Charles Hartshorne
In the hundred years since Darwin was a young man, science has made immense advances. Its most fundamental conceptions have been altered and clarified. During this same period theology also has made advances, though of these the public has been less well informed. It has been found that the conception of God upon which, with all their quarrels over details, theologians used to agree, is not the only possible conception, nor even the best one, for either religious or philosophical purposes. There are, indeed, three and, from one point of view, only three chief ways of thinking about God.
The first is that God is in all respects perfect and complete. This means He cannot change, or grow, or in any way increase in value. Therefore nothing man can do can bring any additional values to God. In that case, what does it mean to talk of serving God? This is only one of the embarrassing questions which can be asked of this type of theology.
The second view of God is that he is perfect and complete in some respects, but not in all. For instance, he may be perfect in goodness, or in love; but not in happiness. Never changing in his righteousness, he might yet grow in joy as his creatures served him, and themselves grew in joy. Is it so strange to say that one who loves perfectly is yet made happier by the increasing welfare of those he loves? Would it not rather be very strange if God, who loves us, gained no new joy from our achievements and growth?
The third way of thinking about God is that he is not in any respect entirely perfect. It would follow that there is no way in which he could not change. This would deprive the idea of God of most of its value, for one could place no ultimate reliance upon a deity in every way subject to imperfection and alteration.
It is certain that God, if he is to be conceived at all, and if “perfect” means anything, must be supposed one of the three: perfect in all ways, perfect in some ways, or perfect in no way. If he is perfect in all ways, and if perfect means complete and incapable of enhancement, then the greatest saint can do no more for God than the worst sinner, for neither could possibly add to, or subtract from, what is always wholly perfect. And such a God could not love in a real sense, for to love is to find joy in the joy of others and sorrow in their sorrows, and thus to gain through their gains and lose (or at least, miss some possible value) through their losses, and the wholly perfect could neither gain nor lose. Hence, it could not love in a proper sense.
On the other hand, if God is perfect in no way, then he would scarcely deserve our worship, religion would have certainly overpraised him, and we could not rely upon him. Thus, only the second possibility is left, that God is perfect in love, but never-completed, ever growing (partly through our efforts) in the joy, the richness of his life, and this without end through all the infinite future.
Until recently no one, apparently, ever saw clearly that there are these three ways, and (apart from subdivisions of each) just these three, of conceiving God, and it is also only recently that the advantages of the second way over the first, or most usual, way as well as over the third, have been at all widely appreciated. This is as definite an advance in thought as anything we owe to Einstein or Darwin. It is a rather simple change, but so is the idea of evolution fairly simple. There is this difference, that the man in the street, or in the parlor listening to the radio, has a better chance of grasping the evidence upon which the new theological doctrine rests than he has of appreciating Darwin’s arguments, to say nothing of Einstein’s. Anyone can see that a purely perfect, complete, self-sufficient deity can have nothing to ask of us, for there is nothing we could give him. We might have things to ask of him, but even this would be senseless, for why should he think it mattered about us, since whatever happens to us his life contains all possible joy and value, and, therefore, existence as containing this sum of possible values would lack nothing if we did not even exist.
It is not surprising that men have reacted against this idea of God. Nor is it surprising that at first they went to the opposite extreme, and denied the existence of God (as in any way perfect) altogether. The human mind seems to have to work in this way. It begins by an over simplification, such as that God is simply and without qualification perfect. If this leads to difficulties, as it does, then the opposite simplification is tried: God—if there is any being worthy of the name—is wholly imperfect, there is no being who could, even with qualifications, be called perfect. Only at long last, does it dawn on men that the problem is not so simple, that the mere denial and the mere assertion of perfection may both be wrong, since the truth may lie in the combined assertion and denial of a perfect being according as perfection is taken in different sense.
To say God is perfect might be defined to mean that he is better than any individual other than himself. This would leave open the possibility that, though no individual who is not God can be better than he, still he himself might improve. Unsurpassable by others, he might yet surpass himself, might grow in value. To conceive God as capable of improvement in goodness shocks the religious sense, which feels that God could not possibly be more just or merciful than he is. In ethical quality and in wisdom and power, religion conceives God as already as perfect as anything could be.
But does religion assure us that God is equally incapable of improvement in happiness? How can this be if God loves us, and through love shares in our sorrows, and is grieved by our misfortunes and errors? But even here we may call God perfect, if we mean by this that he is not to be surpassed in happiness by any being other than himself. To say God can increase in happiness (and if he cannot, then there is no service we can render him) is not to say that any other individual is or could be happier than he, but only to say that he himself could be happier. In other words, if perfect means supreme among individuals, then God is in all respects perfect; but if perfect means incapable of growth or improvement, then only in goodness, wisdom, and power is God perfect.
Thus, we see how carefully perfection must be defined. And similar care must be exercised with respect to other conceptions commonly applied to God, such as that he is immutable, unchanging. In goodness he is for religion indeed ever the same, as he is in wisdom and power. But love is more than goodness, wisdom, and power, it is also happiness as partly arising from sympathy with the joys of others. This happiness will of course change with changes in the joys of others. But does not God see in advance all the joys that will ever exist? Is he not all-knowing? It has been shown that this argument, plausible as it is, is fallacious. For to know all that is, is not necessarily to know all future events; for the question is, do future events exist?
Is it not the essence of the future that it consists of what may or may not exist, that is, of what is unsettled, indefinite, undecided? If so, then God, who knows things as they are, will know future events only in their character as indefinite, or more or less problematic, nebulous, incomplete as to details. Thus, the very great discovery has been made (dating indeed from the fourteenth century, but neglected until recently) that omniscience does not mean the total absence of growth or change. What is now unsettled, both in itself and for God, may become settled, and as it does so he will acquire new content for his happiness as derived from sympathy with the creatures.
The old theology was a first approximation; like Newtonian science it was an oversimplification. All its conceptions are true, provided they are qualified as theologians have only recently learned to qualify them.
We live in a world in which brute force looms large. That may make it more difficult to believe in a divine, a perfect love; but it also makes it more important to do so. It is a strange [ate that has overtaken man during the last two thousand years. Having reached the sublime idea of divine perfection, he failed to see that it is impossible to be perfect in love without being other than absolutely perfect in enjoyment. For to love is to find joy in the joys of others, and sorrow in the sorrows of others, and thus to depend partly upon them for one’s joy and sorrow. And the ideal of love is so hard for men to understand that they forgot that the perfection of God is the perfection of love, and began to think of God as simply perfect in general; and so, without knowing it, they spoiled the conception of divine love.
Naturally, the result was that many men drifted away from any idea of God at all, and today millions can find no better ideal than that of arbitrary power. Fortunately for the world the root of the difficulty has been discovered. Great philosophers like Bergson and Whitehead, theologians like Tennant, James Ward, Pfleiderer, Macintosh, Calhoun, Berdyaev, and many others, have been clarifying the relations between love and perfection in God, and I believe that never again will it be possible for generation after generation of leaders of thought calmly to take it for granted that God must be conceived as motionless in pure perfection and self-sufficiency, incapable of receiving anything from man, or of being served by man in any real sense, incapable of anything that ever has been meant by love.
The idea that God’s power must be limited, imperfect, is not very new, but it is only recently that men have seen that it is God’s happiness, not his power, that must be less than “perfect” if the word means, “incapable of increase.” For it is possible to explain evil in the world through the free action of agents other than God, but no explanation can make sense out of the idea of a will which has purposes yet lacks nothing pleasurable which it might seek to attain, a mind which knows a changing world yet itself suffers no change, which knows free beings whose action is undetermined in advance yet knows determinately what those actions will be, a mind subject to no risks although its creatures act on their own responsibility and with limited wisdom, and though it loves these creatures, cares for their welfare, and hence must mentally share in their fortunes, good or bad.
A God both perfect and, in other ways, imperfect (save as perfection is defined, as was suggested above, to mean “surpassing all others”) can change, whereas a being wholly perfect could change neither for the better nor for the worse. The objection to a God in all ways imperfect would be that he could in all ways change, and hence might cease to be recognizable at all, might lose its individual identity altogether. The objection to a God in all ways perfect (in the old sense) would be that it could in no way change, and hence while it could not lose its identity, it also would not have any significant identity to lose. For we know individual identity as identity through change, and if change is simply omitted from our idea of God, nothing conceivable is left. A changeless being can have no purposes, for purposes refer to the future and the future is related to the present by change. A changeless being cannot love, for to love is to sympathize with, and through sympathy to share in, the changes occurring in the persons one loves.
Since perfection cannot change, and imperfection cannot be changeless, it follows that a God both perfect and imperfect will be unchanging in the ways in which he is perfect, and changing in the ways in which he is not perfect,. If, as religion says, God is perfect in goodness, wisdom, and power, then he is unchanging in these respects. Is this not what the Bible means when it says God is without shadow of turning? His goodness of purpose will never alter in the slightest. But where in the Bible are we told that God never becomes happier, from time time (sic)? We are not told so. What has religion to lose by the idea that God is made happier (though not more wise or good) by the successes of men; as well as grieved by their failures or wickedness? Surely religion has nothing to lose by this idea. Yet until recently nearly all the theologians in the world spoke of God as incapable of any kind of change, even change in his happiness?
Does it not make God more real to us to think of him as subject to change, as like us in having purposes for the future, memories of the past, and the power to receive additions to his happiness?
The memory of God is an inspiring idea. We say the past is gone. What does this mean? Where has it gone to? If the past were gone in the sense of now not existing at all, how could anything we say of it be true, for can a true statement be about what does not exist at all, that is, about nothing real? Surely, the landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth exists somehow in the universe, or when we speak of it we are merely talking about a dream. And it must exist now, for our statement is true now, and how can a relation be real when the thing it relates to is unreal?
Now memory is the way we experience the past as real in the present, to the extent of the memory. Our memory is so feeble that the events we remember are not fully preserved for us by the fact that we remember them. But the events we best remember are the ones most nearly preserved as still real. I can remember a certain wonderful moment so well that the beauty of it is almost fully embodied in the present by that memory. Now if God changes but has perfect knowledge, then all the past must still be before him without loss of any detail or quality in the present; that is, he must have perfect memory. From this memory no joy once attained anywhere in the world can ever be lost.
You may ask, “Must God not have perfect anticipation of the future also?” But I answer that anticipation is a different thing from memory, and what makes it different is that it does not even want to be perfect in the same sense as memory would like to be. Our relation to the past is purely that of a spectator. We can do nothing about the past, it has been what it has been, and no power can alter the fact that it has been so. But the future is what we are engaged in deciding, it is our sphere of choice and action. Therefore, it is not the function of anticipation to decide exactly what will happen; that function is for the will, the practical side of the mind. If you were to anticipate with certainty what your future decisions will be, you would have made these decisions already! The business of anticipation is to ascertain the limits of choice. You may have power to decide between saying “hello” and saying “howdy” when we meet, and if this is to be a genuine decision made at that moment neither you nor I will know in advance with certainty which you will say.
But we may either or both of us be able to anticipate, as at least probable, that you will address me in English, or that you will address me in French, if you do not know English. The role of anticipation is to narrow down the range of possibility in general, or of what is conceivably abstractly, to that group of possibilities whose realization is possible, not simply in general, but at some specified future date, and with a certain ~ degree of probability. Anticipation grades possibilities, so that action can take account of the most probable lines of action, and try to bring about the one that is most desirable.
Even God’s anticipation would have reference to action as ~ choice among probabilities. He would not see what “is to happen,” but the range of possible things among which what happens will be a selection. And he will see that a higher percentage of some kinds of things will happen than others, that is, he will see in terms of probabilities. This seems to be the only view of God’s knowledge that does not make human freedom impossible, or that does not destroy the religious idea of God as perfect in goodness and wisdom.
The view is also not an utter novelty. It was defended by Levi ben Gerson, in the fourteenth, and Socinus in the sixteenth century. It was, however, not to be expected that a Jew and an anti-Trinitarian could in those times secure favorable consideration for their doctrines. Today there is no reason why they should not be considered on their merits.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Reality As Social Process: Studies in Metaphysics and Religion, pp. 155-162.
HyC