Preface to Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism
Charles Hartshorne
To the mountainous — I had almost said, monstrous — mass of writings devoted to “philosophical theology,” what can there be to add? I answer simply, if without apparent modesty, there is exactitude, logical rigor. Beyond question, of those who have dealt with the problem of God, some, including both theists and atheists, have possessed abundant capacity for rigorous analysis. But many causes have prevented them from making full use of this capacity in their treatment of theism. Such causes include the state of logic in general at the time when they were writing, the belief that the main logical outlines of the problem had already been discovered by great, not to mention saintly, predecessors, or the belief that theism is too essentially irrational to deserve or require more than hasty analysis. The purpose of this book is to show that and how the question, Is there a supreme, or in any sense perfect, being, a God? can be answered by secular or philosophic reason operating according to strict canons of procedure. It is all too likely, if not beyond doubt, that I too have deviated at times from these canons. But it may not seem altogether surprising that one who has by chance been rather intimately associated, as pupil, colleague, or editor, with several of the most competent logicians that ever lived, including C. I. Lewis, H. M. Sheffer, A. N. Whitehead, Charles Peirce, should find his thought about the problem which has preoccupied him for twenty-five years falling more and more into sharply logical patterns. If there is any use for logic in reflection upon the religious object, there should be some value in these patterns (and perhaps in others which have not yet occurred to anyone).
The conclusion at which this book arrives, in harmony with a rather widespread belief of recent times, is that secular knowledge supports the religious idea of God if, and only if, by religion is meant something quite distinct from, and partly incompatible with, what has passed as orthodox theology. It is coming to be seen that the meaning which “God” had for the prophets and their most sensitive followers is philosophically more defensible than the definitions of the term which (until recently and with inconspicuous exceptions) were given by theological and philosophical technicians, even when they were also religious men. In other words, religious people have held philosophically justifiable beliefs about God thanks rather to their religious superiority than to their scientific or philosophical skill — somewhat as, before the discovery of vitamins, common practice was a better guide to some aspects of dietetics than was physiological chemistry. Theology appears now to have reached the vitamin stage; it now sees in precise technical terms what was somehow felt to be true all along — a secret told to babes and withheld from the wise and understanding.
Not religion alone, but philosophy as well, is concerned in this result. All the great philosophical systems do something about the problem of God, but only some of the most recent show accurate grasp of the religious idea which is the historical source of the problem. Of late the partly irreligious character of the traditional theologico-philosophical concept of God has been recognized by a number of writers. What has still to be realized, I think, is the philosophical power inherent in the truly religious conception. When we compare Aquinas or Spinoza with James or Bergson, it may perhaps seem that new trends in philosophical theology are relatively weak in logical cogency, in philosophical power. Also, it may seem to many that James’s or Bergson’s idea of God is a radical religious heresy. Or again, Whitehead is not only thought to lack the intellectual clarity of, say, Thomas, but is sometimes accused of not meaning by “God” what religion means by the word. I believe, nevertheless, that the main drift of thought at work in these men, and in many others of our time, is in the direction of greater fidelity both to religious experience and to the canons of philosophical rigor.
The ground then for this book is the conviction that a magnificent intellectual content — far surpassing that of such systems as Thomism, Spinozism, German idealism, positivism (old or new) — is implicit in the religious faith most briefly expressed in the three words, God is love, which words I sincerely believe are contradicted as truly as they are embodied in the best known of the older theologies, as they certainly have been misunderstood by atheists and skeptics. Various pioneers have already marked out some of the main lines of the doctrine I have in mind, with a genius for discovery which I admire rather than hope to emulate. But somehow the scholarly world has not yet been made aware of the extent and exact nature of the revolution which has in principle been effected. This is partly because the movement is split into theological specialists on one side and philosophical specialists on the other, and because both groups are still further split into various schools whose divergencies on other matters tend to conceal their considerable agreement as to the idea of God, especially their negative agreement concerning what God, if he exists, assuredly cannot be. But the main reason, I suspect, is that no one has quite made the logic of the new theism his special province. A great logician, Whitehead, is profoundly aware of many aspects of this logic, but his thought is for many readers inaccessibly intricate and entangled in the technical problems of science, and he has not had the leisure to develop and expound the theological aspect of his philosophy. I think too he has fallen into some fairly serious errors, or at least faults of exposition. As for Bergson, his ultra-simplicity and antilogicism serve to conceal the depth of some of his insights, insights by no means dependent upon anti-intellectualism.
Then there is the influence of those theologians, some of them among the most spectacular of our time, who maintain that philosophical theology is in principle of no use to religion. They deduce this from the doctrine of the Fall and the corruption of human reason. The deduction might be more convincing did one not know that these theologians — e.g., Barth or the Upsala school — are chiefly familiar with those forms of philosophical theology which philosophers like Whitehead would agree with them in rejecting, and that there are even signs that such theologians are not themselves free from the influence of the erroneous philosophies referred to.
The rational way to inquire into the truth of religion is first to allow religion to assert what its claims are, and to avoid the error of supposing that these claims can only be such as are statable in terms of a given, say Neo-Platonic or Aristotelian, philosophy. For unless such philosophy is as infallible as religion could possibly claim to be, this procedure runs the risk of making religion responsible for errors with which it has nothing to do. The only way to avoid such question-begging procedure and yet to furnish a philosophical scheme in terms of which the religious idea can be rationally formulated is to discover a logically complete classification of possible ideas about God, a noncontroversial statement of what the theistic controversy might conceivably be about. Classifications of different kinds of theism are commonly couched in conceptions so vague as to be almost meaningless — such as pantheism, deism, transcendence, immanence, the supernatural — or with reference to contrasts that do not exhaust the possibilities, e.g., Is God in all respects or in no respects perfect (not usually stated so baldly as to make the non-exhaustiveness obvious)? Again, it is not generally realized that “perfection” has two fundamentally distinct meanings, only one of which receives the slightest consideration in the older works, although it can be shown that both meanings are required to define God. Thus religion or philosophy is asked to commit itself as between doctrines both of which may be false, or so loosely expressed as to have no determinate content. Even if this process endures for fifteen hundred years (as it has) it is logically inadmissible to claim that the truth about religion could be reliably ascertained by it. A fallacy becomes no less one through being many times repeated, even though thereby it reaches the status of the great tradition. This is the answer to those who reject recent thought with the assertion that religious and metaphysical truth being eternal, progress is out of place in theology. If only certain errors did not threaten to be eternal — or at least immortal! To root these out is assuredly progress. Nor is it impossible to explain how the errors were made and why they were persisted in. Rather, the known traits of the human mind make it seem only natural that religious people should have felt more truth than they were able for long centuries to analyze, and that Greek logic and ontology should have taken some false turns which made them inadequate to the higher values, as they certainly were to more than set ajar the door to the exploration of nature. Initial and long-lasting error is as natural in metaphysics as in science.
It turns out that a definite and by logical necessity complete classification of concepts of deity is easily possible, though apparently it has been hitherto overlooked. This classification assumes no peculiarly religious and no partisan philosophical notions, but turns upon a few simple ideas which inevitably occur in everyday life (far more plainly and unambiguously than such notions as cause, form, matter, and the like) as well as in every philosophy, and which yet have manifest relevance to what practically every theology has asserted about God. The issue then becomes that of choosing among a number of special cases, or rather special combinations, of elements whose meaning is scarcely a subject of controversy. And it seems almost as certain as arithmetic that some one of the combinations (among which atheism is included) is the truth.
This book also seeks to throw new light upon the types of evidence to which the rival theistic (and atheistic) doctrines may appeal. Thus the cosmological and ontological arguments are given a form which at once fits the religious idea of God and does justice to the criticisms of the older forms of these arguments. The older doctrine possessed its (incomplete and imperfect) rationale, which was elaborated most fully by Aquinas. Any significant alternative must also have its rationale — indeed, if it is the truth, a uniquely convincing and beautiful one.
Concerning method — that acute contemporary problem — I have something to say in chapter 2. “Empiricism” in theology as it is usually conceived is there shown to be an insufficient procedure; and I also attempt to show that the metaphysical method of the Schoolmen and of Spinoza and Leibniz calls for neither mere rejection nor mere acceptance, but for transformation in the light of modern logic. A long discussion of the positivistic objections to metaphysics has been deleted. But I may remark here that since expert opinion (by any reasonably neutral test of expert) is deeply divided on the question, the hypothesis that a sound metaphysics is possible cannot be ruled out. Even the recognized logical authority, C. I. Lewis, who is sometimes classed with positivists, affirms such a possibility (in his Mind and the World Order). If a scientific metaphysics is possible, it will never be actual until we cease to wallow in confusion in regard to the religious aspect of philosophy, in which all the metaphysical questions come to a focus.
The new theism agrees roughly with the positivistic critique of theism as theism is generally conceived, but denies that this critique is relevant to theism as recently revised —in part, just to remove the defects which positivists allege. The revision seems unknown to positivism, and to leading non-theists generally, for example, Dewey.
Those who wish religion to be spoken of only in religious, or, as they suggest, poetic or mythical or devotional or (in Barth’s sense) dialectical terms, should then conscientiously refrain from making any statements about God which suggest a prosaic logical interpretation, such as the bald statement that God does not change, an assertion which precisely such persons ought not to suppose intended by the biblical “in whom there is no shadow of turning,” since this phrase means that God is changeless in some sense required by religion, but not necessarily in every sense of importance to metaphysics. Tillich, a thinker I deeply admire, likes to insist that descriptions of God are symbolic not literal, since God is the “unconditioned,” and language deals literally only with the conditioned. But the term unconditioned is itself a term, and not a religious one either. How does Tillich know but that God is only conditionally, or in some but not in every sense, unconditioned? Just this we shall find to be a reasonable conclusion.
The validity of revelation, or of religious experience as furnishing knowledge, is not a necessary assumption of the argument of this book. I assume only that the most obvious and central implications of religion deserve not less than the compliment of careful examination by philosophy.
For a theology which builds frankly upon revelation, but which appears for the most part consistent with the doctrines developed hereinafter, I point to two writers, Berdyaev and Garvie, representing the Greek Orthodox and the Congregational churches, respectively. These men may believe more than I am at present able to do, but they do not believe most of the doctrines I am explicitly attacking. The same could be said of some leading writers in other churches, including the Anglican — all the great churches indeed but the Roman Catholic. This may make it clear that it is the philosophical not the truly theological element in the Christian tradition that I as a philosopher venture to attack. Is it not time Christianity should be judged in its own terms, not in terms of its borrowed Greek garments, however good a fit these may have long appeared to exhibit? As a personal confession I could say little more, or less, than that I believe that the fundamental (and true) religious insight (into the essentially social character of the supreme or cosmic being) was more vividly present to the Jews than to any other ancient people, and to Jesus than to any other man. But the question I propose for discussion is only this: Were the early Christians right — is anyone right — from the standpoint of secular philosophy, in believing that deus est caritas?
To those who feel that the chief equipment necessary for the discussion of such questions is ability to refer to documents composed, say, in the thirteenth century, a few remarks may be directed. First, there are very learned theologians and philosophers who on the main point accept the“new” theology. Moreover, the new doctrine is also in some measure an ancient tradition, though one so inconspicuous that it was not even refuted by most of the great system-makers, but largely overlooked, although logically it is one of the chief possibilities for philosophical thought. Its history has yet to be made conveniently available.
Moreover, the view which is offered in the place of traditional theism involves a hearty acceptance of many tenets of the latter when these have been subjected to certain rather drastic and scarcely traditional qualifications. (I do not deny, for example, that God is in some sense simple, immutable, complete and perfect, but I affirm that there is a sense, no less important, in which he is complex, changeable, ever incomplete and growing in value.) Whatever the weaknesses of my exposition, the basic issue itself —whether there is a defensible mean between the merely absolute and immutable deity of the classical theologians, and the merely imperfect and indefinitely unstable one of some recent thinkers — is something larger than the eccentricities of any man or any generation. The human race obviously must explore it as thoroughly as any other issue. The only questions are, When? and How?
Under present world conditions it may seem peculiarly difficult to conceive of divine love. More than ever, one feels the force of the old dilemma: either divine power or divine goodness must be limited. But the now rather popular solution of accepting the first horn of the dilemma (denying omnipotence) is too crude to give general satisfaction. The real trouble is not in attributing too much power to God, but in an oversimple or too mechanical conception of the nature of power in general. The problem of evil in its traditional sense disappears for one who sees, on the one hand, that even the greatest conceivable or “perfect” power could not guarantee complete harmonyamong other individuals (and upon what except such individuals could the perfect power be exercised?) since these as such must have some individuality of action of their own, some freedom however slight; and who sees, on the other hand, that divinity is not the privilege of escaping all sufferings but the exactly contrary one of sharing them all. Unlimited companionship in the tragedies which freedom makes more or less inevitable is the theologically most neglected of divine prerogatives. This companionship does not by any means imply that all is for the best, even for God. It only implies that all is as nearly best as any one will could conceivably insure, and that all is expressive of a love which both as benevolent influence and as the will to companionship is unlimited, perfect, when measured by the utmost that is conceivable.
Thus careful analysis, crudely sketched here, shows that both horns of the famous dilemma are false or at least ambiguous. We need not, in this dark time, inquire why God has not arranged all things for the best, since this notion of “arranging” applies only so far as things are not genuine individuals with their own modicum of initiative. (The notion is really an illusion when taken absolutely, and seems to derive from the deceptive appearance of complete passivity of some physical substances to our manipulation, a passivity which physics shows to be a statistical effect of the behavior of numerous individuals which individually cannot ever be strictly manipulated or arranged.) In their ultimate individuality things can only be influenced, they cannot be sheerly coerced. Power is influence, perfect power is perfect influence, over individuals which as such only very imperfect power would even try to reduce to mere echoes or mechanical executors of its own decisions. There is a perfect way, as there are imperfect ones, of allotting to others the amount of goodand evil they shall have within reach of their own decisions. There is neither an imperfect nor a perfect way of dealing with individuals as totally without power of their own over good and evil.
I should like also, again in view of world conditions, to state that I entirely disagree with those who hold that the theological conception of love implies the doctrine of absolute pacifism or non-participation in war. This too, I must think, is due to a crude analysis of the meaning of love, that is to say, social awareness. Those pacifists in England and France whose simultaneous occurrence with extreme bellicosity in Germany and Italy helped to make the current tragedy so devastating exhibited to my mind a deficiency of social awareness, of sympathy in the religious sense, not an excess of it. (I have discussed this question briefly toward the end of chapter 4.) Faith in love is not belief in a special kind of magic whereby refusal to use violence against violence automatically results in the least harm, still less in appeasing the violent. There is nothing in exact theology to indicate that the result may not often be worse than that of resistance — indeed indefinitely worse if enough good men accept pacifism, leaving violence, the most dangerous of all means, to be employed only by those whose lack of scruples will maximize not minimize its dangers. Nor does it contradict the proposition that social awareness is the essence of God and the ideal for man to hold that refusal to resist by violence may actually greatly encourage and intensify the will to violence on the other side, so that either the conflict must break out on a larger scale and with less hope of the more scrupulous party’s winning, or else the world must be enslaved and all high ideals, even pacifism, be largely driven out by brutal control of all the organs of opinion and education.
I should like to recall my debt to my first teacher in philosophical theology, Professor William Ernest Hocking, who introduced me to the idea of a God not in every sense absolute, and yet in the religious sense perfect; and to Professors C. I. Lewis and H. M. Sheffer, also of Harvard University, who introduced me to logical exactitude, though whether the introduction was effective in this case is for the reader to judge. I am also much obligated to my colleagues in the department of philosophy and the divinity schools of the University of Chicago for providing an exacting critical environment for reflections upon the philosophical aspects of religion, or the religious aspects of philosophy. I recall also those teachers of my childhood and youth who led me to look upon intellectual integrity as a religious virtue rather than an impiety. These are: my father, the Reverend F. C. Hartshorne; my school science teacher, also a clergyman, who saw divine beauty in the atom and in the process of evolution, not because he thought he ought to see it but because he did; and Professor Rufus M. Jones, who sees beauty in nearly everything.
My wife, as always, has suggested numerous improvements in the style and reasoning.
This book is intimately related to a preceding volume, Beyond Humanism, published in 1937, and to a sequel, largely completed and soon to be published, The Universal Orthodoxy. Certain topics touched on hereinafter are more fully dealt with in these other works. Such topics are the case for panpsychism, or social idealism as a theory of all existence (see both of the works mentioned, especially the first), the case for indeterminism, or the theory of open alternatives within the temporal process (see Beyond Humanism), the relations of theology to physics and biology (see both of the above), and the following topics dealt with chiefly in The Universal Orthodoxy: the goodness and omnipotence of God in relation to the facts of evil, the relations of philosophical to revealed theology, “the synthesis of philosophical extremes in current theism,” “the formula of immanence and transcendence.” Any of the three books can be read independently, but the present one is probably the most convenient introduction to the system of ideas expressed in all.
As an effort to introduce more strict modes of thought into philosophical theology, the book cannot be altogether easy reading. Not — I venture to hope — that it is obscure, but that in the nature of its goal it is worth reading only if, in crucial passages at least, it deserves careful study. Today, if ever in history, it is upon the competence of readers, more than of writers, that the religious question in its philosophic aspect depends. The past hundred years of freedom from religious persecution have witnessed the vigorous exploration of the logically possible types of theistic and atheistic thought, so that probably not a great deal of such exploration remains to be done. What is now needed is judgment in evaluation — the overcoming of such rigid prejudices, or such laziness or dishonesty of thought, as must make selection among the views offered arbitrary and of no general or permanent validity.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism, pp. vii-xix.