Charles Hartshorne
Persons as we know them are social, that is, they enjoy personal relations. A “personal God” suggests one who can respond to prayer. But we may distinguish two forms of response, local and cosmic. God, if a cosmic being, can “answer” one person’s prayer only as he simultaneously and without foolish bias takes account of other people’s prayers and of all cosmic needs. God may nonetheless respond to the universe with full regard to the individuals which actually compose it, and in this sense may enjoy personal relations (See omnipotence and perfection.)
Since a person is a conscious individual, an impersonal deity must lack either consciousness or individuality (or both). Both have been often denied to God, and for the same reason: that they imply limitations. To be conscious of something is to be subject confronted by object, determined by it, and with it constituting a whole greater than either subject or object alone. Again, to be an individual is to be one member of a class or species rather than another, is to be this while failing to be that, for example, here and now in space and time rather than there and then. Humans are individuated from one another, it is argued, by their defects and inabilities; but the being with all power and value must be being and value as such, “pure” being, rather than this or that being or personality in particular. It is also often said that God is not conscious or individual because he is super-conscious, super-personal. It may be doubted, however, if “super” has here any meaning; since value is an affair of valuation and enjoyment, and superior value can only be superior satisfaction for some valuer, and a “super-personal valuer” seems only verbally distinguished from a superior type of person.
The limitations inherent in “personality” are of two kinds, only one of which need apply to a personal God. (1) People are individuated partly by their localization in space-time, by the fact that they are parts of a larger whole, able to deal effectively with but a small portion of this whole. But suppose a being able to deal effectively with all portions of reality and in this sense non-localized. (2) Such a being would still have a kind of limitation, in that it would deal with reality as it is and not as it might be. Even the whole of actual reality is limited, by comparison with the logically possible; and the being who, in non-localized or universally efficacious fashion, deals with all actual things as actual, can yet deal with possible things only as possible, until they too have been actualized (and not all of them can be at once), and so he must lack whatever value would be found in dealing with these possible things as actual, should they become actual.
Our human individuality is that of parts of the cosmos; the divine individuality may be that of the cosmos itself as integrated into a single self-identical life. If the parts of the universe have individuality, the whole cannot be mere being in general. However, it may be asked if the whole has sufficient unity to be personal; for the individual is contrasted not only to the general but to the ununified or unintegrated. The universe has integrity at least in the sense that it is the only whole whose literal dissolution seems unthinkable. The pervasive laws of nature also suggest cosmic unity. If in us a precarious and imperfect integration of activities, easily disrupted, has for its internal reality a fitful and imperfect individual awareness, the seemingly inviolable integration of all cosmic activities into the grand pattern studied by science (a pattern which, as Fechner likes to insist, is omnipresent and unfailing) may mean a perfect consciousness.
Thus, on the one hand, one may argue from the cosmic body to the cosmic all-ordering mind. On the other, we have no analogy by which to conceive God as an individual mind or person unless we impute to him a body adequate to his cosmic functions. What but the cosmos itself could be such a body? True, the cosmic body has defects, since its parts have defects. However, the perfection of an integrated whole is in principle of a different order from the sum of the values of its parts. God cannot, in every sense, escape limitation and yet have a cosmic body (or a cosmic mind, in any sense that is humanly conceivable, even dimly); but he may very well escape our forms of (localizing) limitations, and thus may enjoy a unique kind of perfection, though not in every sense an, absolute one.
And though the cosmic body must inevitably bring tragedy into the life of God—for there is discord in the life of that body—this fact, so far from contradicting the religious perfection of God, may be its very expression. For it means that our tragedies are not matters of mere indifference to the perfectly loving being, nor yet matters of pure (and ethically monstrous) bliss, but of sympathetic sorrow tingeing the divine blessedness, though not overcoming it. (For this reason Whitehead speaks of the “heroic” character of God, and says that to impute mere happiness to him is a profanation.)
The purely absolute and wholly unlimited God of the main philosophical and theological tradition is scarcely to be termed personal, if words are to retain any meaning. The positing of the “persons” of the Trinity, even when combined with the doctrine of the Incarnation of one of the persons, seems not to remove the basic contradiction between individuality and the sheer absence of limitation. Since philosophy is now inclined to doubt the consistency of the traditional absolutism, regardless of whether or not this absolutism be combined with a personal view of God, and since the limitations inherent in personality as such are no more than are implied by the concept of the universe as an integral whole, the supposition that a more philosophical view of God is attained by sacrificing his personality is seen to have been an error.
Source
Vergilius Ferm, Editor, The Encyclopedia of Religion.
HyC