“Where God Comes In” For Alfred North Whitehead

"WHERE GOD COMES IN " FOR ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD My INTENTION IN choosing the title of this study is to focus on the point of entry for the consideration of God within a philosophical scheme that is vastly more complicated than a simple natural theology. The original draft of the article had " Getting at God " in the title, but a little further reflection made me realize that these words suggest the possibility of reading Whitehead without getting at God. No one who has read him even cursorily needs an article to disabuse him of the idea that the relationship of God to the total Whiteheadian framework might be a matter of " maybe so, maybe not." Even the expression " to come in " has a ring of the extrinsic and fortuitous about it. The words do, however, convey something of the problem at issue if they are understood as asking why Whitehead invokes the notion of God within his theoretical analysis of human experience and possibly why he made that particular analysis. It should be clear, then, that I am not primarily concerned with the particular notion of God formulated by him, although it must also be clear that we cannot speak of the reasons for the notion uberhaupt without involving ourselves broadly with the conceptual and imaginative content of that notion. The reader of this article might expect it to begin with an analysis of the argument found in chapters X and XI of Science and the Modern World since it is there that Whitehead comes closest to giving a formal proof for the necessity of his God. In fact, however, I am convinced that the point of entry for the notion of God in his system lies elsewhere. I prefer to begin with his understanding of what it means to philosophize. The rationale for this beginning should become apparent as I proceed. In his later writings Whitehead often refers to the 98 " WHERE GOD COMES IN " 99 task and method of philosophy, and the character of the references is sufficiently varied and unsystematic to demand an endeavor towards the clarification of their meaning and relationship . With these later works he largely equates philosophy with speculative philosophy, or metaphysics-although his frequent use of the adjective " speculative" would indicate that he is sensitive to the wider scope of the simple term philosophy. Throughout the following paragraphs, though, I shall let the general equation of philosophy with speculative philosophy stand.1 Whitehead sketches a definition in Adventures of Ideas. Speculative Philosophy can be defined as the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.2 The same interest in such a " coherent, logical, necessary system " in the light of which we might interpret our experience and criticize the foundations of all the sciences appears again and again from Science and the Modern World through Modes of Thought. A philosopher, for Whitehead, must be a rationalist who will push explanation to its ultimate limits and who will leave no proposition safe from rational challenge.3 He is concerned to formulate the " ultimate generalities," and yet his method must be at the same time descriptive and tentative inasmuch as the generalities are a response to the experience of the philosopher and his fellows and a response that cannot close off the possibility of alternate responses.4 To the extent that Whitehead's "rationalizing" philosopher articulates a system of strictly descriptive generalities he avoids 1 It is not easy to say what non-speculative philosophy would be like for Whitehead since even the earlier, less ambitious projects, such as An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (Cambridge, 1919) and The Concept of Nature (Cambridge, 1920), have the marks he would attribute to speculative philosophy. 2 Adventures in Ideas (New York, 1963), p. 285. 3 See ibid., immediately above the preceding quotation; Science and the Modern World (New York, 1948), pp. 18, 142; Process and Reality (New York, 1957), pp. 12, 232; Modes of Thought (New York, 1938), p. 237. 4 See Process and Reality, pp. 6, 12, 19. 100 MICHAL J. KERLIN the charge of laboring in abstraction from the...