." Alston's critique of
Hartshorne's view also consists in a refusal to grant that
contingency and temporality are coextensive in the way mutability and
temporality are. Alston believes, contra Hartshorne, that God can be
in some way contingent (that any relation in which God stands to the
world might have been otherwise) and still be nontemporal.



Alston knows that the notion of a nontemporal God who is nonetheless
qualified by relation to temporal beings will strike Hartshorne as
unintelligible. Alston's attempt to make his position
intelligible rests on his own Thomistic-Whiteheadian stance, or
better, on his Thomistic or Boethian interpretation of Whitehead
(strange as this seems); Alston is also influenced here by Eleanore
Stump and Norman Kretzmann. We should not think of God as involved in
process or becoming of any sort. The best temporal analogy, he thinks,
for this conception is an unextended instant or an "eternal
now." For Alston this does not commit one, however, as
Hartshorne would allege, to a static deity frozen in immobility. On
the contrary, according to Alston, God is eternally active in ways
that do not require temporal succession. God's acts can be
complete in an instant. Alston includes God's acts of knowledge,
a stance that at least seems to conflict with one of the concessions
he made to Hartshorne regarding the first group of attributes.



The Boethian-Thomistic notion of the specious present for God, on the
analogue of a human being's perceiving some temporally extended
stretch of a process in one temporally indivisible act, is also
defended by Alston. For example, one can perceive the flight of a bee
"all at once" without first perceiving the first half of
the stretch of flight and then perceiving the second. One's
perception can be without temporal succession even if the object of
one's perception is, in fact, temporally successive. All we have
to do, on Alston's view, is expand our specious present to cover
all of time and we have a model for God's awareness of the
world. This is a much more difficult project for Hartshorne to imagine
than it is for Alston. Apparently Alston thinks that it is easy to
conceptualize God "seeing" Neanderthal man (or Adam),
Moses, Jesus, and Dorothy Day all at once in their immediacy. Here
Alston has a view similar to that of William Mann.



But even if it were possible to have nonsuccessive *awareness*
of a vast succession, which Hartshorne would deny, it is even more
implausible, from Hartshorne's point of view, to claim, as does
Alston, that God could have nonsuccessive *responses* to stages
of that succession. It might make more sense for Alston to say
"indesponses" or "presponses" rather than
"responses," as Creel would urge.



It is correct of Alston to notice that there is no loss in God, but
this is not incompatible with God's temporality, according to
Hartshorne. There can be succession in God without there being loss or
perishing due to the fact that God's inheritance of what happens
in the world and God's memory are ideal. Hartshorne thinks that
the future is incomplete and indeterminate for God as well as from our
limited perspective. Alston, by way of contrast, wants to defend a God
who is not strictly necessary in actuality, but is contingent,
*despite the fact that* God does not undergo temporal change,
nor is God fluent. Hartshorne's defenders, by way of contrast,
think that one of the greatest virtues of process thinking is its
effort to eliminate what they see as such self-contradiction in
philosophical theology.



Alston's treatment of contrast 10, concerning absolute versus
relative perfection, follows from what he has said regarding contrasts
8-9. Relative perfection in God, as opposed to absolute
perfection, has a point only for a temporal being; hence God is
absolutely perfect, according to Alston. A being that does not
successively assume different states could not possibly surpass
itself. Here, once again, Alston engages in linkage, thereby, at the
very least, confirming Hartshorne's belief that we need both to
consider the divine attributes together and to determine whether the
classical theist's linkage or the neoclassical theist's
linkage is more defensible. For the most past, Alston opts for
classical theism. Or more precisely, he thinks that the strongest
concept of God is acquired when we take a modified version of the
neoclassical attributes in contrasts 1-4 and combine them with
the classical attributes in contrasts 5-10.



This rapproachement in Alston between classical theism and
neoclassical theism is a step beyond James Ross's belief that
these are two competing descriptions of God at an impasse. Hartshorne
seems to agree with Ross. Neoclassical, dipolar theism
*already* includes the best insights of classical theism, he
thinks.



From Hartshorne's point of view the linkage of attributes
*within* the first group and *within* the second group
needs to be corrected by a greater concern for reticulating the
attributes in these two groups. He thinks that an explanation is
needed regarding how Alston can be committed to both monopolar and
dipolar theism. For example, Alston ends up defending the view that
God is changed by the objects God knows (pace the neoclassical,
dipolar attributes), but these are not changes that occur in time
(pace the classical, monopolar attributes). It is one thing,
Hartshorne thinks, to say that God exists in a nontemporal specious
present, and it is another to say that God is changed by temporal
beings in a nontemporal specious present. The former view is at least
problematic, he thinks, and the latter seems to be part of the
traditional classical theistic view wherein, from a Hartshornian
perspective, inconsistency goes in the guise of mystery.