In What Sense is God Infinite?: A Process Perspective

IN WHAT SENSE IS GOD INFINITE? A PROCESS PERSPECTIVE PERHAPS THE MOST persistent objection classical theists raise against the process theism espoused by such thinkers as Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne is that it conceives God to be finite. This recurrent charge is assumed to characterize their positions fairly and to be a fatal hindrance to the entire enterprise. Many are deterred thereby from investigating this comtemporary alternative any further. Cornelio Fabro speaks of Whitehead's" return to the finitistic conception of God." 1 Insofar as this claim conceives his con1 God in Exile, trans. Arthur Gibson (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1968), p. 804. Fabro is not ordinarily a careless thinker, and has shown himself to be an eminent scholar of St. Thomas. Apparently he was the first to discover, in 1939, even before Etienne Gilson, the dynamic character of esse in the composition of esse and essence in the finite being. (See Helen James John, S. N. D., " The Emergence of the Act of Existing in Recent Thomism," International Philosophical Quarterly 2/4 (1962), 595-620, at 609.) Nevertheless he can close his discussion of Whitehead's theism with the following quotation described as an excerpt "from a Whitehead essay [which] brings out the Whiteheadian stand with special poignancy " (p. 835) : If you ask me what God is, I can only answer he is a being whose body is the whole world of nature, but that world conceived as actually possessing deity, and therefore he is not actual as existent but as an ideal, and only existent in so far as the tendency towards his distinctive character is existent in the actual world. God, you will say, is on this showing an ideal being, whose deity does not yet exist, but is the next quality due to emerge, and cannot therefore be known by us. He exists only in the striving of the world to realize his deity, and to help it as it were to the birth. Moreover, he is not a creator as in historical religions, but created. Now these words sound suspiciously like Samuel Alexander's, and so they are. Fasro quotes correctly from Science and ReUgion (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931), p. 136. In Fabro's bibliography, p. 1189, this book is erroneously ascribed to Whitehead, but it is a series of twelve radio talks given in Britain during December 1930 by such men as Alexander, Julian Huxley, J. S. Haldane, I LEWIS S. FORD cept of God to be exclusively, or even primarily finite, we think it is utterly unfounded. To be sure, Whitehead subjects the traditional notion as to how God is actually infinite to .severe criticism, but this need not entail the finitude of God as the only alternative. On the contrary, we wish to show that only Whitehead's conception of God can be appropriately described as "the infinite actuality." There is some initial historical plausibility in ascribing the notion of a " finite God " to Whitehead, for he can be seen as heir to the thinking of John Stuart Mill, William James, William Pepperell Montague, and Edgar S. Brightman, all of whom regard God in .some sense as finite. In his posthumous work, Three Essays on Religion (1874), Mill was troubled by the existence of evil in the world, and suggested that we should conceive of a limited deity faced with the independent existence of matter and force. James opposed the block-universe of absolute idealism, and advocated an appropriate alternative that we " be frankly pluralistic and assume that the superhuman consciousness, however vast it may be, has itself external environment , and consequently is finite." We should "accept, along with the superhuman consciousness, the notion that it is not all-embracing, the notion, in other words, that there is a God, but that he is finite, either in power or in knowledge, or in both at once." 2 Brightman criticized the unlimited expansion of the concept of God into an all-inclusive being, and postulated a restricting element within God as The Given, the source of evil which God constantly seeks to overcome.3 Within process theism itself, Charles Hartshorne's position is somewhat problematic. In Man's...