A Natural Theology for Our Time

by Charles Hartshorne

Book by Hartshorne, Charles

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Religion

145 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE PROCESS PHILOSOPHER SUGGESTS THAT NATURAL THEOLOGY IS STILL AN “OPEN” ISSUE

Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) was an American philosopher who taught philosophy at the University of Chicago, Emory University, and lastly the University of Texas. He is perhaps best remembered for his development of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy into a form of theology.

He wrote in the Preface to this 1967 book, “A new day seems to be dawning in religious thought, which for several centuries had been struggling to free itself from the intellectual chains in which Aristotelian and … Platonic or neo-Platonic influences have long held it confined… The philosophical ‘absolute’… can no longer pose unchallenged as the Worshipful one of religion. At the same time, it begins to appear that the God of religion is in a sense more absolute than most philosophers have been prepared to admit, or most theologians to claim… The possibility of natural theology, or a theory of divinity appealing to ‘natural reason’… is often said to have been thoroughly discredited by Hume and Kant. I do not share this trust in the ability of these men… to settle for us… the relations of theoretical reason to revelation… first principles are being reconsidered today, in natural science, logic, mathematics---and theology. Had they not better be reconsidered in philosophy of religion also?... The question of rational or natural theology, I hold, is open, not closed.”

He states in the first chapter, “If worship is to be definitive of deity, it must be worship as more than a mere fact of terrestrial human culture… Worship is the INTEGRATING of all one’s thoughts and purposes, all valuations and meanings, all perceptions and conceptions… Thus one element of worship is present without worship, unity of response. The added element is consciousness: worship is a consciously unitary response to life. It lifts to the level of explicit awareness the integrity of an individual responding to reality. Or, worship is individual wholes flooded with consciousness. This is the ideal toward which actual worship may lead… The more consciousness, the more completely the idea of worship can be realized. Those who pride themselves on transcending worship may only be falling back to a more primitive level.” (Pg. 4-5)

He continues, “there are two possible theories of worship, the theistic and the nontheistic. According to the former, the conscious wholeness of the individual is correlative to an inclusive wholeness in the world of which the individual is aware, and this wholeness is deity. According to the nontheistic view, there is no inclusive wholes, or if there is one, it is not what religions have meant by deity. Perhaps it is just The Unknown… not to be thought of as conscious, or as an individual… Perhaps it is even Humanity. Or … it is all sentient creatures. My view I shall put bluntly. It is the lower animals for whom the Whole must be simply Unknown, sheer Mystery, and their own species practically that that has value.” (Pg. 5-6)

He suggests, “There is another way, besides using the ideas of all-inclusiveness and universal love, to define the One Who is Worshipped. This third way was Anselm’s discovery… God is the not conceivably surpassable being. For, if God could be surpassed by a greater or better, should we not worship the one who would surpass him…? Also, in merely thinking about the better possible being our interest would go beyond God to something else, and we should not be able to obey the Great Commandment of total devotion to the One Being.” (Pg. 17-18)

He outlines, “In what kind of philosophy is the religious idea of God most at home? (1) It must be a philosophy in which becoming is not considered inferior to being… (2) It must be a philosophy which avoids declaring all individual existence to be contingent. For God, to be unsurpassable by others, must exist necessarily… (3) A theistic philosophy must be in some sense indeterministic. It must admit… that process is creative of novelty that is not definitely implicit in the antecedent situation… (4) A theistic philosophy must take ‘create’ or ‘creator’ as a universal category, rather than as applicable to God alone… (5) A theistic philosophy must have a theory of internal relations and also a theory of external relations… Both types of relations are provided for by Whitehead’s theory of ‘prehensions’ and the two ‘natures’ of God.” (Pg. 25-27)

He notes, “This is exactly the point of theism: that the ultimate principle is individual, not a mere or universal form, pattern system, matter, or force---or that, conversely, the ultimate individual is strictly universal in its scope or relevance. A human individual is not the very principle of existence; of course not, for he is not the Unsurpassable, he is not God. But a mere universal, even ‘being’ or ‘reality’ simply as universal, also cannot be God, who must be the most individual of universals, the most universal of individuals.” (Pg. 36)

He observes, “Our ancestors were afflicted with a subtle egoism. They wanted to serve God everlastingly, with the understanding that he also would serve them everlastingly… However… they were really saying that while God would everlastingly serve them, they could do nothing for him, since he is immune to gifts… So, in effect, God serves his creatures forever; they do not, in any intelligible sense, serve him… My proposal is that we should serve God for our time, rather than forever, and should trust him in a suitable sense to serve us also for our time.” (Pg. 55)

He argues, “To the question, ‘Why then the partial disorder and evils in the world?’ a creationist philosophy has essentially but one answer. It holds that it is not God alone who acts in the world; every individual acts. There is no single producer of the actual series of events; [God], to be sure, is uniquely universal, unsurpassably influential. Nevertheless, what happens is in no case the product of his creative acts alone. Countless choices, including the universally influential choices, intersect to make a world, and how, concretely, they intersect is not chosen by anyone, nor could it be. A multiplicity of choosers means that what concretely happens is never simply chosen; rather, it just happens… Concrete evils and goods simply happen, they are never in their full particularity chosen. Hence to ask, ‘Why did God choose to inflict this or that evil upon us?’ is to ask a pseud-question.” (Pg. 58-59)

He asserts, “[God] is not merely another topic to think about, but the all-pervasive medium of knowledge and things known, to recognize whom is a way of thinking about no matter what. The question remains, is it a significant, coherent way of thinking about no matter what? That alone is the question. If the central issue of natural theology were a scientific one, it would be conceivable that observational or contingent facts might justify a negative decision. But any god with whom facts could conflict is an idol, a fetish, correlative to idolatry, not to genuine worship.” (Pg. 79)

He says, “either God is incapable of sheer idleness, or not creating, in which case it is no contingent fact that there is something creaturely but an a priori necessity; or, if he is capable of sheer idleness, then he can and would exist even were there not anything worldly. Take it either way, his existence depends upon no empirical fact… In no case can a sheer necessity obtain because one contingent alternative rather than another is realized. The precritical Kant saw and said this clearly, but in the heat of his critical arguments he partly lost sight of its importance.” (Pg. 84-85)

He points out, “The cosmic laws either have no explanation at all, and are sheer brute facts, or they are explicable as the decisions of a cosmic mind, which never sleeps, and which gives rise to the basic habits of nature. True, the cosmic consciousness must be sensitive to, or in detail dependent upon, the processes of nature. But only for inessential details, not for its essential identity or existence, this being noncontingent, or without alternative. Thus the dependence of God upon the world is superficial, while that of the world upon God is profound.” (Pg. 100)

He contends, “all arguments for personal immortality… seem to me fallacious; and I include ethical and religious arguments… Of course, too, ‘soul,’ life or mind, AS SUCH is immortal, for it is the principle of all reality and unreality, all motion and all permanence. Also one Eminent Life or Mind is deathless and unborn.” (Pg. 107)

He notes, “The question of the legendary bright child, ‘Who made God?’ has an answer. God in his concrete de facto state is in one sense simply self-made, like every creature spontaneously springing into being as something more than any causal antecedents could definitely imply. In another sense, or causally speaking, God, in his latest concrete state, is jointly ‘made’ or produced by God and the world in the prior states of each. We are not simply co-creators, with God, of the world, but in the last analysis co-creators, with him, or himself.” (Pg. 113)

He suggests, “The entire ancient world produced no clear alternative to the monopoly notion of unsurpassable power. However, in our time there is an alternative. It is the view that supreme creativity implies lesser forms of creativity, and that the supreme form sets limits to the chance elements introduced by the lesser forms, but does not and could not eliminate all such elements. Perhaps there is no WHY God sends us evils since he does not send them at all. Rather he establishes an order in which creatures can send each other particular goods and evils.” (Pg. 120)

He concludes, “If natural theology can simultaneously avoid both the abstract and the concrete forms of idolatry, and also avoid the absurd attempt exalt the supreme creativity by treating ordinary creativity as nothing, it may be expected to have a new vitality and a new power to deal with its critics. Plato said that there had always been atheists. Perhaps there always will be some in civilized societies. But perhaps also we know at last how rationally to answer them.” (Pg. 124-125)

Those interested in the philosophy of religion, in process philosophy/theology, or contemporary theology in general will be greatly interested in this book.

[Johnny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Hartshorne was the University of Chicago professor who most developed the implications of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy for its theistic implications. He influenced one of the most prolific contributors to the process theology movement, John B. Cobb, Jr., one of his students. A Natural Theology for Our Time takes to task the classical proofs of theism and demonstrates how a more Whiteheadian perspective could be more integral to the logical extensions of those arguments. He essentially calls Immanuel Kant the academic equivalent of a moron as he demonstrates the attractiveness of the arguments understood using a process premise.

Process philosophy, of course, is the idea that everything, including the possibility of God, changes. Classical theology objects because the classical idea of perfection presumes that change denotes weakness or imperfection. Hartshorne argues that while the unsurpassability of God means, by definition, not being able to be surpassed by another but “…the converse deduction, of the absolute maximum from unsurpassability from another must be unsurpassable by self as well. And this assumption is not self-evident. …’Greatest possible number’ is grammatical, but it is sheer nonsense if it means ‘greatest finite number’; it is also, according to some mathematicians; …” (pp. 19-20) Therefore, the classic arguments for theism created, according to Hartshorne, an immediate fault line due to attempting to define the infinite in terms of the finite.

Hartshorne takes several shots at those who presume pure materialism. He illustrates by suggesting that proposition P entails Q. So, if one accepts P, one must either accept Q or reconsider P. (p. 30) Then, he goes on to argue the reasonableness of his theism by stating: “I should not have been a theist all these years had I not found the P’s which I take to entail this Q to be such that their denial is for me much more clearly counterintuitive than the simple rejection of Q.” (pp. 30-31) To elaborate, he says, “…God, being the sole necessarily existing individual, could not possibly be disconfirmed by a contingent fact; and so in the useful or distinctive sense his existence is not empirical.” (pp. 67-68)

More specifically, he states: “The old notion that ‘in infinite time atoms would be chance fall into all possible arrangements’ was a naïve begging of the question. To talk of this or that set of atoms is to talk of a kind of order, not to explain that kind. The mere existence of atoms with definite character, maintaining themselves through time and relative to one another, is already a tremendous order. Materialism in principle refuses to take order as a problem.” (p. 57) He goes on to say, “If the individuality of God could be specified empirically only, the existence of God could be no more than an empirical or contingent fact. God would then be a mere creature, something which might never have existed, rather than the uncreated creator, presupposition of existence and non-existence.” (p. 69) Rather than ascribing the absolute perfection of all things to God, Hartshorne emphasizes the capacity of God (using what I would call voluntary self-limitation) to interact with all things/creatures which exist while having “…the potential possession of all possible value.” (p. 71)

This is important to Hartshorne’s argument (and fits my self-limitation motif) when he says, “Actualization is the acceptance of limitation; it requires choice among incompatible values; …” and goes on to explain, “It requires that God’s potentiality, what he could be, must be as wide as the absolute infinity of logically possible values….” (p. 74). Such a conception of God’s fullness provides a beachhead for understanding how “free will” can interact with God Who holds all possibility in his metaphorical (but functional) grasp. “Either God is lord over possibility as well as actuality, or he is bare nothing, mere conceptual confusion.” (p. 78)

Of course, theodicy (the problem of the existence of evil) is one of the first objections leveled against theism. Hartshorne hints at his approach to the problem by observing, “Any evil has some value from some perspective, for even to know it exists is to make it contributory to a good, knowledge itself being a good.” (p. 80) He doesn’t stop there, however, recognizing that there are particular evils which seem to have no value and suggests that it is unproductive to attempt to solve the problem of individual evils. He doesn’t really have an answer to particular evil, but he returns to the observation, “…the price of a guaranteed absence of evil would be the equally guaranteed absence of good.” (p. 81) From there, he posits the traditional free-will defense built on God working through potentially existing realities and noting the necessity of a contrast to have meaning. And as for potential conflict between Theism and Science, Hartshorne memorably quips: “We may be afraid of chance, but God need not be afraid of even that.” (p. 92)

To be sure, Hartshorne understands that his contention that God interacts with all creatures and, in one sense, the analogy would be that we are all like nerve cells in the brain of God (p. 98). Yet, he warns of the tendency to extrapolate this too far and end up with self-deification (such as in the Eastern Religions and the New Age approaches to religion—p. 103). My divergence from Hartshorne is largely in his closed mind toward any form of life after death (see p. 57 and p. 107) As an alternative, Hartshorne states: “We are ephemeral, but immortally so, for nothing escapes being woven into the imperishable and living texture of deity.” (p. 111) This comes too close to “absorption” to me, though Hartshorne protests that this is an oversimplification.

A Natural Theology for Our Time is stimulating and this is the second time I’ve read it completely. To be honest, I’m not fully convinced, but every time I read it, I become convinced that my theism is both justified and more complex that those who claim to be purely materialist could ever conceive.

[Tylor Lovins · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book Charles Hartshorne develops his idea of God. Most of his writings took place in the era of positivism, so most of his thought is oriented toward answering their criticisms (such as that the idea of God has not intellectual or meaningful import). His idea of God gets its intelligibility from the intuition that God is not the greatest conceivable being as has been classically conceived (Hartshorne criticizes this notion as being similarly erroneous to the notion of a largest number) but is "unsurpassable." Harsthorne says that this notion of "unsurpassable" is the meaning of "worthy of worship," where there can only be one being worthy of worship.

In this work, at least, Hartshorne's development of the concept of God doesn't use Whitehead's metaphysics as much as I thought it would. His central idea is that God is unsurpassable, and so he doesn't really need Whitehead's stuff to apply this not only to God having an unsurpassable awareness (and therefore knowledge) but also unsurpassable in love, etc. I think it's a great resource if one is developing the idea of God strictly from a logical perspective--showing that the concept is intelligible without as much as a metaphysical scheme.