THE PROCESS CONCEPT OF GOD

From A. N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne.

Inheritance from Philo, the Church Fathers, and Islamic philosophers (such as Avicenna):

The two-stage theory of creation: First God creates the forms (universals, ideas), and then the world according to the ideas

God is perfect (but “perfect” does not imply impossibilities such as “immutability,” altering necessary truths, or knowing in advance the free choices of human beings: see below)

God’s primordial nature: God’s grasping all possibilities before they occur (see the Glossary in PR)

God’s consequent nature: God’s concrete feeling and sympathy and lure (“prehension”) of every creaturely feeling just after it occurs (see the Glossary in PR; compare the notion of “God’s body” in Hinduism and pantheism)

The principle of dual transcendence: God timelessly transcends the world in God’s primordial nature; God continually transcends God’s prior state (as all the events in the world and their prehension) in God’s consequent nature.

Hartshorne’s identification of principal errors in classical Western theology:

1. Immutability, whereas God changes as the world changes in God’s consequent nature.

2. Omnipotence (construed as God making everything that happens happen), whereas God is constrained metaphysically by freedom and chance.

3. Omniscience, whereas it is impossible for God to know future events that will be determined by free creaturely choices.

4. Unsympathetic goodness, whereas God empathizes most intimately with every creaturely feeling and lures it towards the good.