The Philosophical Approach to God: A New Thomistic Perspective, 2nd Edition

Is God Creator of the Universe? Whitehead’s Position

Is God Creator of the Universe? Whitehead’s Position God is not, in the original Whiteheadian system, the Creator of the universe out of nothing—i.e., out of no pre-existing material or subject.4 The universe is an ongoing system which has always been and always will be. God does indeed play an indispensable role in this world system, in four ways: (1) as source of the ‘‘eternal objects,’’ the possible intelligible forms or structures which He holds eternally in His mind and presents at the appropriate time for integration by the momentary ‘‘actual occasions’’ or events (also called ‘‘actual entities’’), which alone are real agents outside God Himself; (2) as providing the initial ‘‘subjective aim’’ or ideal goal of each newly arising actual occasion; (3) as providentially guiding the universe toward the greatest possible realizable value, not by determining or coercing creatures through efficient causality, but by ‘‘luring’’ them with the persuasive power of the good; 93 94 The Philosophical Approach to God (4) as eternally preserving in His memory the objectified values achieved by the successively perishing actual entities. But God is not the ultimate source of the very being of the universe, or even, it seems, of its universal built-in character of self-creativity, for two reasons. In the first place, God’s activity always presupposes the universe as somehow already present, at least in inchoate form, as subject of His action, as something He can lure to the good by presenting form and goal, but of which He is not the ultimate source and hence over which He does not possess absolute control. The situation is close to that of the Platonic Demiurge, which injects forms into pre-existing chaotic matter and which Whitehead explicitly recalls as his basic model. Thus he excludes any theory of the absolute beginning of the universe or of any one ultimate source for all reality. A few texts from Whitehead himself will make this clear: There is another point in which the organic philosophy [Whitehead’s] only repeats Plato. In the Timaeus, the origin of the present cosmic epoch is traced back to an aboriginal disorder, chaotic according to our ideals. This is the evolutionary doctrine of the philosophy of organism. Plato’s notion has puzzled critics who are obsessed with the Semitic notion of a wholly transcendent God creating out of nothing an accidental universe . . . it is necessary to remind ourselves that this is not the way the world has been described by some of the greatest intellects. Both for Plato and Aristotle the process of the actual world has been conceived as a real incoming of forms into real potentiality , issuing into that real togetherness which is an actual Is God Creator of the Universe? Whitehead’s Position 95 thing. Also, for the Timaeus, the creation of the world is the incoming of a type of order establishing a cosmic epoch. It is not the beginning of matter of fact, but the incoming of a certain type of social order5 . . . the doctrine of an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys, is the fallacy which has infused tragedy into the histories of Christianity and Mahometanism.6 Because God gives the initial subjective aim to each new actual occasion, God can be termed the creator of each temporal actual entity. But the phrase is apt to be misleading by its suggestion that the ultimate creativity of the universe is to be ascribed to God’s volition. The true metaphysical position is that God is the aboriginal condition which qualifies its action. . . . But of course there is no meaning to ‘‘creativity’’ apart from its ‘‘creatures,’’ and no meaning to ‘‘God’’ apart from the creativity and the ‘‘temporal creatures,’’ and no meaning to the temporal creatures apart from ‘‘creativity’’ and ‘‘God.’’7 Elsewhere Whitehead adds that we should not pay God the dubious ‘‘metaphysical compliment’’ of being ‘‘the foundation for the metaphysical situation with its ultimate activity .’’ For if this were the case, ‘‘there can be no alternative except to discern in Him the origin of all evil as well as of all good. He is then the supreme author of the play, and to Him must therefore be ascribed its shortcomings as well as its successes.’’8 Thus God is not the ultimate initiator of the cosmic drama with all...