Hartshorne, Whitehead and the Religious
Availability of God
William T. Myers1
[Note: This paper was written for and presented at the Hartshorne Centennial Celebration
and Conference at the University of Texas at Austin, October 10-11, 1997. It has been
published in The Personalist Forum, volume. 14, no. 2, Fall 1998 .]
I have been a student of process metaphysics and, sometimes, process theology,
since very early in my philosophical studies. I first encountered Charles Hartshorne’s
name as an early undergraduate student. While a mere freshman philosophy major, I
recall writing a paper I called “The Power of God: Persuasive or Coercive.” In doing the
reading for that paper, I ran across the writings of thinkers like Lewis Ford, John Cobb,
David Griffin and Schubert Ogden. I had discovered process thought with a
corresponding theology, and I was hooked. From that time forward, I spent most of my
free philosophical time reading works both in process theology and in process
metaphysics generally. For me, process theology was a breath of fresh air, given that I
was at the time a “recovering fundamentalist.” Nevertheless, upon finishing
undergraduate school, I spent my first year in graduate school studying at The Episcopal
Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas, just a few blocks from Prof.
Hartshorne’s house. While I was a student there, I had the opportunity to meet Hartshorne
and to converse with him at some length. And my studies at the University of Texas
afforded other such opportunities as well.
Throughout the early part of my own philosophical development, I was always
puzzled by those philosophers who criticized the Whiteheadian-Hartshornian vision of
God as being religiously weak, or religiously unavailable. To me, if there was to be a
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God, then the neo-classical conception of God was the only one that made any sense at
all. So I found most of these criticisms rather hollow and thought that they showed little
understanding of the subtleties of the neo-classical conception. The charge that the God
of process metaphysics and theology is religiously inadequate is an old one, given the
relative newness of systematic process thought. It goes back at least as far as 1942, when
Stephen Ely published his book The Religious Availability of Whitehead’s God: A
Critical Analysis. More recently, Peter Hare and Edward Madden have charged that
process theism is merely “quasi-theism;”2 John Roth rather bitingly calls the process God
a “God on a leash;”3 and John Hick claims that the process God is “metaphysically
unsatisfying.”4 The list goes on. Process thinkers, of course, have not taken these charges
lightly, and many of the works in process thought have sections devoted to answering this
charge. Yet, for all of this, almost all of the defenses for the process God that I have seen
tend to lump Hartshorne’s and Whitehead’s concepts of God together, as if a defense of
the one could serve as a defense of the other.5 What I argue in this paper is that such an
assumption misses a number of the important differences between the two thinkers’
concepts of God. I propose that when these differences are clearly spelled out, moreover,
it becomes evident that Whitehead’s God is not in fact the God of religion, but
Hartshorne’s is. 6 I will show this by delineating a series of contrasts between the two
philosophers.
One of the more basic differences between Whitehead and Hartshorne is the way
in which they arrive at their respective concepts of God. Generally speaking, Whitehead
begins with a delineation of the categories and derives a notion of God from them.
Clearly, for Whitehead, God is a derivative notion. From that derivation, at best
2
Whitehead can only arrive at the eternal side of God, the Primordial Nature, and perhaps
the barest sketch of the Consequent nature, though that is not uncontroversially
derivative. It is telling that in the chapter from Process and Reality, “Some Derivative
Notions,” where Whitehead most explicitly introduces the Primordial Nature of God, he
mentions the Consequent Nature of God twice, both times referring to Part V for any
further elaboration. Indeed, outside of Part V, he mentions the Consequent Nature only a
very few times (five, by my count) and none of those are more than just a bare statement
of function. The fact that Whitehead delays discussion of the Consequent Nature until
Part V indicates that he is concerned with it largely as a post-systematic notion. That is,
the discussion there is more of a theological application of his system rather than a
systematic statement. Whitehead, then, begins with the metaphysics, and, once the
categories suggest it, derives a notion of God.
While Hartshorne notes that Whitehead’s approach is legitimate (though perhaps
somewhat dangerous), Hartshorne’s preferred method has been to start with God and
derive a metaphysics. In Chapter II of Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method,
Hartshorne says:
If the religious issue is as central in metaphysics as it seems to
be, to attempt first to settle everything else and only then to ask about
‘God’ is to be in danger of begging the chief metaphysical questions.
Hume and Kant did just that, in my opinion. Unwittingly assuming antitheistic postulates, they not surprisingly inferred the impossibility of a
rational theism. But the reasoning can be reversed: since theism at the least
deserves a hearing on its merits, the experiment should be made of
provisionally rejecting every postulate which shows itself hostile to
theism....
...[Thus], ‘neo-classical metaphysics’, when its ideas are
adequately explicated, is neo-classical natural theology and vice versa. In
three several books I have tried to show, at least in outline, how from the
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mere idea of God a whole metaphysical system follows; one may also
proceed in the opposite direction, and show how from general secular
considerations one may arrive at the idea of God and a judgment as to its
validity. But the two ways of proceeding differ only relatively and as a
matter of emphasis (CSPM 40-41).
We can note that while Hartshorne does allow for the possibility of moving from the
world to God (and this admission is one that he likely would not have endorsed so easily
earlier in his career), the method he always utilized was one that moved from God to the
world. Indeed, Hartshorne talks as if there were no significant difference between the two
methods, almost implying that the movement from the world to God is actually reducible
to the movement from God to the world. Immediately following the just quoted passage,
Hartshorne comes close to saying that. He continues:
In thinking metaphysically at all one is already more or less close to an
explicit thinking about God, and in thinking at all clearly about God one is
already somewhat conscious of metaphysical principles. A priori
knowledge, valid ‘for all possible worlds’, must coincide in content with
the most abstract aspects of omniscience. It is what is common to all that
God could create or know, and of course know that he could create or
know (CSPM, 41).
Indeed, that this difference in approach makes a difference is shown with an easy
illustration. In The Hartshorne Festschrift: Process and Divinity, William Christian
makes a strong case (that seems correct to me) that “The concept of God in Whitehead’s
philosophy is categorically contingent, systematically necessary and existentially
contingent” (PD, 195). By “categorically contingent,” Christian means that “the
categoreal scheme permits but does not require the concept” of God (PD, 195).
“Systematically necessary” refers to the crucial role that the concept plays in Whitehead’s
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system. And by “existentially contingent” he means that the proposition “God exits”, if
true at all, is not necessarily true, but only contingently true. (PD, 195).
While I don’t want to take the time to rehearse all of Christian’s arguments here
(they are rather extended), I don’t think I need to in order to make my point. Indeed, could
we imagine anyone making anywhere near this type of claim about Hartshorne’s system?
Or trying to make a substantial argument that one could have “Hartshorne Without God,”
as Donald Sherburne has done with Whitehead?7 Hartshorne is one of the few 20th
century metaphysicians about whom it is appropriate to say, and, indeed, has been said,
that he “deserves the title ‘the God-intoxicated philosopher’ as much as any thinker since
Spinoza” (CH, 73). I do not believe that anyone could say this about Whitehead (though
Russell might well have thought it).
To summarize the first contrast: For Whitehead, the notion of God is not a basic
(categoreal) notion. Whitehead clearly does not start with God, and his method is not
congenial to such a starting point. Hartshorne, on the other hand, begins with God and
derives his system from that beginning. Interpreters of Whitehead have seen and have
argued that Whitehead’s system, or at least a system very much like Whitehead’s, could
be constructed in such a way as to exclude God. Indeed, I would argue that John Dewey
has just such a metaphysics. With Hartshorne’s system, though, given his belief in the
coincidence of natural theology and metaphysics,8 such a reconstruction is clearly out of
the question.
The second contrast is really a grouping of related contrasts all focusing both on
the nature of God and on the way God functions and interacts with the world. In order to
draw out these contrasts, I want to start with a brief discussion of the evolution of the
5
function of God in Whitehead’s system. In Whitehead’s metaphysical writings, the first
systematic mention of God is in Chapter XI of Science and the Modern World. The
description of God in that chapter is really no more developed than the Aristotelian Prime
Mover, and, in fact, Whitehead compares the function of his “principle of concretion” to
the function of the Prime Mover. At this stage, Whitehead’s God really is no more than a
bare metaphysical principle, in no way resembling the God of Religion. In Religion in the
Making, which was written at about the same time as Science and the Modern World,
Whitehead begins to develop his notion of God to a greater degree, albeit the
development, while important, is not nearly as systematic as it is in Process and Reality.
Let me be careful, here. There is an argument to be made that the God of Religion in the
Making plays a greater role than the God of Process and Reality, and in a sense that is
true. But the metaphysics of that operation is not present in Religion in the Making, and,
indeed, Whitehead says some things in Religion in the Making about God that would be
difficult to work out metaphysically. Let me address those here.
First, consider the following: “Since God is actual, He must include in himself a
synthesis of the total universe. There is, therefore, in God’s nature the aspect of the realm
of forms as qualified by the world, and the aspect of the world as qualified by the forms”
(RM, 98); and, later, “Apart from God, there would be no actual world; and apart from
the actual world with its creativity, there would be no rational explanation of the ideal
vision which constitutes God” (RM 157). In the first quotation, it seems that Whitehead is
leaning towards something like what later becomes the consequent nature of God. Indeed,
what he says in these two quotations go beyond the function of the primordial nature as it
is spelled out in Process and Reality. Yet, in Religion in the Making, Whitehead does say
6
of actual occasions that “The most complete concrete fact is dipolar, physical and mental”
(RM 118). He is at least beginning to develop at this point the picture of the actual
occasion as it appears in Process and Reality, that is, as having a physical and mental
pole. God, though, as far as I can see, is not seen as being dipolar yet. “Actual fact,”
Whitehead argues, “always means fusion into one perceptivity. God is one such
conceptual fusion, embracing the concept of all such possibilities graded in harmonious,
relative subordination” (RM 157). As of Religion in the Making, God, for Whitehead, is
purely conceptual and purely spiritual.9 Now, this is not to say that the God of Religion
in the Making is not active and important for the world. On the contrary, this is the most
active and significant description of God that Whitehead puts forth. This is the closest
that Whitehead’s God comes to being the God of religion. But, there is something crucial
missing in the Religion in the Making account. Whitehead says, “Also at present it is
generally held that a purely spiritual being is necessarily immortal. The doctrine here
developed gives no warrant for such a belief. It is entirely neutral on the question of
immortality, or on the existence of purely spiritual beings other than God (RM, 111,
emphasis added). The mere possibility of the “death of God” seems to take away from
any claim that Whitehead’s God, even at this more developed point, is the God of
religion. It seems at least possible, on Whitehead’s account, that when this cosmic epoch
passes, so passes God.
In Process and Reality, Whitehead’s concerns are more explicitly metaphysical in
the systematic sense. Whitehead sees a need for God because of the ontological principle.
Whitehead’s categories of existence include “eternal objects,” and, by the ontological
principle, they must be somewhere. And that somewhere, of course, is the Primordial
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Nature of God. The Primordial Nature, taken by itself, is a further development of the
principle of concretion from Science and the Modern World. It represents God’s mental
pole. But, of course, this isn’t the whole story. Given that actual entities have both a
physical and a mental pole, in Process and Reality, we have the explicit introduction of
the Consequent Nature of God, which represents God’s physical pole. In Process and
Reality, God’s function is perhaps best described as serving as the bridge between
potentiality and actuality. The Primordial Nature envisages all eternal objects, thus being
the absolute side of God in which all possibilities are known, while the Consequent
Nature ensures the objective immortality of the past.
In order to see the contrast between Whitehead and Hartshorne, I want to consider
the functions of the two poles of God, starting with the Primordial or Eternal Nature. In
Chapter IV of Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, Hartshorne notes a significant
difference between Whitehead and him. Hartshorne finds Whitehead’s notion of eternal
objects troubling, preferring instead the more traditional notion of universals. Hartshorne
notes that the question, “Are there objective universals, identical in various spatiotemporally distinct instances?” is not the same question as “Are there eternal universals,
absolutely independent of time, relevant to all conceivable stages of cosmic process?”
Whitehead’s eternal objects, he goes on to say, “dangerously obscures this distinction”
(CSPM, 58). Rather than seeing universals as being strictly eternal, Hartshorne claims
that “there may be emergent as well as eternal universals” (CSPM, 58). By his own
account, Hartshorne’s view of this is Peircean. “All specific qualities, i.e., those of which
there can be negative instances in experience, are emergent, and...only the metaphysical
first principles are eternal...” (CSPM, 59). Hartshorne continues: “I do not believe that a
8
determinate colour is something haunting reality from all eternity, as it were, begging for
instantiation, nor that God primordially envisages a complete set of such qualities”
(CSPM, 59). Whitehead’s view that “actuality owes its definiteness to specific universals,
‘forms of definiteness’, available from all eternity seems,” according to Hartshorne,
“arbitrary” (CSPM 62). To illustrate this difference, consider Whitehead’s favorite
example of an eternal object--color. In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead says,
“A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and goes. But where it comes, it
is the same colour. It neither survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted”
(SMW, 87). In respect to color, Hartshorne tells a different story. In Creative Synthesis
and Philosophic Method, he writes:
An important point to observe is that the common assertion, the red
of this flower (for example) is ‘the same’ as the red of that flower, taken as
an empirical statement, only means that we are not aware of a difference.
This is demonstrable by the well-known fact (rightly stressed by Koerner)
that sameness in this observational sense is non-transitive. Since absolute
qualitative sameness has no empirical meaning, it becomes a fair
metaphysical question whether we should assume that it can occur. I argue
for the negative view and hold with Stout that the precise qualities of
particulars are themselves particular and unrepeatable. Only more abstract,
more or less generalized traits are repeatable. I am here differing from
Santayana as well as Whitehead. Something very like this blue can occur
over and over, but not precisely this blue. Particular qualities in their
absolute definiteness are irreducibly relational and historical (CSPM 6364).
Contra Whitehead, then, Hartshorne holds that Colors are both emergent and nonrepeatable. The only eternal object is the eternal aspect of deity, including, perhaps the
infinity of whole numbers (CSPM, 65).
One way of understanding Hartshorne’s version of this account is that he takes
elements of truth that he sees in nominalism and incorporates them into Whitehead’s
9
system.10 While Hartshorne’s metaphysics is certainly not fully nominalistic, it shares
more in common with certain versions of nominalism than does Whitehead’s.
Specifically, Hartshorne notes three possible commonalities: 1) “similarity is as ultimate
as identity”; 2) “except for extremely general and abstract universals, qualities can be
non-particular without being eternal”; and 3) “perhaps there are no eternal aspects of
reality other than those included in what God necessarily-eternally is” (CSPM, 67).
This difference, it seems to me, is significant for my thesis, since it has an effect,
in part, on the nature of God’s knowledge of future possibilities. Indeed, interpreters
have drawn very different conclusions from this difference. Before moving to some of
those, though, let’s consider what Hartshorne says regarding possibilities:
The advance possibilities for a painting, [for example,] are only
relatively definite. The pigments may already exist; the human senses are
largely fixed. Thus the painter knows roughly what he can do. But that he
can do just this which he subsequently does, not even deity can know until
it is done. The ‘this’ of an actuality simply has no advance status, modal or
otherwise. Creativity does not map the details of its future actions, even as
possible. This, as Berdyaev says, is the non-Platonic meaning of real
creativity, that it is not content with actualizing ‘images’ which are
antecedently, or eternally, in being, but rather produces ‘new images’,
sheer additions to the ‘forms of definiteness’, to use Whitehead’s term for
an idea that he seems at times to deny (unless I have misunderstood him)
(CSPM, 65).
Hartshorne, then, backs off from Whitehead’s strong notion of eternal objects as
‘forms of definiteness,’ thereby limiting to a greater degree than Whitehead, it would
seem, God’s knowledge of future possibilities. But I must be careful, here. Hartshorne
agrees with Whitehead that if some possibility is actualized, then it must in some sense
have existed prior to actualization. The difference is that Hartshorne insists that the
possibility is not as definite as what actually comes to be.11 Lewis Ford sees this as
10
posing a problem for the “religious significance of divine action” of Hartshorne’s God.
Specifically, Ford writes:
[On Hartshorne’s view] God inspires our activities by being the cosmic,
all-inclusive recipient of all our actions, preserving and enjoying them
forevermore, thereby rescuing them from the transiency of the world and
endowing them with ultimate significance. The imposition of the laws of
nature, however, seems deficient in religious inspiration, even if it is
God’s primary mode of acting. While we may be comforted and reassured
that God thereby protects us form chaos, this is primarily a matter for
physics rather than for ethics and religion. Whitehead’s God, in contrast, is
supremely worthy of worship because he is the dynamic source of all
values. God inspires us primarily by what he contributes to us in the form
of values for us to actualize. Our contribution to him is derivative, for it is
dependent upon how we respond to his contribution to us. But there is no
way to respond to a law of nature, particularly if it is imposed by God; it
must simply be obeyed, willy-nilly, for we have no choice in the matter
(Ford, p.79).
While Ford’s description of Hartshorne’s view does point to an important
difference between Hartshorne and Whitehead, Ford’s conclusion is not warranted. He is
no doubt correct that Hartshorne differs from Whitehead regarding the laws of nature.
However, Ford is not totally accurate in his account of Hartshorne’s notion of divine
efficacy. In order to show this, it is necessary to take an aside and explore Hartshorne’s
and Whitehead’s differences regarding God and the issue of panentheism.
Hartshorne is noted (deservedly so) for his development of the panentheistic
alternative to pantheism and traditional theism. In The Divine Relativity, Hartshorne sets
forth three possible accounts of God and the world: “(1) God is merely the cosmos, in all
aspects inseparable from the sum or system of dependent things or effects; (2) he is both
this system and something independent of it; (3) he is not the system, but is in all aspects
independent” (DR, 90). The three views, respectively, are pantheism, panentheism and
11
traditional theism, with Hartshorne, of course, choosing panentheism. I want to argue,
however, that Whitehead, strictly speaking, is not a panentheist. Notice that Hartshorne’s
description applies to God and says nothing, in this bare description, about the world. In
other places, Hartshorne claims that “God literally contains the universe” (DR, 90-91).12
Indeed, this view is contrary to Whitehead. In Process and Reality, Whitehead writes: “It
is to be noted that every actual entity, including God, is something individual for its own
sake; and thereby transcends the rest of actuality. And also it is to be noted that every
actual entity, including God, is a creature transcended by the creativity which it qualifies”
(PR 88).13 In other words, all actual entities are both transcendent and immanent. By this
account, God is not reducible to the world, and neither is the world reducible to God. In
order for Hartshorne’s description of panentheism to reflect Whitehead’s view, it would
have to add, “and the world contains God and is something independent of God,” a
qualification which Hartshorne would certainly be unwilling to make.14
So even if Whitehead might be called a panentheist, his version is certainly quite
different from Hartshorne’s. Returning now to Lewis Ford’s claim that Hartshorne’s God
is not worthy of worship, it seems to me that Ford’s description of the role of God does
not do Hartshorne’s view justice. Given Hartshorne’s panentheism, there is a clear sense
in which God and the world are much more intimate than they are for Whitehead. Divine
efficacy works in Hartshorne because when we feel our possibilities, we feel them as
God’s possibilities. Consider the following passage from The Divine Relativity:
God orders the universe, according to panentheism, by taking into his own
life all the currents of feeling in existence. He is the most irresistible of
influences precisely because he is himself the most open to influence. In
the depths of their hearts, all creatures (even those able to “rebel” against
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him) defer to God because they sense him as the one who alone is
adequately moved by what moves them. He alone not only feels (the only
adequate knowledge, where feeling is concerned) how they feel, and he
finds his own joy in sharing their lives, lived according to their own free
decisions, not fully anticipated by any detailed plan of his own (DR, xvii).
And, later in the same work:
It may be asked how it can be that God constitutes the essential and
inclusive object of our awareness. The answer is in some measure easy to
see. (Its full explication would amount to the proofs for God’s existence.)
Only an adequate awareness can fully measure and contain the being and
value of everything. We are what the ideal knower knows us to be, our
value is that which we have for the ideal valuation, and if we were not thus
adequately known and valued, we should have no determinate, objective,
public being and value. It is not that we are made what we are simply
through being known and valued by deity; as the realists rightly insist,
merely being known does not suffice to constitute the existence of
anything. The point is, we know we are (or will be) known; our being
entirely known is itself known by us. We enjoy God’s enjoyment of
ourselves. This enjoyment-of-being-enjoyed is the essential factor in all
our enjoyment (DR, 141).
Notice how rich this description of the divine role and action is when compared to Ford’s.
Hartshorne’s God lures us toward the ideal, preserves and is the ground of all value. Let’s
compare this to Whitehead. Ford claims that Whitehead’s God “is supremely worthy of
worship because he is the dynamic source of all values” (TPP, 79). I would argue
otherwise. The God of Process and Reality is much more of an abstract principle than
anything else. God’s role is almost exclusively metaphysical--God serves as the bridge
between actuality and potentiality. Hartshorne’s God is the ground of all actuality and is
much more intimately involved in the world. In a literal way, it makes much more sense
to say of Hartshorne’s God that God loves the world than it does of Whitehead’s. The
sheer abstractness, distance, one might say, of the Primordial Nature of God separates
God from the world and makes God more of an abstract principle. While Hartshorne
13
does frequently talk about the “absolute” nature or pole of God, he does so using terms
like “unsurpassable,” “all-surpassing,” “self-surpassing,” “infallible knower,” “logically
unique.” These terms are all abstract, granted. Hartshorne explicitly says that we can only
define God in extremely abstract terms. In fact, “God is the only individual identifiable by
abstractions alone” (CSPM, 246). Nevertheless, notice the difference between
Hartshorne’s descriptive phrases and Whitehead’s: As primordial, God is far from
“eminent reality”(PR 343); he is “deficiently actual”(PR 343); “He is the unconditioned
actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things” (PR 344); “he is the principle of
concretion” (PR 345). Indeed, these kinds of phrases can be cited over and over again as
Whitehead describes the Primordial Nature of God. All of his descriptions seem, not just
abstract, but far from the world, and far from describing a God about whom it would be
appropriate to say that he loves the world.
Now, before it is said that I am being unfair in that I am ignoring the Consequent
Nature of God, we must remember that, at best, only the most basic structure of the
Consequent Nature is derivable from the categories, and the religious significance of that
basic structure is certainly very minor. Nevertheless, I do want to contrast the role of
Whitehead’s Consequent Nature with Hartshorne’s contingent side of God and what their
differences suggest about objective immortality. One of the most significant differences
between the two philosophers is that for Hartshorne, actual occasions are retained in God
in their full immediacy while for Whitehead they are strictly objectified, devoid of
immediacy.15 Consider the practical, religious significance of this difference. On
Hartshorne’s account, there is a greater significance to the notion of immortality. That is,
14
our moments literally live on in the consequent nature of God. For Whitehead, they are
simply remembered. A purely objective immortality carries little religious comfort.
Related to the functioning of God in the world is the question of divine power,
and this is certainly a point of contention among the critics of process theology, and, in
fact, among some of the proponents as well. The status of divine power, quite simply, is
not unambiguously clear. How powerful is the process God? Barry Whitney has pointed
out that Hartshorne’s conception of God, more than Whitehead’s, is one that is not clearly
persuasive only; that is, there may be coercive elements in God’s interaction with the
world in Hartshorne’s thinking that are absent from Whitehead.16 Lewis Ford mentions
three such differences that I think capture the contrast nicely. For Whitehead, Ford writes,
(a) the laws of nature...are immanent, not imposed; (b) the divine lure is not
“irresistible,” for the creature is free to actualize that possibility most contrary to
the one most valued by God; (c) God sets no limits on our freedom; those limits
are entirely set by the past actual world (TPP, 78).
Indeed, the concept of divine activity in Whitehead’s thought is difficult to reconcile with
any kind of coercion. If my argument (earlier) that Whitehead’s panentheism is different
from Hartshorne’s is sound, then this is easy to see. The world, for Whitehead, has an
independence from God that Hartshorne simply does not accept, thereby allowing on
Whitehead’s account for greater resistance on the part of actual occasions. Hartshorne’s
panentheism, on the other hand, is one that affords God greater power. Consider this
passage from The Divine Relativity:
Whatever else God controls, he controls human minds. How then can
minds be controlled? There is but one positively conceivable way. A mind
is influenced by what it knows, by its objects. A mind is influenced by
what it knows, by its objects....If God can alter the object of our
15
awareness, he can alter our awareness, alter us. The question then
becomes, how can he alter (with supreme efficacy) the object of our
awareness? Again, there is but one conceivable way. Suppose he is himself
the supreme and indeed the total object that is or can be given to us....Then
to alter us he has only to alter himself. God’s unique power over us is his
partly self-determined being as our inclusive object of awareness....[A]s
this object changes, we are compelled to change in response (DR 139).17
While Hartshorne’s language clearly does not go as far as the coercive language of the
tradition, it seems to go well beyond “gentle persuasion,” and also beyond Whitehead’s
description. Indeed, Whitehead’s God may be a “God on a leash,” but one would be quite
hard-pressed to substantiate that claim in Hartshorne’s case.
There is one final contrast, and this one may well be the most important one for
both traditional and psychological considerations. In the Western tradition, perhaps the
most consistent attribute applied to God is God’s personal nature. If one looks at the
traditional attributes of God, one can find in the sacred writings of the Western traditions
exceptions to almost all of them. The Yahweh of the Tanakh is not omnipotent, but
simply almighty. He cannot be omniscient in the strong sense, since he is frequently
surprised by some of the things people do. Nor is he immutable, for he is frequently
repenting and changing his mind. Even Yahweh’s goodness can be called into question
when one examines the stories of Job and of Yahweh’s command that Abraham sacrifice
his son. Nor is Yahweh eternal in the sense of being outside of time--he lives on Mount
Zion and dwells amongst the people. Indeed, Yahweh’s call to Abraham and to the
prophets is done in a face to face encounter. While the various attributes of God have
gone through numerous revisions, the one that seems most constant is that God is a
personal God, and that the believer’s relationship with God is of a personal nature.
Indeed, this is not just tradition, but strong tradition.
16
Can our two thinkers handle this tradition? It would seem that Hartshorne can
while Whitehead cannot. Let’s start with Whitehead. Consider the notion of personality.
In Whitehead’s system, personality clearly is not a systematic notion, but rather a
presystematic notion to be interpreted by the various categories. Human personality is not
just an actuality; rather, what we call “my personality” is an abstraction from the complex
of actual occasions and societies that are me. But notice, this cannot be God, since God is
but a single actual entity. As a single actual entity, God cannot be personal in any
meaningful sense. Furthermore, in Religion in the Making, which holds Whitehead’s
most developed account of God, Whitehead is skeptical of applying attributes like
“personal” to God.18 Indeed, even if Whitehead were inclined to do so, he would have
considerable difficulty, given his metaphysical account of God.
Hartshorne’s account, on the other hand, clearly does not fall into these
difficulties. In fact, it can safely be said that Hartshorne’s God is even more personal than
we are; that is, he is perfectly personal. Consider again the relationship between
Hartshorne’s God and the world. In one sense, the differences between the personal
nature of Hartshorne’s God and the personal nature of human beings is a matter of degree.
That is, where humans only imperfectly prehend the past, God does so completely. Where
humans can only dimly foresee future possibilities, God does so to a greater degree. And
the fact that God does not envision the entirety of a realm of eternal objects (as
Whitehead’s God does) makes God’s foreseeing of possibility more like ours. We do not
see possibility as “forms of definiteness”; we see them as vague possibilities. For these
reasons, then, Hartshorne’s God is eminently personal, while Whitehead’s simply is not.
17
And the personal nature of Hartshorne’s God puts his God more squarely in that strong
tradition.
To conclude: The purpose of this paper has been to show that Whitehead and
Hartshorne’s concepts of God are substantially different, and when those differences are
sorted out, it becomes clear that Hartshorne’s concept of God is more apt to be the God of
religion whereas Whitehead’s is not. The God we get from Whitehead is more distant,
more metaphysical, and, in the end, less substantial than what is psychologically and
historically needed for a significant notion of deity. Hartshorne, on the other hand, offers
a richer, more psychologically and traditionally satisfying notion of God.19
Birmingham-Southern College
18
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Christian, William. An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Westport, Conn.
Greenwood Press, 1977. Cited as IWM.
Davis, Stephen T. (ed.). Encountering Evil. Atlanta. John Knox Press, 1981. Cited as EE.
Ely, Stephen Lee. The Religious Availability of Whitehead’s God: A Critical Analysis.
Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1942.
Ford, Lewis S. Two Process Philosophers: Hartshorne’s Encounter with Whitehead.
Tallahassee, Florida. American Academy of Religion, 1973. Cited as TPP.
_____. “Whitehead’s Differences from Hartshorne.” In TPP.
Gragg, Alan. Charles Hartshorne. Waco, Texas. Word Books, 1973. Cited as CH.
Griffin, David Ray. “Creation out of Chaos and the Problem of Evil.” In EE.
_____. Evil Revisited. Albany. SUNY Press, 1991. Cited as ER.
_____. “Hartshorne’s Differences From Whitehead.” In TPP.
Hare, Peter and Edward Madden. Evil and the Concept of God. Springfield. C. C.
Thomas, 1968.
Hartshorne, Charles. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. LaSalle, IL. The Open
Court Publishing Company, 1970. Cited as CSPM.
_____. The Divine Relativity. New Haven. Yale University Press, 1948. Cited as DR.
_____. The Logic of Perfection. LaSalle, IL. The Open Court Publishing Company, 1962.
_____. Reality as Social Process. Glencoe, IL. The Free Press, 1953.
_____. Whitehead’s Philosophy. Lincoln, Nebraska. University of Nebraska Press, 1973.
Cited as WP.
Kane, Robert and Stephen H. Phillips, eds. Hartshorne: Process Philosophy and
Theology. Albany. SUNY Press, 1989. Cited as PPT.
Reese, William L. and Eugene Freeman, eds. The Hartshorne Festschrift: Process and
Divinity. LaSalle, IL. The Open Court Publishing Company, 1964. Cited as PD.
Sherburne, Donald W. “Whitehead Without God.” Christian Schoolman, 50, 1967. pp.
251-272.
Whitney, Barry L. Evil and the Process God. New York. The Edwin Mellen Press, 1985.
Cited as EPG.
_____. “Hartshorne and Theodicy.” In PPT.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: Corrected Edition. David Ray Griffin and
Donald W. Sherburne, eds. New York. The Free Press, 1978. Cited as PR.
_____. Religion in the Making. New York. Fordham University Press, 1996. Cited as
RM.
_____. Science and the Modern World. New York. The Free Press, 1967. Cited as SMW.
1
William T. Myers is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Birmingham-Southern
College. This paper was presented at Charles Hartshorne Centennial Celebration and
Conference held at the University of Texas at Austin on October 11, 1997. It is published
in The Personalist Forum, volume 14, no. 2, Fall, 1998. It was also presented as part of a
special forum honoring Professor Hartshorne’s 100th birthday at the meeting of the
Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy in Milwaukee, WI in March, 1998.
19
In Evil and the Concept of God, their chapter on Process theism is titled “QuasiTheism.”
3
See Roth’s critique of David Ray Griffin’s theodicy in EE, p. 119.
4
See Hick’s critique of Griffin’s theodicy in EE, p. 122.
5
While Barry Whitney recognizes some important differences between the potential
power of Whitehead and Hartshorne’s God, he does not exploit it. This, of course, is no
discredit to Whitney’s fine book. He is simply dealing with other issues. See Whitney’s
EPG pp. 218-219 and 223-224. Also, see Whitney’s essay “Hartshorne and Theodicy” in
PPT, pp. 53-69.
6
I think it’s important to say at the outset that I do not claim that Whitehead’s God is
incompatible with the God of religion, but neither is it incompatible with both a more and
a less traditional concept of God than Hartshorne’s. I can say that, as far as he developed
it, Whitehead’s God is not the God of religion. This ambiguity on the part of Whitehead’s
conception is due perhaps to the fact that his notion of the Consequent Nature of God is
never completely developed.
7
See Sherburne’s “Whitehead Without God.”
8
Lewis Ford makes this point very clearly. See his essay, “Whitehead’s Difference from
Hartshorne,” in TPP, p. 82-3.
9
That Whitehead has not yet derived a consequent nature of God, or even any physical
nature, is shown in other passages as well. See, for example, p. 159: “He [God] is not the
world, but the valuation of the world.” Almost everything Whitehead says about God
refers to the mental function. Randall Auxier’s excellent glossary in the Fordham edition
clearly shows this.
10
For a good summary discussion of this, see David Griffin’s essay inTPP.
11
See Hartshorne’s WP, pp. 31-32.
12
In a conversation in the faculty lounge at the University of Texas, Hartshorne once told
me that he wished that Whitehead would have gone ahead and admitted that the world is
God’s body.
13
Also, in Part V, section V of Process and Reality, Whitehead says, “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” (PR 348). Of
course, I want to be careful citing this as explicit systematic evidence given the postsystematic language of Part V.
14
William Christian also argues that Whitehead is not a panentheist, though he cites
different reasons than I do. While I agree with Christian’s conclusions, I do so for slightly
different reasons. See Christian’s IWM, pp. 403-409.
15
I realize that this difference is a matter of dispute, and Hartshorne clearly disagrees
with me. In my reading of the relevant scholarship, though, Hartshorne seems to be in the
minority on this point. While I do not want to rehearse the various arguments here, given
that they have been worked through by a number of scholars, I will say that I find
Christian and Griffin’s arguments on the subject compelling. For Christian, see IWM, 5052, 61-72 and 339-49. For Griffin, see TPP 52-55.
16
See Whitney’s essay “Hartshorne and Theodicy” in PPT.
2
20
This isn’t, of course, the only passage in which Hartshorne uses the language of
compulsion. See also WP 164, DR 140, DR 142, for example.
18
In RM, see the chapters titled “God” and “The Quest of God”, pp. 67-80.
19
When I first presented this paper, upon concluding, one of the audience members
immediately said, "And that's why I prefer Whitehead's God!" I agree with these
sentiments. If we want to have a process version of deity that is more like the God of
religion, then Hartshorne is the way to go. Personally, I don't care to have such a deity.
17
21