Charles Hartshorne
In what sense, granted evolution, can God be called Creator? Charles Kingsley, an English clergyman, beautifully puts it thus, in formulating the divine procedure: “I make things make themselves.” Only so does a good parent, a good God, proceed. For the parent, or God, to do simply all the making is to leave no genuine function for the children to perform. Language supports this. We say that we “make” decisions, resolutions, or attempts, implying that God is not the unilateral maker or decider of literally everything. So the Socinians thought without quite saying it; so Lequier and Fechner thought, and they virtually did say it. Finally, Whitehead said it. And I believed it before his saying it, as my 1923 dissertation shows.
It is no mere accident that the linguistic analysts, influenced by Wittgenstein, have not noted the testimony of common speech in this matter. For their consideration of the “ordinary language” test has been applied selectively, under prejudices not altogether impossible to discern. We, finally, and not God, make decisions (mostly unconsciously) as to details of the lives of ourselves and our fellows. And so (according to the neoclassical view) do all creatures, though in still less conscious fashion in most of the natural kinds.
Does our making presuppose antecedently existing matter, while God’s does not but is “from nothing”? I ask, in reply, “In making me did God use my parents or was I made simply from nothing?” I believe we can safely await an answer to this; for any answer will show the difficulty that classical theism faced. If my parents were not causally required for my existence, then we know nothing of the meaning of “cause.” And if they were, then clearly I was not made from nothing. Our only knowledge of causation and of making is from the way what happens influences what happens next. True, we have an intuition of ourselves thinking—that is, ‘making’—our thoughts or feeling our feelings, where the selves in question are simultaneous with the thinking or feeling. But if, analogically speaking, God’s causing or making of the world is similar, then the world just is God’s thinking, and surely that is not the intended meaning.
Recall once more the analogy with magic. God said, “Let there be light” and there was light. “Let there be . . . ,” and it was so. “Let there be . . . ,” and it was so. I have no quarrel with these verses from Genesis, but I deny that literalists understand their function. At the climax of the Book of Job (an inquiry into the ways of providence) we are told that a human being cannot understand God’s creative power. Since we cannot understand it, neither science nor philosophy can make use of the idea to justify definite conclusions.
The origin of creation science is neither science nor philosophy. Nor is it intellectually responsible theology. Rather, it is poetry, and its function is to communicate feeling and express an attitude. God beheld what he had created and “saw that it was good.” Somehow in response to divine decisions a good world order was coming into being. That it was coming into being preceded only by God, or by God and nothing, is not definitely asserted and, in view of the rebuke to Job, is not in order. We do not, in biblical terms, know how, or just with what, or without what, the creating is done. This is all beside the religious point, which is the reality of God as somehow voluntarily producing the basic world order and the essential goodness of the result. Also significant is the way God observes that result and only then “sees that it is good.” According to classical theism, God first, or eternally, knows exactly what is to result and how good it will be; and the actuality is merely the planned good over again with no additional determinations. I regard this as a bad interpretation of the biblical account.
Creation Neither Out of Nothing Nor Out of Matter
What divine creation of a particular world order presupposes is neither a preexistent matter nor nothing at all. It is not matter; for that is a label for what, in the psychicalist view, is really an extremely elementary form of creaturely mind in the form of feeling, in huge numbers of momentary flashes with no conscious knowledge of individual identity through change. It is feeling uncomplicated by what Shakespeare once called “the pale cast of thought.” In this sense it is unconscious, but not insentient. Creation’s presupposition is not nothing; for there are difficulties with the idea of an absolute beginning of the creative process. There is no religious need for such a beginning, which limits God’s productivity to a merely finite stretch of past results. This is not the only way in which the tradition, while talking much of the divine infinity, unduly finitized deity. The Buddhists wrote about a past of billions of billions of years, or an even huger number, while Europe talked about a mere several thousand years of past creating by deity. How childish this must seem to Buddhists, as it does to scientists!
Classical theism attempted to harmonize Greek philosophical and Judaic religious views. It is still desirable to search for harmony between the two traditions, but we need to use our additional resources in science, philosophy, and historical scholarship, including our vastly increased knowledge of the history of religions.
Taking Genesis and the Book of Job together, we may say that the biblical view was that the divine creativity is a highly mysterious matter. One may think of it by analogy with primitive magic, a notoriously superstitious affair. One may simply say that no humanly accessible analogy helps, that we just cannot have any rational theory at all here. This seems to be the message of Job. But that book had as author and (for all we know) intended readers only people whose culture was radically different from ours. It was prescientific and prephilosophical—as we, since the Greeks, have known philosophizing. So perhaps the veto on trying to theorize theologically need not without qualification apply to us. In fact, as some scientist has pointed out, part of the evidence by which the voice from the whirlwind convicts Job of inability to comprehend God’s creating or ruling the world no longer applies. Science has thrown considerable light, for instance, on how animals manage to feed themselves or nourish their young. And we can lift leviathan out of the sea, even if not exactly with a fish hook. Above all, it is a thousand years too late to imply that, although God made human beings in the divine image, endowed with the ability to have definite (even though more or less abstract) thoughts about “all time and all existence” (as there is no ground for supposing even apes or porpoises can do), yet we are not to use our thinking capacity freely in seeking to learn about nature but must give absolute priority to the literal words of a book expressing thoughts that, it is only sensible to believe, were the thoughts of some remote human predecessors. And we are to have laws passed to impose this way (or at best to penalize a contrary way) of proceeding upon many who utterly reject the theory on which it is based. (The matter is—as Milton Friedman points out—gravely complicated by our primary reliance upon compulsion and governmental control in education. In so many ways we have feared to accept freedom as a guiding principle of life.)
Medieval thinkers went far beyond (or perhaps fell behind) biblical conceptions, using their understanding of Greek ideas. They thought they knew better than the naive writers of scripture what concepts do and what do not literally apply to deity. They were not fundamentalists in the current sense. However, if there is any consensus at all in scientific or philosophical—or even theological—circles in the matter, it is that the “medieval synthesis” was no permanent solution of the ultimate problems. It was pseudo-biblical and pseudo-Greek. If we make our own fresh try at the job, we may well partly fail too. But we need not be, as the Schoolmen were, Platonic yet largely lacking in much of the best of Plato’s insight; Aristotelian yet lacking some of that thinker’s most carefully worked-out ideas; Christian yet contradicting any natural interpretation of the heavenly parent of the Gospels and the Old Testament idea of the merciful Holy One.
In the Bible, God is just not an unmoved “pure actuality,” in purely eternal fashion planning the very details of worldly existence. According to Genesis, the initial creative action took time—six “days,” was it? At each stage God received new impressions of the goodness of the result. And then, as human beings came on the scene, God soon saw something not entirely good in the result and acted accordingly. Thus the God-world relations were not pictured as merely instantaneous but as a progressive and in some sense time-like succession. And there was action and reaction between Creator and creatures. There was the Covenant between God and Israel. The whole thing was a social transaction. Even the relations of God to “inanimate nature” seemed to take this form. The sea obeyed the injunction “thus far and no farther.” The sun, “rejoicing as a giant to run his course,” was no mere lump of dead matter. Since we now have a philosophy in which the social structure, fully generalized, is the structure of reality, we have less need than the Church Fathers had to explain away the social cast of biblical language. And we also have a philosophy (and science) in which creative becoming is taken as at least much more pervasive and more nearly ultimate than was possible with the overestimation of fixity and mere being which characterized Greek and medieval thought. So in that way too we can come closer than the Scholastics to agreeing with those naive scriptural writers above spoken of. Doubtless they were in some ways naive; but also, doubtless the Schoolmen had their own somewhat different form of ignorance or prejudice. We might do better than either group of predecessors, we who also are images of deity.
Classical theology paid insufficient attention, in reading Plato, not only to the mind-body analogy for God and the world, but also to the doctrine that the soul (any soul) is self-moved and that soul in its various forms is the explanation of all motion or change. Human or animal souls move themselves and their bodies, God moves God and all actualities, without fully determining any. Aristotle rejected the soul’s self-motion and attributed change to matter in combination with mind. So his God, who (or which, for it is not a person) is wholly nonmaterial, is changeless and entirely uninfluenced by, as well as—and this was a consistent consequence—unaware of, the changes and accidental details of the world.
Aristotle was perhaps the first to state the intuitively satisfying principles: what comes to be is contingent (becoming produces genuine novelty and is in principle not wholly predetermined or preprogrammed); but what is without ever becoming is noncontingent, could not possibly not have been. It follows that in sheer eternity there is no freedom, but in becoming there is some freedom. But, while making this splendid contribution, Aristotle, by dropping Plato’s insights about the World Soul, the cosmos as divine body, and the partially temporal nature of the World Soul, was unable to anticipate, as Plato did anticipate, the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic view of God as aware of the individual creatures. Aquinas and the other Schoolmen combined Aristotle’s neglect of a not-wholly-immutable World Soul with the Platonic contention of God’s knowledge of the creatures, thus losing Plato’s consistency in asserting, and Aristotle’s partial consistency in denying, God’s knowledge of concrete, contingent reality. It was mediocre Platonism and mediocre Aristotelianism. And it was a biblical heresy.
It is true that the mind-body analogy does not immediately and in any very simple way show God can be the highest (though not the sole) creative power, the highest (though not the sole) decision maker. For although, by the Sperry psycho-physiological principle, the infant soul (or the infant experiencing) does begin to influence the becoming of the nerve cells—and less directly that of the other bodily cells—the early stages of the embryonic development must proceed without any infant psyche; for prior to the development of a nervous system there is no reason to attribute any such thing to the embryo. All that the facts indicate is cells multiplying and differentiating. The differentiations are in principle explained by the fact that different positions in the embryo expose cells to differing stimuli. The German biologist Driesch argued for a holistic entity directing cellular development, which he called an entelechy, but this has not proved a fruitful idea scientifically. And, in ordinary plants, which never do develop a nervous system, it is the cells that, to a botanist, explain growth, not something corresponding to the plant as a whole. A tree is a cell colony, not a single individual with integration comparable to that of each of its cells; as Whitehead put it, “a tree is a democracy.” Its cells may have souls as little monarchs of their molecules, but probably not the tree a soul as monarch of its cells. So much for Aristotle’s vegetable soul. It is not enough to say that he did not know about cells. Knowing nothing of the fact of cells, he implicitly denied them, just as in his male-favoring genetic theory he denied eggs to female human beings. I think a philosopher should know when he does not know, and avoid, better than this powerful mind did, implicit denials of things of whose existence or nonexistence he knows nothing.
As Soul of the cosmic body, God does not, like the infant, come to be out of a previous world state not involving Him-Her. Any stage of the cosmic body grew out of a previous stage already divinely besouled. This is the uttermost application of the analogy, the all-inclusive one. If the infant is slightly creative of its bodily cells after a certain stage in its body’s development, God has already been and must always be, not slightly but supremely creative of the cells in the divine body, including you and me as such cells. Whitehead calls his view a “cell theory of reality” but never took the Platonic step of conceiving the cosmos as supreme body. I hold that in this he fell a little below Plato. The divine analogy to the human fails unless the mind-body relation applies on both sides to God. The human soul as disembodied is hopelessly unclear or false. A merely disembodied God is an unfounded idea. There is this much truth in naturalistic materialism. What we should be simply without bodies is gibberish. The great letter writer Paul knew that, so he posited a “heavenly body.”
It may appear that the phrase “supremely creative,” not only of recent stages of the worldly process but of all its predecessors, is not enough to make God the “creator of all things, visible and invisible.” My proposition is simply that it is enough, provided you admit that the singular, concrete entities created are to have freedom, to be to some extent self-decided—”self-moved,” as Plato put it. For then, as Kingsley said, what God does is to make things partly make themselves. Adam sinned: this was his decision, not God’s. Indeed, the serpent’s tempting of Adam was the serpent’s decision, not God’s. Job’s torturers’ acts, and even Satan’s instigating of them, were not executions of divine decisions. God told Satan what not to do, but gave no positive command, or even definite suggestion. The “sovereignty” of God is not, I suggest, a very biblical idea, especially if one has a low opinion of the respect of sovereigns for the freedom of their subjects.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, pp. 73-80.