## 1. Historical Notes on Process Theism



Although Whitehead was Hartshorne's senior by thirty-six years,
the two men began seriously to develop their ideas about God in
written form at roughly the same time. In his Harvard doctoral
dissertation (1923), Hartshorne argues for the existence of a God that
is the eminent exemplification of relational and social values.
Whitehead's writings on the concept of God appear only after
1924, when he moved to America. Between the publication of *Science
and the Modern World* (1925) and *Process and Reality*
(1929)--a time of intense creativity for Whitehead--he
articulated his metaphysical system, including the concept of God.
During Whitehead's first year at Harvard, Hartshorne was in
Europe for his second year as a Sheldon Traveling Fellow. When he
returned to Harvard in 1925 he was given the dual assignment of
editing the papers of Charles Sanders Peirce and of serving as
Whitehead's assistant. After 1940 Hartshorne became the primary
conduit for Whitehead's theistic ideas. Indeed, the elaboration
and defense of process theism fell largely to Hartshorne and his
students at the University of Chicago (1928-1955), Emory
University (1955-1962), and the University of Texas at Austin
(1962-2000). So great was Hartshorne's influence that some
scholars try to rescue Whitehead from a too Hartshornean
interpretation. This fact should serve as a warning that
Hartshorne's version of process theism is not the same as
Whitehead's. We shall see that Hartshorne's treatment of
theism owes much to Whitehead's metaphysics while departing from
it in ways that the Englishman would not accept.



Hartshorne accepted the task of chronicling process theism's
history and showing its importance as a significant alternative to
classical theism, pantheism, atheism, and other lesser known options
in philosophical theology. His 1953 anthology (republished in 2000),
*Philosophers Speak of God*, edited with the help of his
student William L. Reese, is a massive critical study of the varieties
of concepts of God as they relate to process theism. The book includes
selections from and commentaries on a wide range of thinkers from
Western and Eastern traditions, both well-known and obscure. It is
safe to say that Hartshorne's vigorous efforts on behalf of
process theism are the single most important factor in eroding the
consensus among philosophers that an eternal, immutable, and
impassible deity should be considered normative for philosophical
theology. More recently, Daniel Dombrowski has examined the history of
the concept of God through the lens of process philosophy (Dombrowski
2016).



*Philosophers Speak of God* demonstrates that Whitehead and
Hartshorne are not the sole representatives of process theism,
although they are its chief exponents. Buddhism, with its twin
emphases on impermanence and dependent origination, is arguably the
most sophisticated ancient form of process philosophy. Buddhist
philosophers criticized the notion of a timeless absolute without,
however, developing a form of process theism (e.g. Arnold 1998).
Whitehead remarks that his concept of God has more richness than the
Buddhist concept of nirvana and that his philosophy of religion could
be viewed as an effort to "true up" the Buddhist idea
(Johnson 1983, 8). Hartshorne maintains that aspects of process theism
are in Plato's later writings--specifically, the
*Sophist*, the *Timaeus*, and the
*Laws*--but they are never brought together into a
coherent theory. Hartshorne sees process theism as providing the
needed coherence (Dombrowski 2005 and Viney 2007).



In the generation immediately preceding Whitehead, C. S. Peirce
(1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910) closely
anticipated process theism and served as important influences on its
development. There was also a cross fertilization of ideas from some
of Whitehead's contemporaries: Henri Bergson (1859-1941),
Samuel Alexander (1859-1938), and William Ernest Hocking
(1873-1966)--Hocking was one of Hartshorne's teachers
at Harvard. Philosophers and religious thinkers who independently
formulated aspects of process theism in the twentieth century include:
Bernardino Varisco (1850-1933), Nicholas Berdyaev
(1874-1948), Mohammad Iqbal (1877-1938), Martin Buber
(1878-1965), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), Edgar
Sheffield Brightman (1884-1953), Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
(1888-1975), Sri Aurobindo (1892-1950), Hans Jonas
(1903-1993), and Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972).



Because process theists reject the idea of a deity whose moral
character is ever questionable, John Stuart Mill's essay,
"Theism," is *not* an anticipation of process
theism. By parity of reasoning, Peter Forrest's proposal of a
God that grows from pure power to pure love is not a version of theism
that process theists would find appealing (Forrest 2007). Some of the
central themes and arguments of process theism, however, are evident
in less well-known thinkers scattered throughout history. One can
mention the names of Levi ben Gerson (1288-1340), Fausto Socinus
(1539-1604), Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775-1854),
Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), Rowland Gibson Hazard
(1801-1888), Jules Lequyer [or Lequier] (1814-1862),
Lorenzo D. McCabe (1817-1897), and Otto Pfleiderer
(1839-1908). Some might count G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831)
as a forerunner of process theism, but his case is not clear. The idea
of development is central to Hegel's thinking about the Absolute
Spirit. On the other hand, his philosophy was more influential in
ushering in what he himself called "the death of God" than
in providing a clearly articulated *theistic* alternative to
classical theism (cf. Kung 1980, 138-42). It is also ironic
that it was much less in the positive influence of Hegelian idealism
than in the negative reactions to it that process philosophy, and by
implication process theism, matured in the twentieth century.



Philosophers and theologians who have published a monograph defending
some variety of process theism informed by Whitehead or Hartshorne
include: Henry Nelson Wieman (1884-1975), Bernard Meland
(1899-1993), Paul Weiss (1901-2002), Norman Pittenger
(1905-1997), Daniel Day Williams (1910-1973), John Moskop,
William L. Reese, John B. Cobb, Jr., Schubert Ogden (1928-2019), Edgar
A. Towne (1928-2018), Eugene H. Peters (1929-1983), Bowman
Clarke (1927-1996), Joseph Bracken, Burton Z. Cooper, Marjorie
Hewitt Suchocki, Gene A. Reeves, Lewis S. Ford (1933-2018),
Andre Gounelle, Rem B. Edwards, Delwin Brown (1935-2009),
David A. Pailin, Franklin I. Gamwell, Forrest Wood, David Ray Griffin,
James A. Keller, Jorge Luis Nobo (1940-2019), Tyron Inbody, Carol P.
Christ, George L. Goodwin, Barry Whitney, Santiago Sia, Jay McDaniel,
George W. Shields (1951-2020), Donald Viney, Catherine Keller, Daniel
A. Dombrowski, Anna Case-Winters, Kurian Kachappilly, Gregory A. Boyd,
Roland Faber, Thomas Jay Oord, Donna Bowman, Derek Malone-France,
Monica A. Coleman, and Julia Enxing; Williams, Reese, Cobb, Ogden, and
Peters were Hartshorne's students at Chicago; Clarke and Edwards
studied with him at Emory; Nobo was Hartshorne's student at
Texas.


## 2. God and Creativity



The question of the metaphysical relation of God and creativity is a
watershed between process theism and more traditional forms of theism.
Process philosophy, modifying a statement from Plato's
*Sophist* (247e), affirms that the most concrete real
beings--in Whitehead's language, actual entities--are
characterized by the power to act *and* to be acted upon (Plato
says real beings act *or* are acted upon). In process
metaphysics no actual entity is wholly determined by the activity of
another; or phrased positively, every actual entity retains
*some* power of self-determination, however minimal or slight
it may be. According to this view, to have power in relation to others
is to have power in relation to other entities with some degree of
power. This is process philosophy's doctrine of universal
creativity. Hartshorne says, "To be is to create"
(Hartshorne 1970, 1, 272). The logic of the matter does not change if
God is included in the metaphysical scheme. For process theism, God is
the supreme or eminent creative power, but not the only creative
power. Thus, process theists speak of God and the creatures as
co-creators (Hartshorne and Reese 1953 [2000, 140]; Hartshorne 1967a,
113).



Process theism's doctrine of creativity differs from that of
classical theism according to which God alone is genuinely creative.
Thomas Aquinas says that in the proper sense of the word, only God
creates (*Summa Theologica* I, Q 45, a. 5). Aquinas explains
that to create is to bring something from nothing, and this is
possible only for deity. This is the famous doctrine of
*creatio* *ex nihilo*, or creation from no pre-existing
material. This *ex nihilo* creation is logically distinct from
the claim that the universe is temporally finite. Aquinas, for
example, treats the questions whether God is the creator and whether
the universe had a beginning under separate headings. Aquinas is clear
that he accepts the temporal finitude of the universe as a matter of
faith, from revelation, and not because of rational argument. On the
other hand, like other traditional theists (Gottfried Leibniz for
example), Aquinas holds that God could have created a temporally
infinite universe, but it too would have been created *ex
nihilo*.



Process theists generally, though not unanimously, deny that the
universe had a first temporal moment. Those wishing to demonstrate the
compatibility between process theism and Jewish and Christian
Scripture commonly follow David Griffin's arguments that the
Bible neither requires nor implies an absolute beginning of the
universe (Griffin 2001b, 109-114). There is still the objection,
however, that by conceiving both God and the creatures as creative,
process theists seem to destroy one of the most meaningful contrasts
between God and the world: God as creator and the world as created.
Indeed, Whitehead says, "It is as true to say that God creates
the World, as that the World creates God" (Whitehead 1929 [1978, 348]).
One must, however, separate Whitehead's poetic expression from
his philosophical meaning. In process theism, as in traditional
theism, the *existence* of God is in no way precarious, in no
way dependent upon the activity of other entities; likewise, process
theism and traditional theism are in agreement that non-divine
individuals are contingent (they can fail to exist)--in the case
of non-angelic beings, they are born and they die. In
Whitehead's and Hartshorne's form of theism, God's
existence is everlasting, but the existence of any particular creature
is not. Nevertheless, the creatures, being lesser creators, create
something in God, if only the knowledge of their own activity. For
process theism, the activity of the creatures makes no difference to
God's existence, only to God's experience of them.



Implicit in traditional theism's doctrine of creation are the
ideas that God's creative act and God's knowledge of the
world are non-temporal. Augustine, for example, in the
*Confessions* (book XI, chapters 13 and 14), considers it
nonsensical to ask what God was doing before the creation of the
world; God, in creating the universe, brings time--and with it,
relations of before and after--into existence; thus, it is no
more meaningful to ask what came *before* the first moment of
time than it is to ask on a spinning sphere what is north of the north
pole. In traditional theism, the temporal world is spread out before
God who can see it in its entirety from an eternal vantage point. As
Boethius says in *The Consolation of Philosophy* (book 5, prose
6), eternity is the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of
everlasting life. Process theism takes a contrary view that *time
is the process of creation*. In other words, the order of beings
in time is the process whereby beings are created. For process
metaphysics, there is no eternal act of divine creation that fixes the
world in existence and there is no eternal perspective from which the
universe can be considered a finished product. Furthermore, the
"creative advance," as Whitehead calls the universe, is
inherently open-ended and growing, like a line to which tiny segments
are continually being added. Where Aquinas could liken God's
prescience to a man viewing a caravan of travelers from a high tower,
Hartshorne says, "There is not (either now or eternally) a fixed
totality of travelers for God to survey, but a new totality each
moment" (Hartshorne 1970, 135).



Whitehead remarks that, "In all philosophic theory there is an
ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents" (Whitehead
1929 [1978, 7]). In process thought, this ultimate is creativity. It would be
misleading, however, to speak as though creativity were "the
ultimate reality" according to process theism (Hick 1990, 49).
Creativity is not a metaphysical agency that produces anything;
rather, it is the character of every concrete fact, from the humblest
flicker of existence in non-divine actual entities to God.
Whitehead's pithy summary of process philosophy is, "The
many become one, and are increased by one" (Whitehead 1929 [1978, 21]).
Creativity, then, is the ultimate metaphysical principle. A principle,
however, is not a real being. Whitehead explained to his student A. H.
Johnson that God is not a principle but an actuality (Johnson 1983,
5). That which is best described, in process theism, as the ultimate
reality, is God. For Whitehead and Hartshorne, God should not be
treated as the exception to metaphysical principles; otherwise, apart
from an appeal to putative revelations from God, there could be no
reasoned discourse about the divine. Whitehead and Hartshorne strive
to conceive God as the chief exemplification of metaphysical
principles. In process theism, the divine or eminent form of
creativity provides the basis for cosmic order and achieved value. In
Whitehead's words, God is "the poet of the world,"
leading it with tender patience by the divine vision of truth, beauty,
and goodness (Whitehead 1929 [1978, 346]).



Process theism is critical of the traditional metaphysical question,
"Why is there something rather than nothing?" In process
thought, the proposition, "Something exists," is a
necessary truth (Hartshorne 1971). Insofar as traditional theism
maintains the doctrine of the necessary existence of God, it too
accepts the necessity of something existing. Therefore, the difference
between process theism and traditional theism is not in whether
something necessarily exists, but in the *nature* of the
necessarily existent. According to traditional theism, the
*totality* of non-divine entities is a multiplicity in need of
grounding in a primordial unifying activity--the "pure
act" (*actus* *purus*) of existing that is God.
Process theism refuses to give a privileged metaphysical status to the
one over the many. In Whitehead's words, "The term
'many' presupposes the term 'one,' and the
term 'one' presupposes the term 'many'"
(Whitehead 1929 [1978, 21]). Taking creativity as the category of the
ultimate is an attempt to keep the one and the many on equal
metaphysical footing by taking reality itself as necessarily social.
God, considered as the ultimate reality in any version of process
metaphysics, necessarily exists as a social being in dynamic
interaction with all non-divine entities.



Clearly, treating creativity as the ultimate metaphysical principle
has far-reaching consequences for the concept of God and of
God's relations to others. It is not possible, in process
metaphysics, to conceive divine activity as a
"supernatural" intervention into the "natural"
order of events. Process theists usually regard the distinction
between the supernatural and the natural as a by-product of the
doctrine of creation *ex nihilo*. In process thought, there is
no such thing as a realm of the natural in contrast to that which is
supernatural. On the other hand, if "the natural" is
defined more neutrally as "what is in the nature of
things," then process metaphysics characterizes the natural as
the creative activity of actual entities. In Whitehead's words,
"It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into
complex unity" (Whitehead 1929 [1978, 21]). It is tempting to emphasize
process theism's denial of the supernatural and thereby
highlight what the process God cannot do in comparison to what the
traditional God can do (that is, to bring something from nothing). In
fairness, however, equal stress should be placed on process
theism's denial of the natural (as traditionally conceived) so
that one may highlight what the creatures cannot do, in traditional
theism, in comparison to what they can do in process metaphysics (that
is, to be part creators of the world with God).


## 3. Real Relations in God



Process theists generally regard the notion of creation *ex
nihilo*, as explained above, as going hand-in-hand with the idea
that the relations between God and the world are one-way relations.
God creates, but the creatures lack all creative power, the one wholly
uncreated, the other wholly uncreative (Hartshorne 1970, 9). It is not
within the ability of any creature, according to this view, to make a
difference to God. Aquinas's way of expressing this asymmetry is
to say that the relation from God to the creatures is real (for it
makes a difference, all the difference, to them) whereas the relation
from the creatures to God is rational, or in the mind only (for the
existence of the creatures makes no difference to the being of God)
(*Summa Theologica* I, Q 13, a. 7). Aquinas borrows, and places
in a Christian context, Aristotle's terms of "pure
act" and "unmoved mover" to apply to God. To say
that God is pure act is to say that anything God could be, God already
is--there is no potentiality in God for any type of change. To
say that God is the unmoved mover is to say that the divine moves
others but is unmoved by another--this includes the idea that God
is impassible, literally, without feeling or emotion.



In the view of process theism, the denial of real relations in God
renders classical theism paradoxical to the point of incoherence.
According to classical theism, God has perfect knowledge of a
contingent and changing world, yet nothing in God could be other than
it is. The one condition, however, contradicts the other (cf.
Hartshorne 1948, 13-14; Viney and Shields 2020, 147-150). If any
event is contingent then it could be otherwise--for example, this
bird at this place and time is singing rather than sleeping; but if
the event could be otherwise, then God's knowledge of the event
could be otherwise--knowing this bird at this place and time as
singing rather than as sleeping. The contingency implied for
God's knowing is not that God might have been ignorant of
something but that the thing that God knows might have been different.
An infallible knower necessarily knows whatever exists; it does not
follow, however, that what exists is necessary *unless* one
adds the premise, taken from classical theism, that nothing in God
could be other than it is. Process theism jettisons the premise that
there is nothing contingent in God. The only other non-atheistic
alternatives, say process theists, are to follow Aristotle and deny
that God knows the world or to follow Spinoza and deny that nothing in
God or in the world could be other than it is (Hartshorne 1976, 12).
What is impossible is a God with no contingent aspects knowing a
contingent world.



The denial of real relations in God also has paradoxical consequences
for the concept of divine goodness. If God is unaffected by the
creatures, then God is impassible, not moved by their suffering.
Anselm, in *Proslogion* chapter VIII, asks how God can be
compassionate towards the creatures without feeling sympathy for them.
His answer--in effect a kind of theological behaviorism
(Dombrowski 2006, 140)--is that the creatures feel the effects of
divine compassion but that God feels nothing. This leaves unanswered
how non-sympathetic compassion is possible. Aquinas provides a less
obviously question begging reply. He says that to love another is to
will the good of the other; God necessarily wills the good of the
other, so God is love (*Summa Theologica* I, Q 20, a. 2).
Process theists do not deny that love requires willing the good of the
other, but they maintain that it requires something more, or at very
least that there are greater forms of love of which willing the good
of the other is a necessary aspect. Divine love is more than
beneficence; it includes sensitivity to the joys and sorrows of the
beloved. This idea is expressed in Whitehead's depiction of God
as "the great companion--the fellow-sufferer who
understands" (Whitehead 1929 [1978, 351]). Hartshorne points out that
Anselm's God can give us "everything except the right to
believe that there is one who, with infinitely subtle and appropriate
sensitivity, rejoices in all our joys and sorrows in all our
sorrows" (Hartshorne 1948, 54).



Closely related to the problem of passionless love, for classical
theism, is the question of the world's value. The denial of real
relations in God, coupled with the concept that the world and its
creatures have no value except as it is borrowed from God, implies
that that total reality described by *God-and-the-world*
contains no more value than that described by
*God-without-the-world*. This view has two unhappy
consequences. First, it implies that there is no value in God's
creating the world--nothing is gained, or lost, in God's
decision to create. Second, it implies that there is no value in
God's interaction with the creatures. Process theists point out
that these ideas do not square with analogies drawn from human
experience. There is value in giving one's love to another, as
for instance, bringing children into the world and loving them; there
is also value in one's love being received and returned, as when
the children mature and cherish relations with their parents. Yet, one
cannot love another unless the other exists, or once existed. Thus, if
there is a value in love, it requires *the existence of the
other*, not merely *the idea of the existence of the
other*. Process theism rejects the counter-intuitive claim that
the world as actually existing has no more value than the world as
possibly existing. By parity of reasoning, process theism rejects the
view that it is no better for God to create the world than to
contemplate the possibility of creating it.



Perhaps the most disastrous consequences of the denial of real
relations in God, as far as process theists are concerned, are the
problems that it poses for free will and creaturely suffering. For
classical theism, the creative or causal relation flows one way only,
*from* God *to* the world. The world and its creatures
are products of a unilateral divine decision that things should be one
way rather than another. Hartshorne poses a dilemma for this view.
Either biological parents are part creators of their children or they
are not. If they are then God alone is not the creator. On the other
hand, if parents are not genuine creators of their children then the
creatures never create anything and we don't know what
"create" means, for parents having children would seem to
be a paradigm of creation--note the word
"procreative" (cf. Hartshorne 1987, 88-89).
Classical theists accept precisely the implication that Hartshorne
finds absurd, namely, that the creatures never create anything. The
Thomist, for example, holds that one's parents are not creative;
they are the vehicles whereby matter-energy is rearranged so as to
form (not to create) a new human being. Strictly speaking, for
Aquinas, what God creates is *your-parents-having-you*. Your
parents had no part in your creation.



Aquinas's theory poses complications for human freedom. The
reality described by *your-parents-having-you* includes the
decisions they make in having you. God, in creating that reality, also
creates those decisions. Aquinas says that God's will is
perfectly efficacious--that is, what God wills comes to pass.
Therefore, your parents' decisions in
*your-parents-having-you* must occur. Would this view of
decision making jeopardize human freedom? Aquinas, representing
classical theism, says no, but Hartshorne, representing process
theism, says yes. In Aquinas's view, one's free decisions
have *two* sufficient explanations, one's own will and
God's will. In other words, God brings it about not only
*that* one freely decides something, but *what* one
freely decides (*Summa Theologica* I, Q 19, a. 8). Process
theists counter that multiple freedom (whether between God and the
creatures or among the creatures) implies the possibility of wills
coming into conflict or being in harmony. Hartshorne says, "Risk
and opportunity go together, not because God chooses to have it so,
but because opportunity without risk is meaningless or
contradictory" (Hartshorne 1970, 238). If this is true, then it
must be possible for the will of the creatures to be at cross purposes
with the divine will. We have already seen that classical theists and
process theists agree that God wills the good of the creatures. Human
beings, however, do not always will their own good, or the good of
other people. In those cases, on the classical view, God brings it
about that people freely decide not to will the good of others.
Process theists argue that this makes God responsible for evil and
suffering in a way that contradicts divine goodness. On the classical
view, for example, the crimes that disfigure human history are the
fault of human beings, but they are also God's doing.



Classical theists are not without responses to these criticisms. One
well-known reply, used by Augustine and Aquinas, is to invoke the
distinction between divine permission and divine causation of human
wickedness and suffering. On this view, the evil in the world is
permitted by God in order to bring about a greater good. For example,
the Exultet of the Easter Vigil, sometimes ascribed to Ambrose of
Milan, speaks of the sin of Adam and Eve as a blessed fault (*O
felix culpa!*) that made possible the sacrificial death of Christ.
Process theists argue that there can be no distinction between
permitting and causing in a being that creates the universe *ex
nihilo*. On the principles of classical theism, whatever is
divinely "permitted" is also divinely created to be as it
is (cf. Griffin 1976, 63-64 and 82-83)--this is one
of the few points on which process theism agrees with John Calvin
(Case-Winters, 1990, 71). On the process view, creaturely decisions
are themselves acts of creation, which means that the universe is a
joint product of God and the creatures. Process theists do not see
how, in creation *ex nihilo*, creaturely decisions that God
permits are not orchestrated by God so as to fulfill the purposes God
has for them. Albert Einstein is reported to have said that God does
not play dice with the universe. Although he was not a classical
theist, his view on this issue is in accord with that philosophy. God
may, as it were, allow or permit the dice to fall where they may, but
only if they fall as God desires them to fall; this seems different in
name only from playing with loaded dice. Hartshorne replies,
"Einstein's rejection of a 'dice-throwing God'
was a great man's error. And human individuals are some of the
dice ..." (Hartshorne 1967a, 113).


## 4. Dual Transcendence in Whitehead and Hartshorne



The dominant theological position in the West, which we have been
referring to as classical theism, denies all relativity to God. One
might suppose that the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the
Incarnation of God in Christ would temper disbelief in divine
relativity. The trend, however, was to argue that these doctrines do
not conflict with the denial of real relations in God. Claims of
revealed truth aside, the core doctrine has been that God, to be God,
must be in all respects absolute and in no respects relative. As goes
the contrast between absolute and relative, so go other metaphysical
contrasts. Theists traditionally held that God is *in all
respects* creator, active, infinite, eternal, necessary,
independent, immutable, and impassible and *in no respects*
created, passive, finite, temporal, contingent, dependent, mutable, or
passible. This view can be interpreted either as a doctrine about the
nature of God or as a thesis about the parameters of responsible
discourse about God (in the latter case it is called the *via*
*negativa*, or negative path). Hartshorne complains that, on
either interpretation, traditional theology is guilty of a
"monopolar prejudice," placing God (or talk about God) on
one side of polar contrasts and the world on the other. It is
*monopolar* insofar as deity is characterized by only one side
of each pair of contrasts; it is *prejudicial* insofar as it
holds to the invidious nature of the contrasts. As Hartshorne notes,
"One pole of each contrary is regarded as more excellent than
the other, so that the supremely excellent being cannot be described
by the other and inferior pole" (Hartshorne and Reese 1953 [2000,
2]).



Classical theists certainly made provisions for speaking of God in
ways that suggested divine passion and even mutability. As Paul
Gavrilyuk argues, for the Church Fathers, divine impassibility was
less a denial of God's emotional life than it was a qualifier
that ruled out "passions and experiences that were unbecoming of
the divine nature" (Gavrilyuk 2004, 16). In a similar vein,
Michael Dodds emphasizes that Aquinas did not construe divine
immutability as an attribute of God nor did he think that it implies
inertness or stagnation. Nevertheless, Dodds, interpreting Aquinas,
maintains that immutability "seems to signify divine being
(*esse*) more appropriately [than mutability] since it more
clearly indicates its distinction from all other things and its
transcendence of all human thought and language" (Dodds 2008,
157-158).



Process theists also emphasize our limitations in knowing the reality
of God, but they are not persuaded that it is best signified by only
one pair of the metaphysical contraries. If one is willing to concede
that God should not be conceived as immutable in the bad ways that
creatures are unchanging, why may not God be conceived as changeable
in the good ways that creatures are, with the proviso that God's
excellence necessarily surpasses all else? Hartshorne notes that
ordinary language provides scanty support for and abundant evidence
against the superiority of one pole over the other. We have already
seen that process theism finds positive value in God's love
being active as well as passive; it is as important that God wills the
good of the creatures as that God is affected by their joy and
suffering. Here is another of Hartshorne's many examples,
expressed with some humor:



> 
> The venerable dogma, 'agent is superior to patient', is
> not derived from the study of knowledge. Indeed, it is not derived
> from any careful examination of ordinary cases. To speak is to be
> agent, to listen is to be patient, and those who want to show their
> superiority by speaking without listening are not trustworthy
> authorities in the theory of value. (Hartshorne 1970, 231-32)
> 



Hartshorne's larger point is that the pairs of metaphysical
contraries are *not* related as superior to inferior, but that
there are admirable and deficient manifestations of both sides. He
sums this up in the principle of *the non-invidiousness of the
metaphysical contraries* (Hartshorne 1970, 268). If this principle
is correct, and if God is conceived as the eminent embodiment of value
and supremely worshipful being, then God must be conceived not in
monopolar terms but as dipolar, exemplifying the admirable forms of
both pairs of metaphysical contrasts. For example, rather than saying
that God is in all respects active and in no respects passive, the
alternative is to say that God is active in some respects and passive
in other respects, each in uniquely excellent ways. This is one
meaning of the expression "dipolar theism"; in light of
other meanings to be given to "dipolar" in discussions of
process theism, it is perhaps clearer to use Hartshorne's
expression for this idea: *dual transcendence*, that is to say,
God as the supreme embodiment of each pair of metaphysical
contraries.



The most elegant statement of dual transcendence is in the closing
pages of *Process and Reality*, a line of which we have already
quoted. The complete quotation reads like a litany:



> 
> 
> It is as true to say that God is permanent and the world fluent, as
> that the World is permanent and God is fluent.
> 
> 
> 
> It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the
> World is one and God many.
> 
> 
> 
> It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual
> eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual
> eminently.
> 
> 
> 
> It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is
> immanent in the World.
> 
> 
> 
> It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World
> transcends God.
> 
> 
> 
> It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World
> creates God.
> 
>  (Whitehead 1929 [1978, 348])
> 



We saw above in the discussion of divine creativity that Whitehead
indulges in poetic expression and that understanding his meaning
requires looking more closely at his metaphysical categories. Above
all, however, what is required is a way of making principled
distinctions between different aspects of God so that the doctrine of
dual transcendence does not collapse into contradiction. Let us
examine the different ways in which Whitehead and Hartshorne attempt
to save the doctrine of dual transcendence from incoherence.


### 4.1 Whitehead on the two natures of God



In Whitehead's philosophy, every actual entity has a physical
and a mental pole. For this reason, Whitehead speaks of actual
entities as "dipolar" (thus, a second meaning of the
word). The physical and mental poles are aspects of every real being
(actual entities) but they are not real beings themselves. In other
words, Whitehead is not a mind-body dualist. It is also important to
note that, for Whitehead, human consciousness is a higher form of
mentality but not the only form. Thus, Whitehead does not claim that
every real being is a conscious entity. As with Leibniz, Whitehead
recognizes a continuum of mind-like qualities ranging from very
primitive feelings to the most advanced form of self-awareness.
Whereas Leibniz speaks of every real being--he calls them
monads--as having apperception and appetition, Whitehead speaks
of every actual entity as *prehending*, or grasping or taking
account of, its environment and as striving to realize the
*subjective aim* of coordinating its prehensions in some
determinate fashion. In *Process and Reality*, Whitehead uses
the word "feeling" as a synonym for prehension to indicate
the vector character of feelings--a feeling is always a feeling
*of* something. Whitehead's belief in a continuum of
mental qualities fits neatly with evolutionary theory where it is
commonplace to conceive differing forms of organic complexity as
associated with differing levels of mental capacity. For example, the
frontal cortex of a human brain allows for more advanced mentality
than one finds in a chimpanzee, whose brain is not as complex.



Whitehead is fully aware that there is an imaginative leap in applying
these categories to God, but he believes the application can be done
in a disciplined and systematic fashion. Whitehead conceives God as an
actual entity. In God, the physical and mental poles are called the
*consequent nature* and the *primordial nature*
respectively. As with the physical and mental poles of actual
entities, so the two "natures" are distinguishable but
inseparable aspects of deity. That is to say, neither can exist apart
from the other and each requires the other. The primordial nature is
God's envisagement of all possibilities; in the idiom of
Leibniz, it is God's knowledge of all possible worlds. It is
called "primordial" because it represents *what could
be* in a sense not tethered to the actual course of events. It is
logical space, deficient in actuality apart from the consequent nature
says Whitehead. The consequent nature is God's prehensions of
the actual processes of the world. Conversely, it is the world's
influence on God. It is called "consequent" because it is
consequent upon, or dependent upon, the decisions of non-divine actual
entities (Whitehead calls them actual occasions). The consequent
nature is the record of all achieved fact, a perfect memory of what
has been--Whitehead speaks of the "objective
immortality" of the world in God. The two natures work in
concert in the process of God's interaction with the creatures.
The deity receives the world of actual occasions into its experience;
then, comparing what has actually occurred with the realm of pure
possibility, God informs the world with new ideals (new aims),
customized for each actual entity, for what realistically could be
achieved. Whitehead sometimes refers to this aspect of the process as
the *superjective* *nature* of God. It is God's
relevance for the world as a "lure for feeling," urging
the creatures to strive for whatever perfection of which they are
capable.



Each of the statements in Whitehead's "litany" can
be interpreted in terms of the interaction between the two natures and
God's interaction with the world. God is permanent in the sense
of everlastingly envisioning the realm of possibility; the world is
permanent as objectively immortal in God's memory. God is fluent
in constantly acquiring new experiences of the world and the world is
fluent in the rhythm of the birth and death of actual occasions. God
is one in being a single actual entity; but God is many in the graded
relevance of possibilities provided for each emergent occasion. The
world is one in virtue of God's experience of it; the world is
many because of the plurality of occasions that make it up. God is
eminently actual in comparison to the world by achieving a unification
of worldly occasions in the consequent nature that is beyond any of
them taken singly; but the world is eminently actual in comparison to
God's primordial nature, which is not concrete, although it is
as infinite as the entire range of possibility. God and the world are
immanent in each other in that each experiences the other; yet God and
the world transcend each other by being realities whose experiences
are not entirely determined by the other. Finally, as we have seen,
God creates the world by informing it with possibilities (technically
speaking, God provides "initial aims" for every nascent
occasion). The world creates God, not by bringing God into existence,
but by creating something in God, namely the material for what shall
become objectively immortal.


### 4.2 Hartshorne on existence and actuality



Hartshorne develops the concept of dual transcendence by drawing a
distinction of logical type between, on the one hand, an
individual's existence and enduring characteristics and, on the
other hand, the actual states of the individual. Using an example dear
to his ornithological interests, Hartshorne says, "That I shall
(at least probably) exist tomorrow is one thing; that I shall exist
hearing a blue jay call at noon is another" (Hartshorne 1962,
63). The logical relationship between the two sentences "I shall
exist tomorrow" and "I shall exist tomorrow as hearing a
blue jay call at noon" is that the second cannot be inferred
from the first, but the first can be inferred from the second. The
relation of entailment between the sentences is a function of the
information provided in them. Both sentences speak of the
individual's existence, but only the second sentence speaks of
the experience that the individual is having. Hartshorne argues that
this logical relation between the sentences reflects an ontological
difference between the bare fact of one's existence and the
actual states in which one exists. Existence, says Hartshorne, is
abstract compared to actuality, which is the concrete. What is true of
existence is also true of one's defining or enduring
characteristics. The state of affairs described by "Hartshorne
existing as an ornithologist" is abstract compared to the state
of affairs described by "Hartshorne existing as an ornithologist
hearing a blue jay call at noon." The more abstract statement
leaves more details concerning the individual's actuality to be
defined. Unless strict determinism is the case--which would
require that there is only one future that is genuinely
possible--the ornithologist can exist tomorrow without hearing a
blue jay call at noon (perhaps he will hear another bird, or none at
all).



In effect, Hartshorne lays out a three-fold distinction between
*what* a thing is (its essence or defining characteristics),
*that* a thing is (its existence), and *the particular
manner* in which it exists (its actual states or actuality).
Hartshorne maintains that this distinction, familiar enough in
ordinary experience, is applicable to God and is the basis for
speaking of dual transcendence in deity. Between the cases of God and
the creatures, however, there are important differences. Human
existence and character are fragile and subject to variation.
God's existence and character, on the other hand, are not
insecure, unstable, or transient; in a word, they are not contingent.
Hartshorne agrees with traditional theism that God exists without the
possibility of not existing (sometimes called necessary existence or
existence *a se*) and that God is necessarily supreme in love,
knowledge, and power. A closely related point is that, in the divine
case, existence and essence are identical, whereas they are not the
same thing in the creatures. Aquinas speaks of the "existential
composition" of the creatures to indicate that no creature
necessarily exists. Hartshorne agrees with Aquinas about this. Since,
in God, existence and essence are the same, Hartshorne customarily
abbreviates the distinction among existence, essence, and actuality to
that between existence and actuality.



The importance of the distinction between existence and actuality is
to demonstrate that the necessary aspects of deity do not preclude God
having contingent aspects, provided they do not conflict with the
necessary ones. We saw previously, in the discussion of real
relations, that there must be contingent aspects of the divine being
if it is to have perfect knowledge of contingent things. Aquinas
resists this conclusion, in part, because he sees contingency as a
kind of metaphysical virus that infects the very existence of the one
of which it is a characteristic. He says that a being whose substance
has any admixture of potency is subject to decay (as in physical
creatures) or annihilation (as in the case of angels) (*Summa
Contra Gentiles* I, ch. 16, para. 2). The logical type distinction
between existence and actuality ensures that contingencies in God pose
no threat to the deity's necessary existence. Thus, Hartshorne
says, "That God exists is one with his essence and is an
analytic truth ... but how, or in what actual state of experience
or knowledge or will, he exists is contingent in the same sense as is
our own existence" (Hartshorne 1948, 87). It is also part of
Hartshorne's theory that God's character or essence is
supremely excellent. Thus, the contingencies in the divine actuality
do not include the possibilities of God being selfish, cruel, or
wicked as they do in the human case.



The mention of angelic existence in the previous paragraph brings up a
point seldom noticed in discussions of process theism. Aquinas
approximates the Hartshornean distinction between immutable existence
and mutable actuality in what he says about the nature of angels.
(Thomists might say that Hartshorne approximates Aquinas.) Aquinas
holds that angels are not subject to natural decay or destruction for
they are incorporeal. Like God, their existence is not affected by the
flow of time. They are, however, capable of certain kinds of change.
While their existence is constant, they have free will and their
knowledge can increase, and in a certain sense, they can move from
place to place. Aquinas says that between the unqualified
changelessness of God's eternity and the qualified
changeableness of corporeal existence, there is the qualified
immutability of angelic being. The technical expression for this is
*aeviternity*, which is the mean between the extremes of
eternity and time (*Summa Theologica* I, Q 19, a. 5). One is
almost tempted to say that God, as conceived by Hartshorne, is
*aeviternital*, except for three important differences:
(1) angelic existence is unaffected by time, but it is still
contingent, unlike the existence of Hartshorne's God; (2)
angelic freedom includes the freedom to be wicked and Hartshorne does
not view that as an option for God; (3) angels are entirely
nonphysical, but Hartshorne argues, as we shall see, that God has a
body of sorts in the universe itself.



Hartshorne often refers to his theism as "neoclassical" to
indicate both its affinities with and its departures from classical
theism--it retains much of what is "classical" in
classical theism, but adds something that is new (*neo*).
Classical theism holds to the necessity, eternity, infinity,
independence, immutability, and impassibility of God. Hartshorne
agrees that God can be so characterized, but only with respect to the
divine *existence and essence*. Hartshorne adds that
God's *actuality* is contingent, temporal, finite,
dependent, mutable, and passible. Indeed, Hartshorne agrees with
Whitehead that all *achieved value* is necessarily finite in
the sense of not exhausting all that can be. Whitehead makes the point
that the limitation of God is a necessary condition of God's
goodness.



> 
> [God] gains his depth of actuality by his harmony of valuation. It is
> not true that God is in all respects infinite. If He were, He would be
> evil as well as good. Also this unlimited fusion of evil with good
> would mean mere nothingness. He is something decided and is thereby
> limited. (Whitehead 1926 [1997, 153])
> 



It is noteworthy that Whitehead does not say that God is not infinite,
but that God is not infinite *in all respects*. Thus, dual
transcendence does not entail that God is in no sense infinite.
Hartshorne locates the infinity of God primarily in the unlimited
capacity to influence, know, and care for the creatures in any
conceivable world.



One may rightly demand an answer to the question: If God is finite in
some respects, what prevents there being a reality that surpasses God?
Hartshorne's response is that there is indeed a possible reality
that surpasses God in any actual state of the divine existence, but
what can surpass God is only a subsequent actual state of Godself.
Hartshorne calls on Gustav Fechner's distinction between
"surpassable by others, including self" and
"surpassable, but only by self." It is only the latter
phrase, according to Hartshorne, that applies to God. This is what
Hartshorne calls R-perfection (for relative perfection), a form of
perfection that permits a contingent actuality in God that is
unsurpassed by all others, *excluding self*. This is by way of
contrast with A-perfection (for absolute perfection)--which
applies to the divine existence and essence--which is to be
unsurpassable by all others, *including self*. To speak of God
as having dual transcendence is to say that God is both R-perfect and
A-perfect, but in different respects. Thus, one of Hartshorne's
preferred definitions of God: "the self-surpassing surpasser of
all" (Hartshorne 1948, 20).



Hartshorne's version of dual transcendence is quite different
from Whitehead's. To be sure, Whitehead and Hartshorne are in
firm agreement, and are at pains to emphasize, that the relations
between God and the world are symmetrical. In addition, both
philosophers regard God as supremely worshipful not only with respect
to the divine absoluteness but also with respect to the divine
relativity. Indeed, one of the main objectives of Hartshorne's
book *The Divine Relativity* (1948) is to show that only by
having an eminent form of relativity can the deity qualify as
worshipful. Nevertheless, Hartshorne conceives God as an individual
who endures through various actual states. In the technical language
of Whitehead's philosophy, this makes God a
"society," that is to say, a collection of actual entities
extended in time, each member of which shares a defining
characteristic, passed along from one moment to the next. All enduring
objects are societies of actual entities; moreover, no actual entity
endures through various states. Whitehead's God is *not*
an enduring object but a single actual entity. To speak of
Whitehead's God as dipolar is to indicate that God has a
physical and a mental pole. This sense of "dipolar" is
different from the meaning that Hartshorne commonly gives the
expression. Hartshorne does not deny that actual entities are dipolar,
nor does he deny that there are physical and mental aspects of deity,
but his God is dipolar in having an enduring character embodied in
successive states, the character being abstract compared to the
concrete actual states--this gives us a third meaning of
"dipolar" (cf. Griffin's rather different view on
the meanings of dipolarity in God, Griffin 2001a, 150). Hartshorne
says, "Unlike Whitehead, I ... define God as an enduring
society of actualities, not a single actuality. Here I think Whitehead
was just mistaken" (Hartshorne 1967b, 287).



Whitehead indicated that he considered the possibility of God being an
enduring object, and thus a society, but rejected it on the grounds
that God's consequent nature loses nothing of the past whereas
societies are characterized by partial loss of the past (Johnson 1983,
9). This argument is curious, for it would seem to apply to actual
entities as well as to societies. No non-divine actual entity
preserves its entire past without distortion and loss; yet Whitehead
attributes to deity--in the doctrine of objective immortality of
the past in God--what no other actual entity can accomplish. In
reply to a question from Vergilius Ferm, Hartshorne notes that the
unique excellence of retaining the past perfectly in memory must be no
less true if God is an actual entity than if God is a society (Rome
1964, 324). He argues that the consequent nature of God is itself
abstract, for it is the generic property of being *somehow
actual* or affected by others (Hartshorne 1972, 75-76).
Thus, Hartshorne proposes that Whitehead would be more true to his own
metaphysics by conceiving God as an enduring object, and thus as a
society, rather than as a single actual entity. Hartshorne
acknowledged that his own theory is not without its problems. Not
least of these is how to coordinate the concept of a divine temporal
world-line with the relativistic view of space-time in contemporary
physics (Hartshorne 1970, 123-125; Sia 1990, 276; cf. Griffin
1992). Suffice it to say that the question whether God is best
conceived as a single actual entity or as an enduring object is a
major parting of the ways between process theists. Griffin, for
example, refers to the idea of God as a single everlasting actual
entity as Whitehead's "greatest blunder" (Griffin
2001a, 152). Nevertheless, Whitehead's view has a number of able
defenders, including Jorge Nobo and Palmyre Oomen (Nobo 1989; Oomen
1998).


## 5. Panentheism



The doctrine of prehension, developed by Whitehead but also
enthusiastically endorsed by Hartshorne, insures that the world is,
*in some sense*, part of God. Actual entities, by virtue of
their prehensions of one another, are internally related to their
predecessors and externally related to their successors.
Whitehead's "organic" philosophy can thereby affirm
both that an individual is *in* the world and the world is
*in* the individual. This generalization applies equally to
God, but with differences that allow for a clear distinction between
the divine and the non-divine. Whitehead maintains that events in the
world have a specific locus with reference to God, but God has no
locus with reference to the world (Johnson 1983, 9). Hartshorne says
that God is the one individual conceivable *a priori*--God
is individuated by, though not exhausted by, concepts alone
(Hartshorne 1948, 31). This is because God's scope of
interaction is universal whereas the scope of interaction for any
creature is localized. To be God is to causally affect and be affected
by *every* real being; to be a non-divine entity is to causally
affect and be affected by *some, but not all*, creatures.
Whitehead and Hartshorne also say that God and the creatures differ in
the quality of interaction. For example, any non-divine
individual's knowledge of others is imperfect and partial
whereas God's knowledge is without defect (Hartshorne 1967,
40).



While both philosophers deny that God has location within the
universe, they consider God to be *in some sense* a physical or
material being. Since process thought affirms the goodness of God, it
is clear that it denies the ancient Manichean and Gnostic ideas that
there is something inherently evil in being material. Even so, in
order to fully appreciate the process view, it is well to keep in mind
that Whitehead and Hartshorne reject the traditional concept of matter
as devoid of any activity or feeling--Whitehead refers to the
traditional view of matter as "vacuous actuality." Because
actual entities are dipolar, all of them have a physical aspect, but
none are entirely lacking in psychic qualities, although in most cases
these qualities are negligible. Thus, in process thought, being
physical does not mean having no mind-like qualities. The closest
anticipation of process ideas about mind and body are in Leibniz,
although process thought denies Leibniz's view that the monads
have no "windows." Leibniz maintains that no monad enters
into the internal constitution of another; Whitehead's doctrine
of prehension insures that actual entities are internally related to
their predecessors.



A common criticism of process theism is that it conceives God as
"needing" the world. In one sense this is true, but in
another sense it is false. It is true that, in process metaphysics,
the structure of reality is social, and necessarily so. Thus, it
promotes a social view of God--God as necessarily related to
non-divine actualities. On the other hand, the process God does not
require any particular universe in order to exist. Whitehead speaks of
a succession of "cosmic epochs" which are, in effect,
different universes where the very laws of nature are different. God
presides over each universe as its eminent creative power, making
possible all localized expressions of creativity, but no universe
sustains God's existence. Hartshorne makes a similar point by
comparing God's existence and actuality to a set that
necessarily has members. "To say that a class could not be empty
is not at all to say that its particular members are necessary"
(Hartshorne 1970, 144). From the perspective of process theism, the
criticism that God "needs" the universe is, at best,
simply another way of raising the question of how best to conceive the
necessarily existent: Is it, or is it not, social in nature?



Trinitarians sometimes argue that a social concept of ultimate reality
can be formulated if God is necessarily related to the divine self.
Process theists, especially those who are Christians, are not averse
to this suggestion. Nevertheless, if this is to be taken seriously as
a philosophical proposal, then there can be no mere appeal to the
"mystery" of the Trinity. Some effort should be made to
retain the primary meaning of "social" as multiple
entities in a network of relations, some of which are internal and
some external. That is to say, a genuinely social concept of reality
is one in which the multiple identities of each of the interrelated
and interacting entities are not absorbed into each other. Whitehead
and Hartshorne claim to do this apart from the Christian doctrine of
the Trinity, but there is no reason *a priori* to suppose that
Trinitarian metaphysics cannot be one version of process metaphysics,
or that the latter could not be adapted to the former (Boyd 1992;
Inbody 1997, ch. 8; Bracken and Suchocki 2005).



Whitehead and Hartshorne part company concerning the proper analogy
for conceiving the God-world relation. Hartshorne modifies
Plato's world-soul analogy in the *Timaeus*
(30a-34c). In Plato's myth, the eternal demiurge creates a
universe that is a living creature, animated by a soul. Hartshorne
argues that the best philosophical interpretation of the myth is to
consider the demiurge and the world-soul as two aspects of the same
deity (Hartshorne & Reese 1953 [2000, 55]). If this is correct, then
Plato affirms a version of dual transcendence, with one aspect of God
being the universe. According to this interpretation, Plato came close
to Hartshorne's view that, "the world is God's
body" (Hartshorne 1941, 185; Dombrowski 2005, chapter 1). This
is not to say that God has a location within the universe, but that
the location of the universe is in God, for the divine
being-in-becoming is all-inclusive. Hartshorne borrows a word invented
by Karl Krause (1781-1832) to express this view:
*panentheism*--everything (*pan*, all) is in
(*en*, in) God (*theos*, God) (Cooper 2006, 121).
Panentheism is a mediating position between pantheism and classical
theism. For pantheism, the world is identical to God; for classical
theism, the world is completely external to God; for panentheism, the
world is within God.



Hartshorne makes qualifications to Plato's analogy. Whereas
Plato apparently conceives the soul-body (or mind-body) relationship
as a one-to-one relation, Hartshorne, following modern biology, argues
that it is more plausible to construe it as a one-to-many relation.
The human body is a hierarchical society of thousands of kinds of
cells. Thus, Hartshorne maintains that God is related to the universe
in a manner similar to the way that a person is related to the cells
of his or her body. In an important respect, Whitehead can make a
better claim than Hartshorne that the relationship of God to the World
is one-to-many. Whitehead's God is a single actual entity
whereas Hartshorne's God is a society. Thus, if it is a question
of the relations of actual entities, then the God-to-World relation in
Hartshorne's theism is a many-to-many relation.
Hartshorne's point requires clarification: God, a single
enduring object, is related to every non-divine actual entity and
society. Clarity on this point brings out another comparison. By
conceiving God as an actual entity, Whitehead weakens the analogy
between God and a person. Donald Sherburne shows that in
Whitehead's metaphysics, persons are enduring objects of a
specific type (Sherburne 1969). Therefore, Hartshorne's view of
God as an enduring object apparently provides more of a basis for
speaking of God as a person.



Randall E. Auxier and Gary L. Herstein (2017) maintain, on the
contrary, that a Whiteheadian view is friendlier to conceiving God as
a person than Hartshorne's view. Their argument turns on the
idea of negative prehensions, that is, experience which
"eliminates [certain data] from feeling" (Whitehead 1929 [1978,
23]). According to Auxier and Herstein, one cannot be a person or
experience temporal passage apart from negative prehensions, which,
they say, allow distinctions both between what *was* and what
*might-have-been* and between what *will-be* and what
*might-be* (Auxier and Herstein 2017, 243 and 265). Hartshorne
consistently rejected the idea of negative prehensions in God whereas
Whitehead, at least in some of his statements, seemed to allow for
them. The metaphysical issues run deep; suffice it to say that
Hartshorne distinguished the actual and the possible in ways that
diverged significantly from Whitehead (see Ramal 2010,
139-157).



To speak of God as a person is, of course, an analogy. A
person's feelings cannot be entirely separated from the feelings
of cells in the body--damage to the cells hurts the person. In a
similar fashion, God is affected by what affects the creatures. On the
other hand, God knows--in Whiteheadian language, God
prehends--each "cell" of the divine body in a
perfectly distinct fashion whereas others experience their cells
*en masse*, much as one sees the green of the grass but not
each blade. Another difference, as we have seen, is that God is not
located within the universe as are non-divine individuals. Hartshorne
turns this difference to his advantage by following a suggestion in
Plato. He says that Plato's argument concerning the spherical
nature of the universe adequately explains why the divine body has
neither internal organs nor sense organs. Bodily organs in the
creatures, including a central nervous system, are needed to mediate
with an external environment, but there is nothing external to the
universe (Hartshorne 1984, 134). God's only
"environment" is internal to God. Thus, the world-soul
analogy does not entail that God has a brain or any other bodily organ
that one finds in the creatures. In addition, the lack of an external
environment for God means that there can be no threat to the divine
existence from such a source. The "harm" done to God by
creaturely suffering can never be fatal.



Whitehead's view of God as a single actual entity is arguably
one factor that prevented him from taking the Platonic analogy as a
serious proposal. His remarks on the topic are entirely negative. He
called the *Timaeus* Plato's "most unfortunate essay
in mythology," and he referred to the idea of the World-Soul,
considered as an emanation, as "the parent of puerile
metaphysics" (Whitehead 1933, 166; ch. VIII, sec. VI). Whitehead
read the dialogue through the lens of neo-Platonism, conceiving the
world-soul as an emanation from a wholly transcendent demiurge.
Hartshorne agrees that this is not the solution to the problem of
permanence and flux. However, Hartshorne sees in Plato's myth
the elements of a solution, provided the demiurge and the world-soul
are not separate deities, but aspects of the same deity. For this
reason, Hartshorne says that Whitehead rejected the analogy for
"weak reasons" (Hahn 1991, 642).



Late in his career, Hartshorne saw other advantages to the world-soul
analogy that touch on the problem of God and gender. He was
sympathetic to feminist complaints about the male bias in traditional
theology and he made a concerted effort in the closing decades of his
life to use inclusive language (Hartshorne 1987 [2001, 258]). For example, in
the 1980s he began using "He-She" when referring to God
and he remarked in 1996 that he would title his third book *Our
Vision of God* rather than *Man's Vision of God*
(Auxier and Davies 2001, 159). Hartshorne goes further than simply
worrying about pronouns. If the world-soul analogy is combined with
the parent-to-child analogy, then he argues that, "it is the
mother, not the father, who furnishes by far the best symbol of deity.
The fetus-mother relationship is decidedly more intimate than the
fetus-father relationship" (Hartshorne 1984, 60). Hartshorne
never expressed his thoughts on feminism systematically, but it is
instructive that Carol P. Christ explicitly develops her feminist
philosophy of religion in light of Hartshorne's metaphysics in
her book *She Who Changes*. Generally speaking, feminist
theologians have been friendly to process thought, seeing Whitehead
and Hartshorne as articulating ideas about the divine that speak to
feminist concerns (Christ 2003, 4-5).



One objection to the concept of a deity whose "body" is
the universe is that it implies that all values, both the good and the
evil, are within God. Hartshorne counters that this is true, but not
in a sense that compromises divine goodness. As a point of logic,
wholes do not necessarily share the characteristics of their parts. On
Hartshorne's model, the relation of God to any non-divine
creature is a relation of whole to part. Indeed, this is the basis of
Hartshorne's view of religion as the acceptance of our
fragmentariness--we are fragments of the cosmos, not the whole of
it. Thus, Hartshorne can say that God's goodness is not
diminished if a fragmentary being is heedless of the good of others,
by indifference or harmful intent. Nevertheless, *precisely because
of God's goodness*, the suffering and wickedness of the
creatures enter God's experience. God sympathizes with the
sufferer and grieves for the criminal in losing an opportunity for
creating the good. God can feel the contrast between what could have
been and what is. The "what is," moreover, is not
unilaterally determined by God but is left, in part, to the creatures;
we have seen that God and the creatures are co-creators in process
theism. For this reason, Hartshorne, following Berdyaev, speaks of
tragic and sublime aspects of divine love (cf. Hartshorne 1953,
chapter 8). Whitehead agrees that, "there is a tragedy which
even God does not escape" (Johnson 1983, 7).


## 6. Divine Power and the Problem of Evil



Process theism provides unique, if controversial, thoughts on the
traditional problem of evil. Simply stated, the problem of evil comes
to this: if God is all-powerful then God has the ability to prevent
unjustified suffering; if God is perfectly good then God has the
motive to prevent unjustified suffering; but unjustified suffering
apparently exists; therefore, there is reason to believe that God is
not all-powerful or not perfectly good. The argument can be taken in
at least two ways. According to one interpretation, the problem of
evil poses a challenge to belief in God. In other words, it is a
stepping stone towards atheism. Another interpretation is that it is a
challenge to rethink the attributes of God. In this case, if one
considers the argument sound, it is not belief in God that one should
abandon, but belief in certain concepts of God. Process theists
generally approach the problem of evil in the spirit of the second
interpretation. Moreover, they point out that to assume the first
interpretation--that the problem of evil is an argument against
the existence of God--is an invitation to beg the question
against alternative proposals about the nature of God such as process
theism offers.



A central contention of process theism is that the problem of evil is
aggravated by flawed accounts of omnipotence commonly assumed by
theists and their critics. Most theists agree with Aquinas that God
cannot bring about logically impossible states of affairs, like
creating a circle with unequal radii (*Summa Contra Gentiles*
II, ch. 25, para. 14). This is not, Aquinas argues, a limitation on
God but a condition of responsible theological discourse. To say, as
Descartes does, that God could have made such irregularly shaped
circles, is to utter nonsense according to Aquinas (Cottingham 1991,
25). Whitehead remarks that some medieval and modern philosophers got
into the unfortunate habit of paying God "metaphysical
compliments"--that is to say, attributing properties to God
that seem to make the divine more worthy of devotion but that are
contrary to sound metaphysical reasoning (Whitehead 1925, 258).
Whitehead's observation is more applicable to Descartes than to
Aquinas. Indeed, process theism has no quarrel with Aquinas on this
point. It is rather, the stronger claim that God can bring about any
state of affairs the description of which is not contradictory, with
which process theism takes issue. It is a fair question whether
Aquinas held this view (see *Summa Theologica* I, Q. 25, a. 3).
Nevertheless, it is a widely accepted view of omnipotence as Griffin
makes clear (Griffin 1976, chapter 17). In a deliberate play on J. B.
Phillips' classic, *Your God is Too Small*, Tyron Inbody
sums up the criticism of traditional accounts of divine power by
saying, "Your God is too big" (Inbody 1997, 139).



Griffin warns against what he calls "the omnipotence
fallacy." This is the fallacy of assuming that if a state of
affairs is logically possible--that is, its description involves
no contradiction--then an omnipotent being could single-handedly
bring it about (Griffin 1976, 263f). Griffin represents all process
theists in considering it a fallacy, for it is their contention that
there are logically possible states of affairs that no being,
including God, could bring about by itself. For example, a contractual
agreement between two individuals or parties is impossible unless each
agrees to keep the conditions of the contract. This is expressed
colloquially in English by saying, "It takes two to
tango." The example of making contracts is especially relevant
since it is a theme in Jewish Scripture that God enters into numerous
covenants with the creatures. The emphasis is invariably on the divine
initiative in making the covenants and on God's reliability in
keeping a promise; nevertheless, when "covenant" is not
simply shorthand for God's promises, the agreements are
two-sided affairs, including God's blessings and demands and
human obligations. Arguably, the logic of contracts, agreements, and
covenants, does not change when one of the parties is divine. These
examples are evidence that there are logically possible states of
affairs that require something more than the decisions of God.



Hartshorne argues the case as follows. Suppose *X* and
*Y* are agents who make decisions *A* and *B*,
respectively. The conjunction, *AB*, is something that neither
*X* nor *Y*, individually, decided, *even if one of
the agents is God*. Suppose, however, for the sake of argument,
that this reasoning does not apply in the divine case. According to
this view, if *X* is God, then it is possible for *X* to
decide not only *A*, but also *AB*. We can imagine that
*A* represents God loving an individual and *B*
represents the individual freely accepting God's love. If God
decides *AB* then God must also bring it about that *B*,
that the individual freely accepts God's love, for this is part
of *AB*. Hartshorne responds that this view divorces the
concept of decision making from any meaningful connection with lived
experience. Numerous analogies have been discussed in the literature
for how free creatures might be related to a deity that makes their
decisions--the creatures as God's marionettes; as androids
programmed by God; as subjects hypnotized by God; as objects of
God's dreaming; as characters in God's novel. Each analogy
faces the dilemma that either the decisions of the person are not
fully determined (e.g., the hypnotism case) or the person is not an
actual individual (e.g., the fictional character case). In ordinary
language, an individual that tries to control a relationship is called
manipulative, overbearing, or colloquially, "a control
freak." Doubtless, it was considering this kind of analogy that
led Hartshorne to speak of "the *tyrant* ideal of
power" in classical theism (Hartshorne 1984a, 11). In a similar
vein, Whitehead speaks of the idolatry of fashioning God in the image
of imperial rulers: "The Church gave unto God the attributes
which belonged exclusively to Caesar" (Whitehead 1929 [1978, 342]).



James Keller argues that the traditional concept of omnipotence can
only be justified by appealing to metaphysical schemes or intuitions
that are no better established than omnipotence itself (Keller 2007,
131). Hartshorne goes further and says that the traditional concept of
omnipotence was not coherent enough to be false (Hartshorne 1978, 86).
The denial that an individual's free decisions can be totally
determined by another is what is behind the slogan--often found
in discussions of process theism--that *God acts by persuasion
rather than by coercion*. Whitehead attributes this idea to
Plato's later thought, in the *Sophist* and the
*Timaeus*, and calls it, "one of the greatest
intellectual discoveries in the history of religion" (Whitehead
1933, 213; ch. X, sec. III). Unfortunately, the slogan has often been
misinterpreted, even by process thinkers. It does not mean that,
according to Whitehead and Hartshorne, God acts only as a final cause
and never as an efficient cause, as Griffin has shown (Griffin 1991,
98-99). "Coercion," in the sense intended by the
slogan, is the ability of one actual being to unilaterally bring about
the decision of another actual being. In process metaphysics, no
individual possesses this ability. Thus, in a metaphysical sense, it
is not only God that acts persuasively and not coercively, but every
actual being.



Of course, "persuasion" and "coercion" have
meanings in ordinary language. To persuade is to convince others to do
something *of their own will*. To coerce is to force
one's will upon others *who are unwilling*. The
italicized phrases are important, for they demonstrate that persuasion
and coercion presuppose the ability of the individual who is being
persuaded or coerced to make decisions. Even in the case of coercion,
the person being coerced retains the power to resist, even if only
mentally. This indicates that coercion is an inferior form of power,
used either out of ignorance or when persuasion has failed. Cobb says,
"In my relations with other people, such as my children, the use
of such power is a last resort which expresses my total powerlessness
in all ways that matter" (Cobb 1969, 89). Thus, even if the
words "persuasive" and "coercive" are taken in
their ordinary, non-metaphysical, senses, it makes sense to speak of
the supreme or eminent form of power as persuasive rather than
coercive.



David Basinger presses the following objection. Coercion in the
ordinary sense may be an inferior form of power, but there is
sometimes a moral imperative to use it, otherwise we would never have
a police force. Thus, a deity that possesses both coercive and
persuasive power is greater than a deity that possesses only
persuasive power (Basinger 1988). Hartshorne, who argues against
strict pacifism, agrees that the use of brute force can sometimes be
morally justified. In response to the threat of Naziism he wrote,
"Freedom must not be free to destroy freedom" (Hartshorne
1941, 173). In process theism, however, coercion in the ordinary sense
represents an *indirect* form of power that is available only
for localized beings within the cosmos (Hartshorne 1948, 155). It is
indirect in the sense that it is exerted on aggregates of actual
entities and not on actual entities themselves, as when one person
prevents another from performing a vicious act by restraining the
aggressor's body. God's power over aggregates is nothing
over and above the direct persuasive power over the actual entities
that comprise them. Barry Whitney argues that there is a coercive
aspect of God's power in process theism insofar as the laws of
nature are the result of a divine decision that no creature is free to
abrogate (Whitney 1985, 99-114). That there should be this form
of divine power--which is also a form of efficient
causation--providing for an ordered world that no creature has
decided, is a necessary condition for any creaturely activity,
Hartshorne believes. "God decides upon the basic outlines of
creaturely actions, and guaranteed limits within which freedom is to
operate. That not everything can be guaranteed does not mean that
nothing can be" (Hartshorne 1966, 206).



Griffin maintains that it lies at the heart of process theism's
answer to the problem of evil that God's power is exerted on
individuals rather than aggregates (Griffin 1991, 104). Theists of a
more traditional bent may view this as an indication of the inadequacy
of process metaphysics, for there is no provision for a
run-of-the-mill coercive power in its concept of God. The idea that
persuasion plus coercion is a greater form of power than persuasion
alone ignores, however, a significant difference between God and the
creatures. Every person has the power of persuasion and coercion (in
their ordinary senses), but neither of these powers involves a
violation of the laws of nature. In order to attribute both forms of
power to God seems to require that God have the power to violate the
laws of nature. That may not seem unreasonable since God, as
traditionally conceived, acts miraculously in ways that break or
suspend the laws of nature. Nevertheless, to speak, as Basinger does,
of a moral imperative to act coercively is tantamount, in the divine
case, to demanding that the deity contravene the very laws that,
according to traditional theism and process theism, it imposed in the
first place. There is an additional irony where the problem of evil is
concerned. Traditional theists fault process theists for, in effect,
not attributing to God the power to prevent gratuitous suffering.
Traditional theists, on the other hand, attribute this power to God
but are obliged to argue that God is not at fault for not using it or
for using it in ways that we find utterly baffling.



A hallmark of process theism is to draw attention to *the value
inherent in the twin probabilities of genuine good and evil*.
Process thought raises the question--and answers it in the
affirmative--whether a world with a probability, not merely a
possibility, of genuine good and evil is preferable to a world without
it. In the closing pages of *Pragmatism*, James raises this
question by means of a thought experiment. If God asked you before the
creation of the universe if you would agree to be part of a world that
was not certain to be saved--where there was real adventure and
real risk--what would you say? James recognizes that a world
where the risk of failure is real does not appeal to everyone; but he
says that the chances for success that it promises brings zest to life
and makes it rational to, "add our *fiat* to the
*fiat* of the creator" (James 1907, 290-291). In
fairness, however, the freedom that makes life an adventure must be
judged against the probabilities of debilitating diseases, natural
disasters, the horrors of history, and cosmic catastrophes. Freedom
is, in Hartshorne's words, a "perilous experiment."
George Shields called this "the hard problem" of a
specifically process theodicy (2014, 33). And Hartshorne admitted that
if he played at questioning God, it was at this point (1984, 126).



Hartshorne says that a universe with multiple freedom or creativity is
a universe where the non-identical twins of opportunity and risk are
inevitable. As already noted, process theists do not believe in a God
that plays with loaded dice. What James's image adds to this
picture is the idea that a world-order with the opportunity for
genuine good and the risk of genuine evil *is of greater value*
than a world-order devoid of these opportunities and risks.
James's idea also implies that, in such a world-order, the risks
would be real for deity. We have already seen that process theism
affirms tragedy in God. The silver linings on this cloud are: (1) God
preserves the universe in the divine memory which means that the
creatures contribute something to God; (2) God, considered as
superject, has an inexhaustible capacity to bring order from chaos and
make fresh beginnings, providing a sense of hope amidst the ruin of
our lives.



The problem of evil is often presented primarily as an ethical
concern, but there is an aesthetic dimension to the problem that is
emphasized by process theism (cf. Whitney 1994). If a perfectly good
deity would have the motive to overcome discord and wickedness, it
would also have a motive to avoid triviality and boredom. This is
especially the case in the universe as conceived by process theism
where feeling (prehension) is a metaphysical category. The etymology
of "aesthetic" is *aesthesis*, which means
"feeling," and process thought emphasizes that aesthetic
values are fundamentally values for an experiencing subject. Moreover,
the experiencing subject, in most cases, is not human. This fact is
evident not only by looking at the contemporary world with its
countless varieties of species, but also when one considers the nearly
unfathomable stretches of time on this planet when humans did not
exist. Process theism takes the non-anthropocentric, and
non-relativist, stance that the experiences of non-human creatures are
valuable whether or not humans value them. This is not to say that all
experience is equally valuable--the experience of a cockroach can
have value without being fully comparable to human experience. Process
metaphysics provides for an aesthetic theory that recognizes objective
criteria of value such as unity amid contrast and intensity amid
complexity (see Dombrowksi 2004). The long process of evolution can be
charted on a curve of ever increasing varieties and complexities of
organisms with augmented capacity for valuable types of experience. As
Cobb and Griffin note, the escape from triviality meant an increased
risk of discord, but this brings us full circle to James's
thought experiment (Cobb and Griffin 1976, 73).


## 7. Divine Knowledge and the Problem of Future Contingents



The Preacher in Ecclesiastes gives eloquent expression to
world-weariness by saying that there is nothing new under the sun.
Nevertheless, process thought reminds us that there was once a time
when the sun itself was new. We noted earlier that in process
metaphysics, time is the process of creation. The universe is not a
totality, fixed once and for all, but a dynamic vector growing from a
determinate past into an open (partly indeterminate) future. We have
also seen that process theism conceives God as being really related to
the world through prehensions or feelings. If divine knowing is
considered perfect, then it follows from these premises that God knows
the past as fully determinate (as created), the present as the process
of determination (as being created), and the future as partly
indeterminate (as yet to be created). Some have criticized process
theism for advocating a limited God who is ignorant of the future.
Process theists reply that this is incorrect and represents a subtle
begging of the question. The question is not whether God knows a fully
determinate future but whether there is a fully determinate future to
know. It is the nature of time, not the nature of divine knowing, that
is at issue. If the future exists as partially indeterminate,
unsettled, or uncreated, then a perfect knower must know it as
such.



The fact that process theism construes God's knowledge as
prehensive means that it is a mistake to interpret it solely in terms
of the information content of declarative sentences. This is not to
say that God does not have this information, but it is well to keep in
mind that omniscience, for process theism, is more akin to what
Bertrand Russell calls knowledge by acquaintance than it is to
knowledge by description (Hartshorne 1941, 241). Divine prehensions of
the world include not only information but affective tone (Whitehead
calls it the "subjective form" of prehensions);
God's knowledge is empathetic, feeling the feelings of the
creatures. Again, this contrasts with the traditional account of
omniscience which "attributes to God the informational content
of our perceptions without the hedonistic content" (Kenny 1979,
32). E. S. Brightman (Auxier and Davies 2001, 43, 70), Henri
Simoni-Wastila (1999), and Auxier and Herstein (2017, 264) argue that
claiming this kind of knowledge for God is excessive, for it would
mean, for example, that in knowing a creature's fear of death,
God would also fear death. Hartshorne's response is that God
feels *how* we feel without feeling *as* we feel,
similar to the way in which persons can vividly remember emotions they
once experienced without actually having those emotions as their own
in the present experience of memory (Hartshorne 1984b, 199). This
issue highlights a tension between Whitehead and Hartshorne. Whitehead
speaks of an actual entity's subjectivity as
"perishing" as it becomes past, but Hartshorne insists
that the divine memory preserves the immediacy of our experiences,
making them objectively immortal (Whitehead 1929 [1978, 351]; Hartshorne
1970, 118).



Process theism provides an account of the mechanics of
omniscience--that is, an account of how God knows the
world--that fits well with analogies drawn from experience. Apart
from complications introduced by quantum physics, events do not occur
because we know about them; we know about them, in part, because they
occur. Process theism applies the same logic to God. This account
differs from traditional views in two important ways. First, many
theists follow Aquinas in reversing the cognitive relation in God. For
Aquinas, God knows events in the world because God is their cause
(*Summa Theologica* I, Q. 14, a. 11). This allows Aquinas to
affirm omniscience while denying real relations in God; however, it
also makes an unambiguous affirmation of the contingency of creaturely
decisions difficult if not impossible, as we have already seen in our
discussion of God and creativity. Second, the process view contradicts
the Boethian concept of eternity as a non-temporal viewpoint on
temporal events. For Boethius (and for Aquinas) events in time are
related to God as the points on the circumference of a circle are
related to its center (*Consolation of Philosophy*, bk 5, prose
6; *Summa Contra Gentiles* I, ch. 66, para. 7). For process
thought, time is more like a line being added to from moment to
moment, but never complete, so there is no vantage from which it can
be taken in all at once (Hartshorne 1945, 284).



There are peculiarities in traditional metaphors for omniscience that
process thought rejects. God, it was said, "sees" all of
time in one eternal instant; yet seeing, like knowing, requires real
relations in the perceiver; moreover, one cannot see as fully
actualized that which is still only possibly to be actualized, that is
to say, the partially indeterminate future. It is noteworthy, however,
that process theism retains one element of the traditional view. We
have seen that Hartshorne attributes the laws of nature to an act of
God. For this reason, God knows the extent to which the future is
open--what the laws allow and what they do not allow. The process
God must also be aware of the conditions that creaturely decisions set
upon future actualization, opening up some possibilities and closing
others.



Process theists were not the first to notice the problems that the
Thomistic account poses for human freedom. William of Ockham, for
example, despaired of explaining how God could come to know the future
free decisions of the creatures (Shields 1993, 298). Luis de Molina
developed the chief rival in classical theism to Aquinas's
account of the mechanics of omniscience. Molinism has been much
discussed in recent literature and vigorously defended (Shields &
Viney 2004, 241, n. 15). Molina claims that there are true statements
about what any possible creature *would freely do* in any
situation in which that creature existed. The truth of these
statements, called "middle knowledge conditionals," is
decided by neither God nor the creatures; they are simply eternally
true, a kind of innate divine knowledge. Molina agrees with Aquinas
that the deity knows the product of its own creative
activity--called "free knowledge" (Kenny 1979, 62).
Using free knowledge, in conjunction with middle knowledge
conditionals, God can deduce what any actual creature *will freely
do*. The deduction has the form: "If individual *X*
were in situation *S*, then *X* would freely decide
*A*" (middle knowledge conditional); and
"*X* is in *S*" (God's free
knowledge); therefore, "*X* will freely decide
*A*." Molina's theory is designed to save both the
freedom of the creatures and the divine immutability and
impassibility. Thus, it poses as much of a challenge to process theism
as does Thomism which claims for itself the same advantages.



Neither Whitehead nor Hartshorne addresses Molinism, but process
metaphysics provides resources for a number of criticisms (Shields
& Viney 2004, 225-233). One objection is that Molinism
endows God with an innate knowledge of an elaborate set of contingent
truths which have no explanation. Yet, contingent truths are precisely
the sorts of truths for which we legitimately seek
explanations--indeed, this is one of the marks of contingency
(Hartshorne 1962, 74). A related problem is that the distinction
between the possible and the actual is finessed. It is common to refer
to what an *actual individual* would do in a certain
circumstance, for one can speak of that individual's
dispositions and character as so far formed. To refer to what a
*possible individual* would do is entirely different. Possible
individuals are either fictional (like Sherlock Holmes) or they are
tied to the creative powers of the actual world (like a child yet to
be conceived). The properties of fictional characters are defined by
someone's imagination and so there is no fixed truth about what
they would do. Arguably, persons yet to be conceived can only be said
to have the properties that link them to the reproductive
potentialities of actual persons. Thus, most babies have the capacity
to grow up to become parents themselves. What may the first child
(call it Chris) of a particular newborn (call it Kim) be like? The
most that can be said with certainty is that half of Chris's
chromosomes will be inherited from Kim. To speak informatively about
what Chris would do under any given circumstances presupposes
uncountable human decisions and years of development beyond
Kim's own childhood.



A third and final criticism of Molinism, from a process perspective,
is that it doesn't really preserve the freedom of the creatures
in the way it claims. Molina verbally accepts the idea that one is
significantly free only if one could have done otherwise in the same
circumstances (in the literature this is called incompatibilist
freedom). For example, if Oswald's assassination of President
Kennedy was a genuinely free act then if, *per impossibile*,
the clock could be turned back to the moments before the murder,
Oswald could have decided not to pull the trigger. Alternately stated,
Oswald's not pulling the trigger in the exact situation where he
in fact did pull the trigger could have become actual. In
Hartshorne's view, and as far as incompatibilist freedom is
concerned, *to be actually possible is to be (or to have been)
possibly actual*. On Molinist principles, it is difficult to see
how Oswald's not pulling the trigger in those circumstances
could have become actual. It is true that, in Molina's view,
there is no contradiction in conceiving Oswald in those circumstances
not pulling the trigger. But, given the set of middle knowledge
conditionals about Oswald, Oswald's not pulling the trigger
happens in no world that God can create (this is not to say that if a
different set of middle knowledge conditionals were true of Oswald God
could not create those possible worlds). The events, however, that can
become actual, that are actually possible, are events in universes
created by God. Since, under the assumption of the set of middle
knowledge conditionals we know to be true of Oswald, no universe that
could be created by God--no possible actuality--is one in
which Oswald freely refrains from pulling the trigger, Oswald's
act cannot be considered a free act. Of course, it may be the case
that the set of middle knowledge conditionals concerning Oswald are
such that he could have refrained from pulling the trigger had God
created a slightly different universe; but it is Oswald's
freedom in the actual universe that is at issue.



The problems of the mechanics of omniscience aside, the traditional
theist might argue that the process view of God's knowledge is
problematic because it either limits God's knowledge or it
violates elementary principles of logic. The argument is apparently
straightforward. Every proposition of the form, "*p* or
*not-p*" is true because one or the other side of the
disjunction is true. To use Aristotle's example from *De
Interpretatione* IX, either a sea battle will occur tomorrow or it
will not. Let *p* represent "A sea battle will occur
tomorrow" and *not-p*, "A sea battle will not occur
tomorrow." In that case, "A sea battle will occur tomorrow
or a sea battle will not occur tomorrow" is a tautology and
hence true. If God does not know which side of the disjunction is true
then God's knowledge is limited. If the disjunction itself is
not true then some tautologies are false. Any theory that commits one
to the falsity of some tautologies flaunts the fundamental principles
of logic and thereby faces a steep burden of proof.



Aristotle apparently believed that, where future contingents are
concerned, "*p* or *not-p*" is true but the
two halves of the disjunction have indeterminate truth values. This
idea seems logically counter-intuitive. If *p* and
*not-p* are indeterminate, shouldn't "*p* or
*not-p*" also be indeterminate? For a brief period,
Hartshorne defended the Aristotelian idea (Hartshorne 1939), but he
discovered a more parsimonious solution (Hartshorne 2011c, 123).
Instead of locating the indeterminacy of the future in truth values,
he focused on predicates that reflect the extent to which the future
is open for any given event. Either all causal conditions are such
that the sea battle will occur, or no causal conditions are such that
it will occur, or it is permitted by some but not all causal
conditions (cf. Hartshorne 1970, 145). It "will" occur
means that all the possibilities for tomorrow which are still left
open involve the occurrence in question; while it "may"
occur means that some of the open possibilities involve the
occurrence; and it "will not" occur means that none of the
possibilities involve it (Hartshorne 1941, 100).



Although Hartshorne rejected Aristotle's view on future
contingents, his solution to the problem that Aristotle tried to solve
neatly parallels Aristotle's square. "*Z* will
occur" and "*Z* will not occur" are
contraries--they may both be false but they cannot both be true.
The contradictory of "*Z* will occur" is
"*Z* may not occur"; similarly, the contradictory
of "*Z* will not occur" is "*Z* may
occur." In *A Christmas Carol*, Scrooge presupposes this
schema when he asks the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, "Are
these the shadows of the things that Will be or the shadows of things
that May be, only?" Of this example, Hartshorne said,
"There is a master of language [i.e. Dickens]. Will and May are
nicely distinguished in ordinary speech" (Hartshorne & Viney
2001, 39).



Hartshorne maintains that, "the semantic analysis of truth with
reference to future events should not be so formulated as to make
'will' and 'will not' the sole
possibilities" (Hartshorne 2011a, 83). Following
Hartshorne's suggestion, George Shields says that,
"*Z* will occur" and "*Z* will not
occur" should not be symbolized in the propositional calculus as
*p* and *not-p* but as *p* and *q*, where
"If *p* then *not-q*" and "If
*q* then *not-p*." The conjunction of these
propositions, "If *p* then *not-q* and if
*q* then *not-p*" mirrors the truth value
semantics of contrariety, not contradiction, which is mirrored by
"It is false that '*p* if and only if
*q*,'" or exclusive disjunction. Shields argues
that it is question begging to assume that "*Z* will or
will not occur" must be an instance of "*p* or
*not-p*". The question at issue is the formalization of
future tense statements; thus, it will not do to assume that verb
tense makes no difference in the formalization (Shields & Viney
2004, 220).


## 8. Transforming Traditional Theism and Process Theism



Whitehead says that, "Philosophy never reverts to its old
position after the shock of a great philosopher" (Whitehead
1929 [1978, 11]). Whether or not Whitehead and Hartshorne are considered
great philosophers, they seem to have occasioned a seismic shift in
contemporary discussions of the philosophy of religion in which
philosophers take the doctrine of real relations in God more
seriously. For example, some Neo-Thomists have taken the criticisms of
process theism to heart and admitted real relations in God, contrary
to the teaching of the angelic doctor (Whitney 1985, 75-81). The
Jesuit philosopher W. Norris Clarke advises Thomists to "simply
drop" the doctrine of the lack of real relations in God and to
adopt the view that, "[God's] consciousness is
contingently and qualitatively *different* because of what we
do" (Clarke 1979, 92). At times, Clarke almost sounds like a
Whiteheadian or a Hartshornean: "God is the *supreme
Receiver*, gathering together in His consciousness all that
creatures do and responding appropriately to it" (Ibid., 93).
Another example of a group of theists influenced by process thinking,
are those Evangelical Christian philosophers calling themselves
"open theists" or "free will theists." While
careful to distance themselves from the more heretical dimensions of
process metaphysics, they have stirred controversy in their
communities of faith by defending aspects of process theism (Pinnock
et al. 1994; Enxing 2013, ch. 5; Rice 2020).



The extent to which theists outside the process camp accept the
elements of the doctrine of dual transcendence varies greatly.
Neo-Thomists like Clarke and some other theists, like William Alston,
accept real relations in God but retain the timelessness,
immutability, and non-corporeality of God. Clarke and Alston also
affirm creation *ex nihilo*. Alston, who was Hartshorne's
student at Chicago, refers to his view as a "*via
media*" (a middle path) between Hartshorne and Aquinas (Cobb
& Gamwell 1984, 78f). Hartshorne responded to both Clarke and
Alston (Sia 1990, 269f; Cobb & Gamwell 1984, 98f). In both replies
he emphasizes, among other things, what he takes to be arbitrary
divisions among contingency, potentiality, and change in their
theories. To admit real relations in God is to admit contingency in
God. To admit this, but to retain the concept of the non-temporality
of deity, requires belief in contingencies eternally fixed in the
being of God. The ordinary sense of "*W* is
contingent" is "*W* could have been
otherwise," which presupposes that the future was once open with
respect to *W*. Since there is no future in eternity, to speak
of contingency in eternity is to lose one's anchor in ordinary
language which is saturated with temporal reference. Likewise, the
concept of an eternal "now" has lost all moorings with
experience where the present is invariably nested between past and
future. Hartshorne also maintains that there are forms of
value--specifically, aesthetic values--that do not admit of
a maximum. It may be no more meaningful to speak of greatest possible
aesthetic value than it is to speak of a greatest positive integer
(Hartshorne 1970, 38 and 310; cf. Whitehead 1929 [1978, 111]). If this is the
case, and if the creatures contribute to the aesthetic value of the
world, then there must be respects in which, as the aesthetic value of
the world increases, God increases with it. We have already touched
upon this aspect of process theism which Hartshorne refers to as
God's relative perfection (R-perfection).



Openness or free will theists are closer to process theism than the
Neo-Thomists or than Alston. They concur with process theists that God
cannot determine a creature's decisions without depriving it of
its freedom. They also accept the process view of the nature of time;
thus, for God to be influenced by the creatures means that in some
respects the future is yet to be determined and God knows it as such.
This provides for a straightforward concept of God responding to the
creatures and for an interpretive scheme for the dominant Scriptural
motif that God is in dynamic interaction with people (in answering
prayer, for example). On the other hand, it is this aspect of process
theism which seems most disturbing to more traditionally minded
Evangelicals, for the lack of knowledge of a detailed future
compromises or at least complicates the doctrine of divine providence.
How, they ask, can history be the working out of a divine plan if the
future is uncertain for God (cf. Hall and Sanders, 2003). Open theists
believe that they can mitigate this criticism by not following process
theism in the denial of creation *ex nihilo*. Open theists like
William Hasker and John Sanders can speak of God as "a
risk-taker," but they insist that God can still perform miracles
and guarantee the ultimate triumph of good over evil (Pinnock, et al.,
1994, 151; Sanders 1998).



To speak of open theism as a school of thought distinct from process
theism is ironic since God's openness to creaturely influence is
precisely the shared content of their views. Hartshorne referred to
"the openness of God" in 1963, more than thirty years
before the openness controversy erupted (Hartshorne 1987, 92). In any
event, these controversies began too late for Hartshorne to respond to
them. It is noteworthy, however, that he was instrumental in bringing
a little known forerunner of open theism, Jules Lequyer [or Lequier],
to the attention of philosophers (Hartshorne & Reese 1953 [2000,
227-230]). Because of the dominance historically of classical
theism, Hartshorne viewed free will or open theists more as allies
than foes, although he was fully aware of his differences from them
and was not without arguments against those aspects of their views
with which he disagreed (Viney 1998, 214-230). A vigorous
dialogue between process theists and free will theists is on-going
(Cobb and Pinnock 2000; Ramal 2010, part II).



The most contentious issue is creation *ex nihilo*. Whitehead
and Hartshorne share a commitment to the idea that God is the supreme
creative power among many lesser creators. Hartshorne is adamant that
nothing is gained by endowing God with the ability to create
non-creative actualities or to refrain from creating altogether.
Nevertheless, process theists are criticized for failing to consider
the alternative that God, the sole origin of creative power,
graciously shares that power with others. Lequyer speaks of
"God, who created me creator of myself"--words that
Hartshorne often quotes with approval (Lequier 1952, 70; Hartshorne
1970, xi). Lequyer's view is similar to what Nelson Pike calls
"over-power," the power to "completely determine
which, if any, powers are possessed by agents other than
oneself" (Pike 1983, 19). Pike avers that over-power is
precisely what most classical theists ascribe to deity. Process
theists generally disagree (cf. Griffin 1991, 67-68). For
example, Aquinas views God as having the ability to determine the free
decisions of others, but this ability is *not* entailed by
over-power, although Pike sometimes defines over-power in these terms
(Pike 1982, 151). If God has over-power in the sense of being able to
determine the extent to which others can make free decisions and
execute them, it does not follow that God can also determine a
creature's free decisions. The latter claim is much stronger,
and it is the one that process theists attribute to most classical
theists.



The process God has what might be called a second cousin to
over-power. As we have seen, in process theism, God is responsible for
the laws of nature and these laws determine the limits of non-divine
creativity. Whitehead and Hartshorne deny, however, that God could
create actual entities devoid of creative activity. Moreover,
developmental and evolutionary categories are central to their
thinking. It is contrary to process philosophy to imagine God with the
ability to create a fully grown man or woman who did not grow to
adulthood from having been a child. One's *being actual*
is inseparable from one's *having become actual*
(Hartshorne 1941, 233-234). Hartshorne would say that this is
also true of God's actual states, though not of God's
existence. These qualifications notwithstanding, one philosopher
working within the process tradition advocates revisions in process
theism that would move it in the direction that the critics suggest.
Rem Edwards speaks of divine self-limitation in creating the
creatures. For Edwards, God could create a universe of uncreative
beings but chooses not to. He thinks that God could "work an
occasional miracle or two." Edwards acknowledges that, from the
standpoint of "orthodox" process thought, these ideas are
"process heresy," but he prefers revising process theism
in these ways in order to avoid the charge, which he regards as
legitimate, that there is a "divine power-deficit" in
process theism that makes its outlook "religiously
intolerable" (Edwards 2001, 256).



The claim that deity sharing its creative power is an instance of
self-limitation can perhaps be clarified and placed more in the spirit
of process theism by referring to it as *divine
self-augmentation*. A self-imposed handicap is one that prevents
one from achieving a goal or performing a task that one could
accomplish without the limitation. As Inbody notes, any divine
self-limitation can be "self-unlimited" (Inbody 1997,
149). For example, a governor on a truck can be designed to inhibit
the velocity it could attain without the governor. In creating other
creators, however, the deity imposes no limits on what it could
achieve without them. To be sure, God could have unerring knowledge of
a determinate future if the creatures had no freedom, but this would
not be knowledge of a future with free creatures in it. To imagine a
limitation in this case would require that God could know the future
decisions of free creatures, but chooses instead to put on a
blindfold, so to speak. On the other hand, the existence of non-divine
creators opens opportunities for cooperative effort (and conflict)
that would be impossible without them. One cannot use persuasion on
completely unfree beings. Thus, in creating other creators, other
beings with some degree of freedom, God would be perfecting the divine
power and the uses to which it can be put.



Edwards also affirms a version of the doctrine of creation *ex
nihilo* and believes that this is compatible with process theism.
Inspired by developments in speculative cosmology among
astrophysicists--which he insists is really
metaphysics--Edwards asks whether our universe may not be one of
many actual universes existing within an infinite Superspacetime. This
super matrix of co-existing but independent universes could be
interpreted by process theism as the divine body, much as Hartshorne
views our universe as God's body. Edwards maintains that these
ideas allow for a concept of creation *ex nihilo*. Within the
divine Superspacetime, God can create universes from no pre-existing
material. Thus, it is not necessary to conceive our own universe as
created from the dying embers of a previous cosmic epoch. The initial
singularity of our universe could represent an absolute beginning.
This does not mean that one must jettison the claims of process theism
that God is necessarily social, embodied, and creative. In
Edwards' words:



> 
> Within infinite Divine Superspacetime, God could be infinitely loving,
> social, embodied, and creative without being tied to a single temporal
> strand of spatially finite antecedent-and-successive universes. Within
> infinite Superspace and throughout infinite Supertime, God could
> create many co-existing universes out of nothing .... (Edwards
> 2001, 262)
> 



Edwards notes that his suggestions are not as far removed from the
metaphysics of Whitehead and Hartshorne as one might suppose.
Whitehead speaks of cosmic epochs and Hartshorne argues that this
involves a time beyond what is available to physics that connects
various cosmic epochs (Hartshorne 1970, 53-54). Edwards views
himself as amending Hartshorne's idea to include super space as
well as super time.



Edwards' treatment of creation *ex nihilo* retains the
essential meaning of the idea--creation from no pre-existing
material--but it also suggests both less and more than the
concept as it was expressed in classical theism. It suggests less in
the sense that God's creative act in traditional theism takes
place in eternity. Superspacetime differs from the Boethian idea of
eternity in at least this much: it is complex whereas eternity has no
parts. Edwards also wishes to avoid the deterministic connotations of
the traditional idea of creation. To create another creator is
*not* to create that creator's decisions; this is one
reason Aquinas denies that God creates other creators, for he regards
God as creating, with us, the decisions we make in such a way that
God's activity is a sufficient explanation of our decisions
(although he denies, contrary to the charge of process theism, that
this deprives us of our freedom). Finally, Edwards imports more into
the idea of creation *ex nihilo* than was traditionally in the
doctrine. As we noted in the opening section, the idea that the
universe had a first temporal moment is not to be identified with
creation *ex nihilo* since, according to traditional theism,
God could have created a temporally infinite universe *ex
nihilo*.



Edwards' revisions of process theism are made largely, though
not exclusively, in light of criticisms from those who do not share
his commitment to process metaphysics. Lewis Ford revises process
theism in a very different direction, mostly in response to
difficulties within process metaphysics that he finds insurmountable.
We have already seen that in Whitehead's metaphysics, the way
that one actual entity influences another is by means of prehensions.
According to Ford, an additional mode of influence must be posited,
for one must account for an actual entity's *ability to
prehend*. This ability to prehend is precisely its portion of
creativity. Ford remains within the parameters of process metaphysics
by denying that the entity's allotment of creativity has its
source outside of time in an eternal being. This leaves only three
possible sources for the entity's creativity, the past, the
present, or the future. Ford maintains that past actual entities,
because they are past, are devoid of any inner creativity--thus,
they cannot be the source of an actual entity's creativity. Nor
can creativity simply "well up" from within the present.
It is precisely an actual occasion's *present creativity*
that needs explanation, and it cannot pull itself up by its own
bootstraps, so to speak. Ford argues, by elimination, that a future
creativity must be the source of an occasion's ability to
prehend.



In process metaphysics, the future is infinite, indeterminate, and its
possibilities for actualization are inexhaustible. Ford identifies God
with the future so conceived, but with one important departure from
standard accounts in process thought. According to Ford, God is
*the activity of the future*. This is contrary to the views of
Whitehead and Hartshorne for whom the future is the arena of
possibility awaiting decision. Creative activity is confined to the
present actual entity (called its concrescence) and to its effects on
subsequent actual entities (called transitional creativity) (Whitehead
1929 [1978, 211]). In Ford's view, however, the future is a soundless
depth of creativity that endlessly "pluralizes itself into the
many finite regions of the present" (Ford 2000, 248). This is a
process whereby divine future activity is "infused" into
the present actual occasion (Ibid., 253). In Ford's view,
present activity *makes the past* in the sense that what is
done today adds to what will be the accomplished past of tomorrow. The
present is not made by the past but by the divine activity of the
future.



Because the divine is indeterminate, it cannot be an object of an
actual entity's prehensions. This is dangerously close to saying
that God cannot be known, except that Ford understands God to fill a
definite role in his metaphysics, to wit, the infusion of creativity
into the present, providing for an immediacy of the divine presence in
all actualities. Ford also recognizes the difficulty that his view
poses for God's knowledge of the past, and hence for divine
omniscience. The physical prehensions of actual occasions are not only
the means whereby the present takes account of the past, but they are
also the means whereby the past persists into the present. As
Hartshorne notes, Whitehead's concept of prehension brings
efficient causation and perception under a single category (Hartshorne
1984b, chapter 9). If the past were to persist into the future so as
to impart knowledge to God, it would co-opt the present's
function of preserving the past. In order to avoid the idea that God
is ignorant of the past, Ford posits a kind of knowledge of the past
that abstracts from efficient causation. In the interstices separating
the death of the past moment and the birth of the present moment,
"God immediately perceives the recently emergent past and
retains that memory forever" (Ford 2000, 284). Since divine
memory, on Ford's account, abstracts from efficient causal
relations, it is clear that it records sequences and correlations of
events; it is a fair question whether it also contains information
about causal chains.



Ford recognizes that his revisions of process theism will strike some
thinkers as contrary to the metaphysics that first inspired it. He
correctly observes, "The notion of an active future may be
regarded as oxymoronic, even as bizarre, but it is certainly
unique" (Ford 2000, 316). It is indeed unique; it bears a
resemblance to the Thomistic doctrine of participated being, albeit
tailored to the categories of process philosophy, as modified in
various ways by Ford. In Thomism, the creatures can exist only by
participating in and channeling the infinite creativity of God. In
Ford's revised process theism, non-divine actual entities can
exist only by borrowing the influx of future divine activity into the
present. The parallel with Thomism breaks down insofar as Ford denies
that God's activity explains what the actual entities do with
their portion of creativity. Ford can affirm the freedom of the
creatures vis-a-vis God's activity since deity does not function
as a deterministic efficient cause as it does in Thomism and other
forms of traditional theism. In Whitehead's and
Hartshorne's theism, there is an efficient causal dimension to
God's creativity, but it is not deterministic. We have already
noted that the process God's fixing of the laws of nature is a
form of efficient causation, but Whitehead and Hartshorne agree with
most current scientific thinking that those laws are stochastic.


## 9. Arguments for the Existence of God in Process Theism



Our task has been to explain the concept of process theism, not to
argue that the God of process theism exists. Nevertheless, a few words
are in order about the approaches that process theists take to
justifying belief in the existence of God. We noted in opening that
process theism does not privilege claims to special insight or
revealed truth (cf. Keller 2007, chapter 6). This is not to say that
some theologians have not found process thought congenial to their
interests (e.g., Ogden 1963; Cobb 1965; Griffin 1973). Whitehead and
Hartshorne did not view themselves as apologists for a particular
faith, but neither did they simply dismiss religious experiences as
uninformative. Whitehead warns against narrowness in the selection of
evidence. He says, "Philosophy may not neglect the
multifariousness of the world--the fairies dance, and Christ is
nailed to the cross" (Whitehead 1929 [1978, 338]). They add, however,
that the claims that religious people make, individually (as in the
case of mystics) or collectively (as in the case of religious
organizations), are subject to human fallibility. There may be a God
who is infallible but human beings are not, and every putative
revelation is sifted through an imperfect human filter (Hartshorne
1984a, 41). As far as justifying religious belief is concerned,
Whitehead and Hartshorne try to navigate between appeals to blind
faith and knock-down proof. In metaphysics, says Whitehead, "The
proper test is not that of finality, but of progress" (Whitehead
1929 [1978, 14]).



If process theism is not based on revelation, neither is it based on
naive appeals to science, including the social sciences. It is no
more characteristic of process thought to give a
"scientific" argument for the existence of God than to
give a reductionistic account of religious belief by means of a theory
in sociology, psychology, or more broadly, what F. LeRon Shults calls
"the biocultural study of religion" (Shults 2018). As far
as Whitehead and Hartshorne are concerned, the working assumptions of
the sciences are no more or less open to question and clarification
than the working assumptions of religion. Process thought teaches a
modest skepticism about the competencies of science that is arguably
in the spirit of science itself. Indeed, the theory of actual entities
and their prehensions is Whitehead's alternative to the
metaphysical worldview that developed as a result of the dramatic
successes of early modern science--Whitehead calls it
"scientific materialism." The theory of actual entities is
a response to the idea that the "stuff" of which the world
is made is devoid of mind-like qualities--Whitehead refers to
this as "vacuous actuality." The theory of prehensions is
a response to the idea that bits of matter can exist at definite
places and times without any essential reference to other places and
times--Whitehead refers to this as "simple location."
The fact is that Whitehead wrote relatively little about God and a
great deal about how his philosophy of organism resolves problems of
metaphysics and epistemology inherited from a prior age.



Process theism is not based on religious doctrine or theology and it
is not a scientific theory; it is a product of metaphysics, or what
Whitehead calls "speculative philosophy." It is, however,
metaphysics "in a new key," to borrow a phrase from
Susanne Langer. Whitehead says that, "Speculative philosophy is
the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of
general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be
interpreted" (Whitehead 1929 [1978, 3]). Metaphysics, so defined, is an
audacious enterprise, for experience is open-ended and every claim to
knowledge is perspectival and conditioned. If metaphysicians strive
for a comprehensive vision of things, they must continually remind
themselves that there is no standpoint within the world from which to
speak confidently for eternity. Whitehead and Hartshorne reject the
idea that metaphysics proceeds best by deducing theorems from
self-evident axioms. To be sure, inferences must be made from the
categories of one's metaphysics, but it is the categories
themselves that are continually on trial. The court in which
metaphysical proposals are judged is the community of philosophers,
stretching through history and into the future. Whitehead and
Hartshorne, heavily influenced by Plato, practice philosophy as a
dialogue with great minds, past and present. Hartshorne, taking a page
from Karl Popper, says that, "Objectivity is not in the
individual thinker but in the process of mutual correction and
inspiration" (Hartshorne 1962, ix).



When it comes to the "God question" Whitehead says that he
is not offering proofs. "There is merely the confrontation of
the theoretic system with a certain rendering of the facts"
(Whitehead 1929 [1978, 343]). Having established to his satisfaction an
alternative to scientific materialism--that is, the philosophy of
organism--he asks whether that philosophy's categories
require reference to God. Ford suggests that Whitehead was surprised
to find that they do, for he began his reflections on the philosophy
of nature as an agnostic (Ford 1977, 27). In keeping with his
sensitivity to the history of philosophy, Whitehead characterizes his
discussion as adding another speaker to David Hume's
*Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion*. If Whitehead has an
"argument" for the existence of God it is implicit in the
dual attempt (1) to show the reasonableness of process metaphysics and
(2) to show the conceptual necessity of God for its overall coherence.
Rudolf Carnap says that it is one thing to ask what one's
metaphysics commit one to and it is something else to ask what commits
one to one's metaphysics. Whitehead asks both questions.



Ford rightly says that, in Whitehead's writings, the problem and
nature of God is nowhere explored for its own sake (Ford 1970, 393).
Moreover, during the period when he was introducing the concept of God
into his metaphysics, beginning in 1925, the very concept of God was
in flux. For these reasons, there is an inherent flexibility in
reconstructing arguments for God's existence from
Whitehead's work, and this is reflected in the critical
literature. Hartshorne identified six arguments implicit in
Whitehead's metaphysics (Hartshorne 1972, 78-88), but
others find fewer (Sherburne 1971) or more (Griffin 2001a, chapter 5).
Ford attempted to derive the existence of God analytically, as a
theorem from the set of axioms in Whitehead's categoreal scheme
in *Process and Reality*; his much abbreviated version of
Whitehead's reasoning is this: "Actual entities either
belong to God or to the World. Given the World, God must exist. Given
God, the World must exist. Since one or the other must exist, both
must" (Ford 1970, 393). Interestingly, the God to which
Ford's reconstructed argument concludes is a single non-temporal
actual entity, and no mention is made of developments in
Whitehead's idea of God after *Process and Reality*.



More traditional forms of reasoning can also be found in Whitehead.
There cannot, to be sure, be a cosmological argument in the classical
sense for Whitehead rejects the traditional idea of divine creativity,
but he does see a need to explain the initial phase of each actual
entity. In Whitehead's view, God customizes the general
potentiality of the universe for each emergent occasion, providing it
with its initial aim. The graded relevance of these potentialities
answers to our sense that there are objectively better and worse
options. A related problem is how the activities of the many
actualities that make up the cosmos happen to obey a common set of
natural laws. Order implies an ordering power; however, all localized
order presupposes cosmic order; thus, order on a cosmic scale requires
a cosmic ordering power. The best candidate for the cosmic ordering
power is God, according to Whitehead (Whitehead 1926 [1997, 104])--this
is a type of design argument. Another consideration is that the realm
of possibility in terms of which cosmic order is conceived is akin to
Plato's Forms. In Whitehead's system, these "eternal
objects" require an ontological ground. The primordial nature of
God serves this function (Whitehead 1929 [1978, 46]). Finally, the consequent
nature of God is the explanation of the fixity of accomplished fact
and achieved value. "The truth itself is nothing else than how
the composite natures of the organic actualities of the world obtain
adequate representation in the divine nature" (Whitehead 1929 [1978,
12]). This sketch of Whitehead's reasoning may suggest that his
"arguments" lose their force when abstracted from his
metaphysics. Bowman L. Clarke, however, produced a formal theistic
argument along Whiteheadian lines using the linguistic framework
developed by Nelson Goodman (Clarke 1966, 162-164). In a
different vein, Franklin Gamwell argues that the moral law must be
grounded in the divine good, where *the divine good* is most
parsimoniously conceived in neoclassical terms (Gamwell 1990). Another
process thinker, Derek Malone-France, argues that the promise of
Kant's transcendental philosophy is best fulfilled in a
Whiteheadian inspired theistic metaphysics (Malone-France 2007). Thus,
arguing for the existence of Whitehead's God, or something like
Whitehead's God, need not be inextricably tied to evaluating
Whitehead's metaphysics.



The debate among Whiteheadians over the existence of God is
complicated by the fact that Whitehead's views rapidly evolved
from the time he began teaching at Harvard in 1924. His view of God is
less a completed philosophical theism than a work in progress that was
left to others to try to complete, and many have tried. It is worthy
of note, however, that an influential group of scholars maintain that
Whitehead was not true to his finer insights when he included God in
his metaphysical system. Donald Sherburne wrote a pivotal article in
1967, revised in 1971, titled "Whitehead without God."
Sherburne holds that God can be "exorcised" from
Whitehead's metaphysics by showing that the existence of God is
inconsistent with its categories and by demonstrating that all of the
functions ascribed to deity in the system can be met in other ways.
Donald Crosby and Frederick Ferre (1933-2013), also
within the process fold, hold similar views. Ferre considers
theism "optional" in the sense that the premises of
theistic arguments are subject to competing and equally rational value
commitments (Ferre 2001, 177f). One of the most careful and
persistent critics of process theism is Robert Neville (Neville 1980).
Neville does not argue for "Whitehead without God" so much
as "Whitehead without Whitehead's God." He believes
that Whitehead's critique of scientific materialism and his
philosophy of organism are basically correct, but that the ultimate
explanation of the universe is in a deity that wholly transcends it
and creates it *ex nihilo* (Neville 1968). Griffin forcefully
criticized Neville's views (Griffin 2007, 186-214) and
Neville gave a spirited response (Neville 2008).



Hartshorne was more in the mainstream of philosophical discussions
about God than was Whitehead. He spoke of proofs for God's
existence and defended them vigorously, although he ceased calling
them "proofs" when he realized the differences between his
approach and more traditional ones. Hartshorne is best known for his
voluminous writings on the ontological argument--he devotes two
books and numerous articles to the topic (Hartshorne 1962 &
1965a). Despite his fondness for his revised ontological argument, he
never considered it sufficient unto itself to make the case for
God's existence. The ontological argument is one strand of a
multiple argument strategy--which Basil Mitchell calls a
"cumulative case"--in which the various elements are
mutually reinforcing.



> 
> All of the arguments are phases of one 'global' argument,
> that *the properly formulated theistically religious view of life
> and reality is the most intelligible, self-consistent, and
> satisfactory one that can be conceived*. (Hartshorne 1970, 276)
> 



Hartshorne's versions of the cosmological, teleological (or
design), moral, epistemic, and aesthetic arguments complete the set
that make up the global argument (Viney 1985).



In Hartshorne's view, the importance of the ontological argument
is to establish that God could not exist contingently. He calls this
"Anselm's principle." If Anselm's principle is
correct then *if* it is possible for God to exist, then God
necessarily exists. In Hartshorne's view, Anselm failed to make
a convincing case for God's existence because he failed to show
that his concept of God is coherently conceivable. Indeed, Hartshorne
believes that matters are much worse for Anselm since he considers
Anselm's form of theism to be incoherent, as we have seen.
Hartshorne believes that the other arguments in his own global
argument make the case for God's possible existence. Contingent
beings require a divine necessary being (cosmological); cosmic order
implies a divine cosmic ordering power (design); reality should be
construed as the actual content of divine knowledge (epistemic); the
supreme aim in life is to contribute to the divine life (moral); and
there is a beauty of the world as a whole that only God can enjoy
(aesthetic). The structure of Hartshorne's argument is
reminiscent of the elaborate case made by John Duns Scotus in *De
Primo Principio*. Of course, the God whose existence Hartshorne
seeks to establish is one that "the subtle doctor" would
find unacceptable.



Hartshorne presents each of the sub-arguments within his cumulative
case as a list of options from an exhaustive set, with his
neoclassical theistic option rounding out the set. The reason for
presenting his arguments as lists of options rather than as a series
of disjunctive syllogisms is to avoid the pretense of offering strict
demonstrations. The conclusion of any valid deductive argument can be
rejected provided one is willing to reject one or more of the
premises. In this sense, a valid argument provides one with options
for belief rather than a proof of its conclusion. Hartshorne denies
that one can coerce belief in God with arguments. Moreover, he
acknowledges that his own choice for neoclassical theism is not
without its difficulties. He maintains, therefore, that one should
employ the "principle of least paradox" in assessing the
options. Since no metaphysical position is without its problems, it
will not do to argue for one's own view by finding the problems
in the views of others. "One must decide which paradoxes are the
really fatal ones, in comparison with those of contending
positions" (Hartshorne 1970, 88).



Hartshorne presents his theistic arguments as *a priori*, not
in the sense that they are conclusive demonstrations, but in the sense
that they aim at a conclusion about what is true in all possible
states of affairs. In this he is true to Whitehead's
metaphysical project of finding categories that are universal and
necessary. He insists that none of the conclusions of his arguments
are empirical. A proposition is empirical, in Popper's sense, if
it is falsifiable by some conceivable experience. If Anselm's
principle is correct then either God exists without the possibility of
not existing or God's existence is impossible. Thus, if God
exists, then no conceivable experience could falsify the statement
that God exists. For this reason, Hartshorne finds all empirical
arguments--and hence, all scientifically based
arguments--for God's existence to be fatally flawed since
they must conclude to that which is not God, that is, to that which
exists contingently. Hartshorne also points out that none of his
arguments tell us anything concrete about God. True to his distinction
between existence and actuality, Hartshorne maintains that the
arguments concern that which is most abstract about deity, its
existence and character. This is why Hartshorne claimed to know so
very little about God, even though he wrote so many volumes on the
subject (Hartshorne & Viney 2001, 46).



After his ninetieth birthday, Hartshorne emphasized a somewhat
different approach in arguing for God's existence that
incorporates his ideas about dual transcendence (Hartshorne 1993;
Hartshorne 2011b). He notes that from a purely formal point of view,
any pair of metaphysical contraries may apply to God or to the world.
For example, either God is in different respects necessary and
contingent (NC), wholly necessary (N), wholly contingent (C), or
neither necessary nor contingent (O). The same is true of the world:
necessary and contingent (nc), wholly necessary (n), wholly contingent
(c), or neither necessary nor contingent (o). This yields sixteen
formal options which Hartshorne arranges in a four by four matrix.
Historically significant forms of theism can be found on the
matrix--classical theism, for example, is N.c and free will
theism is NC.c. Only one of the sixteen options can be true, so
Hartshorne develops criteria for judging the various possibilities.
For example, if the contrast itself should be preserved, then options
like N.n, C.c, and O.o are unacceptable. Of course, Hartshorne's
conclusion is that NC.nc is the true option. Arguably, the value of
these matrices is as much in mapping concepts of God and the world as
it is in arguing for a particular option, for they allow a more
detailed idea of the views that contradict one's own. Hartshorne
maintains that one reason classical theism remained unchallenged for
so long was because philosophers had not considered all of the options
(Hartshorne 1997, ch. 5). If any two matrices are combined, the number
of formal options jumps to 256. If we generalize for any number of
pairs *n*, then the number of concepts of God and the world is
16*n*.



We have already mentioned others within the process tradition who have
made the case for process theism: Clarke, Gamwell, and Malone-France.
Schubert Ogden (1963) and David Ray Griffin (2001a and 2016) should be
added to the list. Griffin explicitly employs a cumulative case
involving eight strands; his argument is indebted to both Whitehead
and Hartshorne but includes his own distinctive contributions. Having
found the alternatives to process theism unsatisfactory, Griffin
maintains that "process philosophy's naturalistic theism
is *overwhelmingly* more probable than the truth of
atheism" (2001a, 203). Also of note is that Griffin is one of
the few process philosophers to have addressed the arguments in the
literature of the new atheism (although, see Viney and Shields 2020,
chapter 6).



With Hartshorne, as with Whitehead, what is at stake in theistic
arguments is less a matter of the soundness of a particular piece of
reasoning than the assessment of an entire metaphysical system. Thus,
the sketch given here does not begin to do justice to their arguments.
Nevertheless, the development and defense of a concept of God that is
fully engaged in temporal processes is perhaps the central pillar and
the lasting achievement of their reasoning. After all, one of the
selling points of process theism over its rivals has been not only its
theoretical superiority in dealing with theological puzzles but its
adequacy to everyday religious sensibilities. Process theists argue
that the deity of traditional theism is at once too active and too
static. It is too active in the sense that its control of the universe
is absolute, leaving nothing for the creatures to do except to
unwittingly speak the lines and play the parts decided for them in
eternity. It is too static in the sense that it lacks potentiality to
change, to participate in the evolving universe it created, and to be
affected by the triumphs and tragedies of its creatures. In short, it
is a God who acts but is never acted upon and can therefore never
interact. This is summed up in the non-biblical Aristotelian formula
of God as the unmoved mover. Fritz Rothschild describes the God of
Rabbi Abraham Heschel--a God who feels and is felt by the
creatures--as "the *Most Moved Mover*"
(Heschel 1959, 24). Hartshorne, who greatly admired Heschel, amends
this formula in an attempt to distill the essence of process theism,
"God is the most *and best* moved mover"
(Hartshorne 1997, 6, 39).