Process
Philosophy and Our Idea of God
Dr. Ileana Grams presented the ideas of Process Philosophy and how they have altered some ideas about God. Process Philosophy is associated with Alfred North Whitehead and his followers. Whitehead was born and educated in England and was initially trained in physics and mathematics. Other advocates of Process Philosophy are Charles Hartshorne, (who is still alive at age 102!), John Cobb and David Griffin.
Process philosophy has been associated with religion as well as philosophy. As a philosophy, it took seriously an investigation of the ideas and concepts of God. They began with the classical Theistic ideas about God and concluded that:
1) God is a concept which is philosophically important and necessary. The concept of God is necessary in order to do metaphysics.
2) The classical ideas of God, significantly influenced by the Greeks, are not coherent and needed radical revision to be understood. Process philosophers undertook a revision of the concept of God.
Classical Theism and the Idea of God: The primary idea is that God is perfect. According to classical ideas, being perfect required that God be unchanging, impassible, eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
Why must God be perfect? Making judgments of any kind requires that we have a standard in mind against which we measure or judge. A straightness of an edge requires that we have some idea of perfect straightness. The standard itself, ‘perfect straightness,’ is not a physical object; it is an ideal, ‘straightness’ itself. Although these standards are not physical, we learn them and know what they mean. Plato believed that these standards are not material, yet are real and known to the mind. These reside is the Platonic Forms or Ideas. The standards must be perfect in order to serve as a measure. To Plato, to be perfect required that the Forms or Ideas be unchanging. Why? Because if something changes with time, it must become different, either better or worse. If it could become worse, it could not have been perfect; if it became better, it was clearly not perfect. Therefore perfect was necessarily unchanging! God must be unchanging to be perfect.
God is impassible means that God cannot be passive. God is always acting but is never acted upon. God is always a cause, never an effect.
Since time is change, and since God is unchanging, God must not exist in time! To be perfect also requires that God be omniscient or all-knowing. If God knows the world, he knows it as not existing in time. If omniscient, God knows the future as well as the past. Thus the future must be determined and certain; so must be the past. These ideas of God raise problems with the idea of man’s free will. If God knows the future, how can we be free to choose or change it? If all is predetermined, how can we be guilty of anything? How can God punish non-believers, for example, since their ‘non-belief’ was predetermined and they had no choice in the matter? How could there be morality and the possibility of moral choices if everything is predetermined?
Does God know things in time? Thomas Aquinas said “no.” God may experience, but not in time! But then does God know our human experiences? Because our experiences are temporal and God’s are not, how can He know my experience, or yours, or anyone’s in temporality. This would suggest that God does not know the world as we know it. We can see how these ideas of God lead to serious questions, conflicts and intellectual tangles.
God is believed to be ‘the Creator of All Things.’ God created the material world and interacts with it. How can this be if God is non-temporal while the material world is clearly temporal and changing? Is God relational? Does He interact with the world as we interact with the world? A truly impassible being could not be in any relationship with the world like this. It would make relationships for God impossible. All this leads to difficulties and conflicts with scientific concepts, understandings, and language. The only way to have an unchanging God knowing the world is for the world to be perfect and unchanging, to be predetermined. Like God, if we knew everything, we could predict the future. But time seems to have a direction. Certain well-proven tenets of physics show that the universe is, in fact, running down. Entropy is running out. This is not reversible but a one way continuous change.
Is the world deterministic? Quantum mechanics suggests that there is real novelty in the world, real indeterminancy. What will happen cannot be known since change occurs de novo, spontaneously, unexpectedly and indeterminately. The future is open. Thus science suggests that God can’t know what will happen because the future is unknowable. Even God cannot know what is not knowable. And if God learns, then God changes! This cannot occur if God was already perfect. If God knows all and God learns, then God must be a process!
Because of all these conflicts and inconsistencies, process philosophers felt that the classical ideas about God must be altered. They began by agreeing that God is perfect and perfect in all categories. However, they cancel out the categories of ‘impassible’ and ‘unchanging.’ They suggest that temporality is part of God’s nature. This does not mean that God is not eternal, but God is both temporal and eternal. God endures through all temporality. This is one sense of eternity. The other sense of eternity is in the pattern and order found in nature. This suggests that there must be an underlying standard (Form). Where do these unchanging Forms exist? They exist in the unchanging mind of God! Whitehead calls this the Primordial Nature of God. But God also has a Consequent Nature which allows change. The primordial nature is responsible for all the eternal forms; the consequent nature is responsible for what happens in time, for temporality, change, learning etc.
Regarding ‘omniscience,’ rather than knowing all, the present, past and future, process philosophy suggests that God is omniscient in the sense that He knows all that is knowable. Even God cannot know that which is not knowable. The future is not and certainly is not yet. Thus the future is not knowable, even by God. But God remains perfect in that God is maximal in any category which has a maximum!
Regarding ‘omnipotence,’ why can’t God control everything? The classical question arises: If God is omnipotent, why does He allow evil in the world? Again, process philosophy suggests that God is not omnipotent in that sense. God, however, can control all that is controllable! But God built ‘freedom’ into the universe! We humans experience this freedom as well. We can and do choose. We can and do make moral decisions. A material universe results in inevitable clashes. Evil remains a possibility and evil is an unavoidable consequence of this freedom. . They suggest, however, that God acts to bring about maximum harmony among all these ‘free’ creatures and dynamic phenomena.
During the question and answer period, it was pointed out that process philosophy was influenced by Spinoza. Theism holds that God is the creator of all things, separate from his creations. Contrarily, process philosophy holds that God is not separate from the world, but instead is immanent is some sense. Yet God is separate enough that we can have some relationship with Him. God is both within us and not within us.
During the discussion, the question arose: Why is it important to talk about God? From where or what arises the initial idea or sense of God? Some felt there was no need to define or characterize God. This is similar to the ancient Jewish idea that to give God a name and talk about Him was to diminish and objectify God. The Kabbalah draws the analogy that God is like light, a force, or positive energy in the universe. It was suggested that there is something beyond us, greater than ourselves. Our ‘souls’ are connected to a greater phenomenon than ourselves; there is a striving for a greater good in the world, some synthetic force which pulls together while at the same time there are forces which push things apart. It was also suggested that much of the confusion about God was because of our finite minds trying to grasp the infinite. Our efforts are puny and in vain. It was also suggested that Man created the concept of God. God was given characteristics and attributes which served to satisfy the needs, desires and wants of Man.
The role of fear was raised by Don Emon, our stimulating moderator. Several felt fear was definitely a motive in generating the idea of a God who could interact with the world and assist Man in situations which were beyond his control. The fear of death and the unknown hereafter is commonly considered a motive to think about God. It was suggested that ‘fear’ was the result of ‘threat’ and that ‘threat’ implied a ‘greater power than oneself’, since we are not threatened by lesser powers. Perhaps the simple ‘awareness of a greater power’ itself is the primordial religious sentiment. The explanation of that greater power, whatever it is, results in all the endless religious ideas and explanations we are all familiar with (theology and religions). The process philosophers concluded that the idea of God was necessary in order to discuss metaphysics. Of course, the cosmological question of the origin of the universe requires an explanation, a prime mover or creator, or a God of some sort. Perhaps God is our ultimate concern, whatever language we speak.
In summary, the process philosophers
have taken seriously the concept(s) of God.
They involved themselves in the theological domain. They analyzed the conflicts that arise
between the existing ideas of God which come down to us from the Greeks,
Romans, Christianity, and history, as well as those arising from modern science
and recent experience. They have
proposed changes in the classical concept of God which is more consistent with
what man has experienced and learned.
Dr. Grams suggested some references: