The traditional proofs for God have long been in disrepute among theologians and philosophers. They remain of interest, however, partly for historical reasons -- there is a vast amount of subtle literature on the topic -- and partly, perhaps, because the stakes are so high. They also continue to tease the minds of such persons as clergy, or youthful experimenters with religious ideas, or others who feel that something so important as the question of God's actuality for providing the context of contexts for our lives must somehow be accessible to conclusive demonstration.

I have long been teased with these issues myself, and wrote my doctoral dissertation on the subject. Now I think they have continuing legitimate functions, but those functions do not include coercing agreement to propositions. There are unavoidable matters of judgment that arise in every theistic "proof," making them suggestive at best but never knock-down demonstrations.

The theoretical proofs for God can be grouped into three families, which among them cover the possibilities in the way that "no," "all," or "some" exhaust the logical possibilities for quantifying premises in arguments. The first family, which I shall call "Perfection" arguments (traditionally "Ontological" arguments), makes use of no factual premises, relying instead on necessities of meaning. The second family, which I name "Causal" arguments (usually "Cosmological" arguments), stakes its ground on all factual premises, whether taken together (in the sense of the "entire sum") or individually (in the sense of "any"). And the third family, which I refer to as "Design" arguments (often "Teleological" arguments), rises from some factual premises selected as especially significant. In addition to the three families of theoretical proof stands another family of "Moral" quasi arguments. My aim in what follows is nothing exhaustive, but simply to show how in each family human judgments -- rationally rejectable evaluations -- are inextricably entwined.

Perfection Arguments

The Perfection family of arguments has been offered in many different versions by thinkers premodern, modern, and contemporary. Shared by all versions is agreement that God is absolutely perfect, unlimited, lacking in nothing. If a greater could be conceived, then the greater, replacing the lesser, would become the correct conception of God. By definition, God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. This definition is a priori: absolute and secure, dependent on no factual premises, no deliverances of experience. It would hold even if there were no world of factual experience.

From this it is supposed to follow necessarily, in this family of arguments, that God must actually exist. Failing to exist would be a serious lack, a huge imperfection ruled out (once we understand "God" as entailing absolute perfection) by the fundamental meanings involved. Denying the existence of God cannot rationally be done, since it would involve a logical contradiction: namely, both affirming and disallowing all perfections in God. Since God's existence cannot rationally be denied, then asserting it is the only logical possibility. That "God exists" can be known to be true as soon as it is fully understood, so this family of arguments insists.

It is an old, distinguished family and deserves respect. On close examination, the argument is capable of stimulating tantalizing gestalt-switch games. Some philosophers report that they are inclined to accept it on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but reject it on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday (on Sunday God gives even philosophers a day off). As an argument, it obviously points up something fundamentally important about the uniqueness of the religiously powerful concept of God it revolves around. An early matter of judgment is whether or not to accept this definition as appropriate to one's religious tradition and/or one's linguistic intuitions. Taking "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" as logically equivalent to "God" is not optional for the argument, but it is optional for persons. Other definitions of "God" abound. Defenders of the Perfection argument will rightly point out that the tradition equating God with absolute perfection is old and widespread, but it is not the only tradition, even within Judaism and Christianity. They may assert that it is the only correct tradition, but this again is a value-judgment, not at all coercive for those who prefer another usage. The argument will not work given other meanings for "God." Nothing but the sole all-perfect One has ever been considered an appropriate subject for an Perfection argument. No finite thing, even considered perfect of its kind (e.g., a "perfect island," a "perfect soprano," or even a "Lord of Hosts"), could be proven actual by the argument, since something greater could always in principle be conceived. The Perfection argument, if it works at all, works only for what is defined as beyond all conceivable limits, the possessor of everything valued, that for which one is not prepared to acknowledge shortcomings of any kind.

But here we come upon still more matters of judgment. Conceptions of perfection, even absolute perfection, will differ, depending on what components are valued initially. It is easy for world-affirming Westerners to agree, without much reflection, that "actual existence" is to be preferred to "nonexistence." Since Plato, at least, there has been a nearly automatic identification of being and goodness. The Perfection argument hinges on that evaluation. Without it there would be no argument, since no conclusion about God's existence would follow. But Easterners, steeped in traditions of world-denial and longing for release from the wheel of existence, might make a different evaluation. So might a Westerner, such as Hamlet, deeply exploring the positive possibilities of nonbeing. If actual existence is not judged to be a perfection, however, the Perfection argument is derailed.

If "mere" existence might not be judged even always a good thing, then "necessary" existence, the inability not to be, will turn out no necessary perfection, either. Quite independent of Kant's famous logical challenge to treating existence as a predicate (or property) at all,⁽²⁾ judgments may differ on the evaluation of existence, both contingent and necessary. Therefore, there is a new, non-Kantian, sense in which "existence is a perfection" may intelligibly be refused. It may, of course, be intelligibly accepted, too. Here is a place where the gestalt-switch game may start. But in either case, the Perfection argument turns out not to be the knock-down proof for which some of its proponents hoped.

Causal Arguments

The second, Causal, family of arguments for God depends on the actual existence of anything at all. It is not selective. For this argument, offered by such great thinkers as Aquinas and Descartes, a whole universe is no better as an initial premise than a single existing self. Aquinas offered three versions of the argument in which moving things, caused things, and contingent things, singly or together, took turns on center stage as premises for inferences to a Prime Mover, a First Cause, and a Necessary Being "whom all know as God." Descartes, after proving his own existence as a thinking thing, took this discovery as sufficient to prove the necessary existence of God. The logic of the arguments within this family all have the same structure: Anything at all that exists either accounts for itself or not. If not, then it must be accounted for by something else sufficient to the task. That something else, in turn, either accounts for itself or not. If not . . . , in the end it is unthinkable that the regress could go on forever, leaving the whole sequence and the presently existing datum unaccounted for. Therefore, since there is something (the datum), there must be something that accounts for itself, on which everything else that does not account for itself depends.

"And this everyone understands to be God," remarks Aquinas, treating it as something obvious, as he completes his first version of the Causal argument.⁽³⁾ But does this follow in any logically required way? It may indeed be a transition that many in the Hebrew-Christian-Muslim traditions are glad to make, but it takes a major value-judgment to do so. There is nothing inherent in the idea of accounting for the facts of motion, or accounting for causal sequences, or even accounting for the existence of everything from oneself to universe, that compels worship. The appeal of the argument is to an explanatory stopping place, not to anything necessarily divine. If the sequence simply must be stopped (and this "if" itself is a matter on which fully informed judgments may differ), then the character of what stops the infinite regress remains an open question, just as long as the abyss of infinite regress is somehow avoided. No personal characteristics are required by the Causal argument, even if it is judged completely successful. In principle, the Unmoved Mover could be completely unconscious, the First Cause could be purposeless, the Necessary Being could be malevolent, as far as the argument is concerned. All that is required by the argument is that the question "why?" be finally brought to rest.

What sort of explanation could achieve this goal? If the first premise of the Causal argument is that everything needs to be accounted for; and if it is then found that only something that accounts for itself can stop the sequence, why should "the world as a whole" not be sufficient? If "the world as a whole" is rejected because we do not know how it accounts for itself, then why should "God" not be rejected on exactly the same grounds? If it is replied that "God" is defined as everlasting, without beginning or end, then why not define "the world as a whole" as everlasting, in the same way? If this is opposed by reverting to the first premise, insisting a priori that everything "worldly" needs to be accounted for by something else, why not ask why "God" escapes the same theoretical requirement? The answer is likely to be that "God" is perfect, lacking in nothing, especially in existence, and is consequently necessary. But this, we recognize, is the Perfection argument again, which rests on many value judgments. The purely theoretical "why?" has no legitimate stopping place. What allows the infinite regress to end is not theory alone but the value-laden, functionally religious judgment that one's theorizing has finally come to what "stands to reason," what "ought to be," what "justifies itself."

Candidates for this stopping place differ in character. Certainly the religious conception of God is one powerful candidate, but in contrast some have preferred others, including various consortia of deities, or uncreated and indestructible matter, or inexplicable chance, or primal cosmic energy, or an ever-evolving universe. These are truly matters of profound preference, not issues forced by evidence and logic. The Causal argument, if it works at all, rests on the barest of all evidence -- sheer existence of something -- and its logic presses only to seek what might be a plausible place to hand over the theoretical quest to a far from coercive judgment of finality.

The arguments from religious experience, or the arguments from mystical illumination, are sometimes treated as a separate family. Perhaps this is because the worship-inspiring properties of God are obviously central to this set of arguments. Here God is allegedly "seen" as holy, loving, just, and so forth, not simply inferred from motion, causes, or contingency. But insofar as religious experience offers data for an argument, and not simply a way around all arguments by asserting immediate awareness beyond the need (or reach) of all theoretical warrants, these data are not in principle different from the others. They are events in experience used to launch their own versions of the Causal argument: "An experience of an awesome presence has occurred; it does not account for itself; therefore something must account for it." But again it is a matter of judgment whether such psychological events should be accounted for as veridical "sightings" or "encounters" with an objectively existing cause "like" the qualities of the experience, or should instead be accounted for in other terms. A cause may be called for, but perhaps the categories of explanation should be drawn from psychology or physiology rather than religion. One does not need to be quite so radical a gastronomic reductionist as Scrooge, who at first tried to explain his encounter with Marley as "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato,"⁽⁴⁾ but many causal explanations of mystical experience may be offered, from repressed sexuality to brain chemistry. Perhaps, theists may retort, these are ways God has wisely chosen to channel the divine presence to finite human organisms. Perhaps -- but this is no longer the Causal argument, which merely seeks a stopping place in a cause that has no need of further explanation. This new reply has the distinct sound of the Design argument, next on the agenda.

Design Arguments

The family of Design arguments is much more selective about its evidence. This selectivity is its great strength, and also its great weakness, at least if any of its exemplars should be mistaken for a knock-down proof. Of all the theoretical arguments, this is the best loved. It uses wonderful features of our cosmic habitation to warrant inferences to an at-least-equally wonderful architect, purposefully responsible for them. The specific features chosen can be quite various in this family of arguments. Aquinas pointed simply to "natural bodies" which, despite lacking knowledge, regularly work well together to produce the "best result."⁽⁵⁾ Kant acknowledged the starry heavens above as evidence of wonderful "order and system."⁽⁶⁾ William Paley wrote a large book detailing the intricate internal organization of animals, birds, and fish as proof that they, just as much as a watch, must be considered products of intelligent design.⁽⁷⁾ More recently, many have appealed to some purposeful "anti-chance" in overcoming the improbabilities of life organizing itself within the comparatively brief window of opportunity afforded by the cooling Earth.⁽⁸⁾ Currently, much interest is directed to the remarkably "fine tuned" character of the physical constants shown by the early universe, without which no world like ours, no life on earth, no personal intelligence could ever have evolved.⁽⁹⁾ This latest discussion has revolved around the "anthropic principle," holding that a good guide to understanding the earliest stages of our universe is the extremely improbable (but significant) fact that it gave rise to the human species now speculating about it. I shall return for a further look at the anthropic principle in the following section of this chapter.

It should be clear that human judgment enters early when the Design argument is deployed. As an opening move one must decide what, out of a wide array of evidences, should be selected as best for the case. This choice tends to change with the state of science. Coordination between "natural bodies" not understood in one age, thus open in that age to explanation in terms of intelligent design, may be differently accounted for in another age. The most dramatic example of such a shift is the publication of Paley's Natural Theology (1802) within mere decades of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Ironically, Darwin (with all other undergraduates) was required to study Paley's book while a student at Cambridge, less than a decade before his famous voyage on the Beagle and his development of the idea of natural selection as an alternative explanation for the amazing intricacies of organic life. After Darwin, virtually all scientifically respectable examples of the Design argument have begun by assuming evolution, then have worked toward the same conclusion with quite different evidences of providential design found within the new framework.

Another key judgment underlying this argument is the decision how far one should extend the principle of self-organization, instead of relying on the hypothesis of an external designer. It is interesting to note that Aquinas, despite his famous Aristotelianism, rejected (at least for the purpose of the Design argument) Aristotle's own stress on the immanent teleology of things. If organisms are truly self-organizing, their difference from watches is underscored and the need for external "watchmakers" diminished. The use of the plural in "watchmakers" reminds us of another evaluative judgment needed: namely, how much unity should be assigned the alleged intelligence behind the regularities of the world? There are many different kinds of systems in our experience. Must all of them be attributed to the same purposive agent? Could the evidence selected be even better accounted for by a team of designers? Even Paley admitted that there is no coercive evidence for a single personal agent behind the many systems: "Certain however it is that the whole argument for the divine unity goes no further than to a unity of counsel."⁽¹⁰⁾ But a team or a committee is capable of reaching "unity of counsel." Is this good enough to prove the existence of God?

Still harder judgments need to be made. How "great," really, is the intelligence of this committee (or this God) in light of the facts? Wonderful though we may find the organization of the world and many things in it, it is possible to imagine improvements. A world without the useless human appendix would be a world without appendicitis. A world without wisdom teeth would contain less impaction. And so on to more serious proposals. The Design argument may reach to "great" and "wonderful," but surely not to "perfect" wisdom in the designer it proposes. Even more uncomfortable for the argument is the problem of pain and disorder. Pain in limited quantities may be a vital organic benefit as a danger signal, as Paley argues,⁽¹¹⁾ but there seems to be a huge superabundance of pain among persons and in nature for this defense to seem plausible. "How much is too much?" is exactly the sort of judgment that is now unavoidable. If the judgment on pain, illness, earthquakes, tornadoes, and the like, turns out "too much," then a judgment needs to be rendered not only on the perfect intelligence of God but also of God's goodness. The intractable Problem of Evil is the nemesis stirred by the Design argument. There are defenses, though when it comes to animal suffering they seem far from satisfactory.⁽¹²⁾ Still, all the arguments and counterarguments rely on evaluations of the deepest sort, drawing on moral intuitions as well as intuitions about the appropriate use of religious superlatives for God. The Design argument, from beginning to end, rests on a skein of value judgments.

This in itself is nothing shameful. All human reasoning depends upon judgments of importance, appropriateness, conceptual fit, and other norms of one kind or another.⁽¹³⁾ But there is a scale on which conclusions dependent on judgments can be plausibly rejected by other persons with equal information and intelligence. The three families of theoretical theistic arguments are found on the high end of this scale.

Quasi and Hybrid Arguments

Even higher on this scale of "plausible rejectability" is the Moral argument for God, since it is openly an appeal to moral intuition. Most members of this family of arguments do not even claim theoretical status, but as in Kant's version, acknowledge that they are exercises of practical reason.⁽¹⁴⁾ The argument itself, in Kant's classical statement, points out that we have a practical need to assume that the two great goals of human life, morality and happiness, can be fulfilled. We discover no causal connection (or even correlation), so far as the empirical evidence is concerned, between moral virtue and the rewards of happiness. The motivation to do one's duty is entirely independent, and often contrary to, the motivation to happiness. "Nevertheless," Kant says,

in the practical task of pure reason, i.e., in the necessary endeavor after the highest good, such a connection is postulated as necessary: we should seek to further the highest good (which therefore must be at least possible). Therefore also the existence is postulated of a cause of the whole of nature, itself distinct from nature, which contains the ground of the exact coincidence of happiness with morality.⁽¹⁵⁾

Since such a "ground" will have to be able to know perfectly the motives of the people whose virtue is being assessed, and to control perfectly the empirical circumstances that make for happiness, as well as to act in a perfectly lawful, just manner in correlating the two independent variables, this "ground" is divine.

Now a being which is capable of actions by the idea of laws is an intelligence (a rational being), and the causality of such a being according to this idea of laws is his will. Therefore, the supreme cause of nature, in so far as it must be presupposed for the highest good, is a being which is the cause (and consequently the author) of nature through understanding and will, i.e., God.⁽¹⁶⁾

God is a "reasonable" postulate if one thinks according to the twin practical necessities of morality and happiness, Kant concludes, but this remains only a matter of practical reason. It is not a requirement of theoretical reason. As he puts it, "it is morally necessary to assume the existence of God." But then in the next line he adds: "It is well to notice here that this moral necessity is subjective, i.e., a need, and not objective, i.e., duty itself. For there cannot be any duty to assume the existence of a thing, because such a supposition concerns only the theoretical use of reason."⁽¹⁷⁾

The Moral argument for God then lays no claim to coercive theoretical proof. It is not a theoretical proof at all. Given a readiness to respect the pure call of duty, given a willingness to affirm the importance of happiness, given a sense of the appropriateness of the ultimate adjustment of happiness to moral virtue, and given that one is prepared to affirm that this highest good must somehow be possible for life to make moral sense, then it makes moral sense to postulate a being capable of bringing this about. This postulate is not to any degree knowledge. It does not even carry a degree of probability, since as Kant admits, it is entirely dependent on "subjective" factors.

There are other members of the Moral argument family that are not quite so pure as Kant's. Sometimes it may be argued that if "good" purposes finally triumph over "evil" ones (if a crime turns out not to have paid, or if a cruel ruler is defeated in a "just" war), then this shows that "God's in Heaven, after all." But it should now be clear that this is a disguised version of the Design argument, in which the evidence selected to show providential "design" is defined in moral categories. A large degree of "plausible rejectability," due to the selectivity of this argument and its dependence on other value judgments, remains and is even intensified by the many ethical judgments involved. And, as in other applications of the Design argument, this hybrid Moral argument raises the Problem of Evil by calling for counterexamples about crimes that do seem to have paid and cruel dictators who manage to win their battles, avoid retribution, and die happily in their beds.

Another hybrid Moral argument is grafted to the Causal. It can be argued that morality would not exist if God did not. But if this is not a disguised Design argument, holding that no one would be moral if God had not designed or intended it so, then this is another case in which the universal scope of the Causal argument is again illustrated. Anything that exists, including morality but also gross immorality, can start the regress toward a cause capable of accounting for it. There is no guarantee from the Causal argument that the quality of the datum will be manifest in the ultimate cause. If the existence of morality is supposed to prove a good God, might the existence of immorality prove a wicked, disgusting one? To guard against this scoffing challenge, theists may be tempted to insist that only positive perfections can be thought to characterize God. The very meaning of "God" entails it. But this, alas, is only to call for help from the Perfection argument, whose limitations as a coercive demonstration have already been laid bare.

Reflections and Applications

The point hardly needs further belaboring. All the families of theistic "proofs" are deeply dependent on value-laden judgments. This makes them plausibly rejectable, but they are not without jobs to do, when the circumstances are right. Clearly the circumstances will not be right for their use when facing a determined agnostic or a committed atheist. They do not make good offensive weapons. Or, to change the metaphor, they are not tools that can be expected to grip on every sort of surface. Something attitudinal must be granted for them to gain a purchase and start to work.

No amount of information without key evaluative attitudes will lead to religious conclusions. In overlooking this attitudinal prerequisite, traditional users of the "proofs" have misread the nature of the religious response and its relationship to facts. Learning a list of the particulars concerning the structure of the human eye, for example, leads nowhere -- except perhaps to a degree in anatomy. Even in the sciences the facts are taken in a value structure and are given significance as part of some human interest. Naturally, the human interest undergirding the Design argument, for example, is specifically different from scientific interests. Contemplating the optical facts with an attitude of wonder and awe at the marvels of our organic system, as Paley did, may lead to worship the Wisdom that devised and now sustains us. Even the facts on which the Moral arguments rely are without religious significance unless taken as religiously significant. A feeling of moral obligation may be interpreted merely as the irritating residue of parental training. Likewise, on the Causal argument, a feeling of holiness may, as we have seen, be shrugged aside as a spooky reminder of our primitive ancestors, or on other grounds. But attitudes of respect for morality and the readiness to accord a place of importance to religious experiences may transform these phenomena into pointers toward something worth worshiping.

All of these arguments require what can be called "apprehensional premises."⁽¹⁸⁾ These "premises" may or may not be present. It should not be thought peculiar that theological arguments require for their success something beyond what is contained in the arguments themselves. All arguments -- even the proofs of logic or mathematics -- are in an analogous position. Proofs in formal logic depend, for example, on prior decisions expressible in a "meta-language" concerning relevant axioms and rules of formation and transformation. Attitudes of readiness to accept these rules, and to continue to abide by them even when difficulties arise, are essential to the discipline. Scientific arguments, too, depend on factors not included in the arguments, such as semantic rules which must be accepted for interpreting perceptions on which the arguments are founded and to which they are intended to return. The theistic arguments, analogously, require an unusual supplement, a personal attitude, without which they are impotent. The Causal argument, for example, requires that one admit that there is a problem involved in the existence of individual things which do not cause themselves. Above all, this means that we -- who are included in the class of beings which did not cause themselves -- must be ready to admit that there is a problem about our own being. To admit this, however, requires (among other qualities) a certain degree of humility. We may prefer to refuse the idea that there is anything to wonder at in the existence of anything. We may reject he idea that we might not have been. If we do this the Causal argument is crippled. Withdraw the apprehensional premise of awe and respect from contemplation of "the starry heavens above and the moral law within," and the Design and Moral arguments are wrecked. Refuse to grant numinous overtones to thoughts of absolute completeness and self-existence, and the Perfection argument is shorn of its power.

This may help account for the notorious fact that the arguments for God are more effective with some people than with others equally intelligent and well-informed. This is not uniquely the case in religious matters. In philosophy of science, philosophers have long realized that there exists no formal criterion for producing belief or dissipating incredulity through nondeductive arguments, arguments to the effect, for example, that some regular sequence of events is a "universal law of nature." Some may be convinced after a few instances of a happening that the relations between A and B is a law of nature or a fully dependable regularity. Or some may remain skeptical for much longer periods of time. Similar issues rise in connection with falsification. When has a "law" been falsified? How long can one hang on, dismissing apparent falsifying results as "mere anomalies" to be dealt with later? There is no algorithm to answer this question. It is a matter of judgment, and judgments differ. In like manner, determining the effectiveness of a theistic argument is a matter of judgment in which personal traits will be crucial. Given humility, a sense of wonder, a readiness to take seriously moral, aesthetic, and religious experience, the arguments for God may have considerable power to direct attention and offer encouragement. Confronted by opposite traits, the arguments will bear no fruit at all. A postmodern suggestion to opponents struggling over the theistic proofs would be to "lighten up," therefore, and notice how easily arguments of this kind become disguised clashes of fundamental valuations rooted in human personality.

A qualification should be noted before turning away from this kind of clash between a theist and what might be called a "hardened unbeliever." First, personality considerations should not be overinterpreted as unalterable traits of character. Both what is loosely called "the climate of opinion" and more specific pressures of education may do much to form the personality considerations at work. For example, the sense of what is a "rational" question or a "rationally satisfying" answer may be greatly affected by the sort of answers to questions which an individual is accustomed to asking and trained to find satisfactory. If one lives in an intellectual climate where one is accustomed to being satisfied only by answers in terms of what Aristotle called "material" or "efficient" causes to questions starting with "why,"⁽¹⁹⁾ then such a one is likely not to feel the same sort of needs for rational satisfaction as is the person whose intellectual practice demands explanation also in terms of "final" causes. To the former, much theistic debate will be both incomprehensible and redundant, while, to the latter, it will be charged with maximal significance. A great deal depends on the way in which our minds have been furnished before we approach theistic argument. "Rationality" does not mean the same to all regardless of experience, education, or interests.

Dropping the "hardened unbeliever" and turning, instead, to dialogue with someone with apprehensional premises less firmly set against the topic, we may find still further uses for the theistic arguments. In this more hospitable climate, one may hope, through the arguments, to show a person who is prepared in humility to revere what can be shown worthy of reverence, that reverence for God is not incompatible with intellectual integrity. The Causal argument, for one, may be used to instill a sense of wonder before the mystery of existence, to draw attention to the dependence of all finite things on something vastly beyond themselves, and to suggest by analogy the dependence of the aggregate of these dependent things (including oneself) on something awe-inspiring, fittingly modeled by the value-laden imagery and theories of some great theistic tradition. The Design argument, similarly, may reinforce an appreciation of the universe in which we find ourselves and may lend some weight to the claim that intelligence, far from being a biological accident in a meaningless swarm of stars, must be involved in the very fiber of the world's being.

These arguments need not always require dialogue with others. They may have uses in solitary meditation as well. Someone inclined to faith in God can by their means make sure that his or her faith is not contrary to careful thought. In so doing, the dimension of intellect is added to the worship of God. Religion at its highest cannot violate or neglect any part of complex human nature. If faith stifles reason, faith is bound to be insecure and unhealthy. More positively, theological arguments give believers an opportunity to worship with their minds. In the Design arguments, a theist can praise God for the wonders of creation; in the Causal arguments the theist asserts confident dependence on the One on whom all things depend; in the Perfection arguments (which are only properly understood in this light, I believe) the theist can affirm all existence as good and enlist thought itself into the service of the Perfect One.

From purported demonstrations to acts of worship, the theistic arguments have been wrung through many changes in this discussion. I have tried to show that arguing about God is a many-layered activity, involving a number of dimensions besides the formal manipulation of symbols. Please keep this enriched logic of theistic argumentation in mind through the following pages, where I add some more personal answers to religious questions about the cosmos.
 
 

My own preferred worldview, personalistic organicism, stresses the presence of purpose, mind, and the creation of value in nature. It is a "kalogenic" ("beauty-creating") vision, so named because in my view the fundamental value born in the self actualization of each momentary entity is beauty, defined as intrinsically satisfactory experience.⁽²⁰⁾ My worldview is inspired by the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, who developed a quantum organicism -- a "vibratory universe"⁽²¹⁾ based on fundamental events -- aimed at broadening the adequacy and increasing the coherence of any philosophy of mechanism that assumes the world is made up of "particles" with no degree of subjectivity or internal relatedness. Orthodox modern worldviews have been mechanistic in this sense; that is, they have resisted including any trace of mind or value in the natural universe, restricting these characteristics exclusively to humans.⁽²²⁾ In so doing, mainstream modern thinking has managed simultaneously to undermine human respect for nature, seen as valueless in itself, and to create an insoluble mind-body conundrum with disastrous implications for metaphysical coherence, epistemological self-confidence, and ethical adequacy.

My debt to Whitehead is deep, as I have acknowledged gladly in staking out my own metaphysical and epistemological positions in the first two volumes of my trilogy. I have made significant adjustments, particularly by explicit stress on the "personal" to complement Whitehead's "organic," and have made extensions to topics he touched lightly, or not at all. I think Whitehead would for the most part have welcomed these modifications and applications. In connection with God, however, I suspect he would have resisted. My kalogenic worldview agrees with Whitehead's "bottom-up" approach to the world but, in contrast to Whitehead himself, is less convinced of the additional need for God or a god, a single unified cosmic entity in constant relationship with the world, to complete the cosmic picture.⁽²³⁾ At this point, it seems, I need to wrestle with Whitehead himself, at least with the Whitehead of Process and Reality, where the doctrine of God as an actual entity is most fully developed.

This doctrine is a sensitive one, since one of the key motives for the continuation of Whitehead scholarship after his death in 1947 and until the present has been theological. "Process theology" has become a significant industry, a lively subdiscipline in which some of the best theological work of the late twentieth century has been accomplished. I am not a process theologian, but "full disclosure" should reveal that I am closely allied to, and enjoy warm ties of friendship with, the men and women who lead and sustain this movement. That said, it should be obvious that my own motivations are more generally philosophical. My initial introduction to Whitehead, while still in high school, was through reading Science and the Modern World, a gift from my father, who had been Whitehead's graduate assistant at Harvard. My father, though absorbed in the question of God, did not much avail himself of Whitehead's ideas in this area, preferring a more classical conception radically rooted in (and transformed by) taking infinite, self-giving love, or agáp, as central for interpretation and systematic construction.⁽²⁴⁾ My first attraction to Whitehead, in contrast, was as one who could allow me to embrace the best of science, answer Hume's doubts about inductive causation, and shake me awake from the seventeenth century's bleak vision of a universe "cleansed" of all qualities and values. Despite my early work in theological language,⁽²⁵⁾ Whitehead's doctrine of God remained in the background.

The doctrine itself is somewhat indistinct, coming from different periods of Whitehead's thought. The two most important early expression of Whitehead's views on God, were written at almost the same time, both for the Lowell Lecture series in successive years, 1925 and 1926, presented at King's Chapel in Boston. The first was published as Science and the Modern World (1925); the second was Religion in the Making (1926).

From Science and the Modern World

In the chapter, "God," in the first of these books, Whitehead opens by praising Aristotle for following his argument where it led, dispassionately, to a First Mover. This Mover was required by Aristotelian physics, in which motion did not "stand to reason," thus needing explanation. Today, and since Newton, physics recognizes motion just as "natural" as rest. Under these circumstances, there is no more need for an Unmoved Mover than for an Unstopped Stopper. At least Aristotle's God was not an arbitrary intrusion into thought but instead a logical requirement of his system. Such dispassionately metaphysical thinking "did not lead him very far towards the production of a God available for religious purposes," Whitehead recognizes, then adds: "It may be doubted whether any properly general metaphysics can ever, without the illicit introduction of other considerations, get much further than Aristotle."⁽²⁶⁾

His own purely theoretical requirement is analogous: "In the place of Aristotle's God as Prime Mover, we require God as the Principle of Concretion."⁽²⁷⁾ What "requires" this is the basic Whiteheadian account of all reality as made up of events coming to concreteness, depending for the initial phase of their particular character on the range of possibilities provided by the immediate environment. The environment, constituting the immediate physically prehended past, both provides and limits possibilities for new concrescence. Every actuality is "in essential relation to an unfathomable possibility," Whitehead points out, and "every actual occasion is a limitation imposed on possibility."⁽²⁸⁾ There are no single occasions. All are related. In their togetherness an actual universe is woven out of possibility by process. Still, there are too many pure possibilities to account for why just this universe is actual rather than an innumerable set of others. Actuality is an achievement of value. How account for the fact that just these values are selected rather than others?

Thus as a further element of the metaphysical situation, there is required a principle of limitation. Some particular how is necessary, and some particularization in the what of matter of fact is necessary. . . . [We] must provide a ground for limitation which stands among the attributes of the substantial activity. This attribute provides the limitation for which no reason can be given: for all reason flows from it. God is the ultimate limitation, and His existence is the ultimate irrationality. For no reason can be given for just that limitation which it stands in His nature to impose.⁽²⁹⁾

Whitehead postulates God as the final ground for there being anything definite despite the "unfathomable" superabundance of possibility. Like the Causal argument, which it resembles, this one rests on "all or any" concrete data being given, and is indifferent to whether the actual world is a paradise or a torture chamber. God's nature is totally inscrutable. Unlike the Causal argument, however, and despite Whitehead's use of the traditional language of personal pronouns and talk of "His nature" causally "imposing" arbitrary limitations, this argument does not purport to require an actual causal entity at its conclusion. "God is not concrete," Whitehead writes, "but He is the ground for concrete actuality. No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality."⁽³⁰⁾ God, at this period of Whitehead's thought, is a Principle, not an actuality.

Whitehead thinks that this metaphysical requirement provides the logical space within which religious persons may fill in the details, depending on actual experience. "The general principle of empiricism depends upon the doctrine that there is a principle of concretion which is not discoverable by abstract reason. What further can be known about God must be sought in the region of particular experiences, and therefore rests on an empirical basis."⁽³¹⁾

I find myself unconvinced that this argument does much to secure even a logical space within which theists can construct doctrines more to their liking. Certainly the use of personal language for this Principle is simply based on old tradition. The fact that Aristotle used "" in connection with his Prime Mover (in the "entirely dispassionate" way approved by Whitehead) might account for the use of "god" for this Principle as a matter of rhetoric. It does point up the analogy. But the honorific capital "G," turning "God" into a proper name, roots in Christendom's baptism of Plato and Aristotle,⁽³²⁾ and is close to out-of-bounds, while the use of "His" in this context is a clear foul. Further, besides the use of tendentious language to which the argument earns no right, Whitehead's logic wobbles between "entity" and "principle." The introduction of Aristotle's Prime Mover suggests an entity, and Whitehead starts by explicitly endorsing this suggestion: "For nothing, within any limited type of experience, can give intelligence to shape our ideas of any entity at the base of all actual things, unless the general character of things requires that there be such an entity."⁽³³⁾ But then he announces that his analogue to Aristotle's Mover will be just a Principle, explicitly disclaiming actuality for this Principle, which nonetheless he describes in personal, causal language as "imposing" "His" nature. A final puzzle defeated even Whitehead himself, since he changed his mind about it: how can a Principle do anything if it is not "concrete actuality"? When it came time for rethinking, he pronounced his "ontological principle": "The ontological principle can be summarized as: no actual entity, then no reason."⁽³⁴⁾ This effectively rules out the suggestion that somehow god can be a reason for the actuality of the world while remaining other than concrete actuality. Appealing to a Principle bakes no bread.

From Religion in the Making

In Religion in the Making,⁽³⁵⁾ based on the second set of Lowell Lectures, Whitehead turns from the analogue of the Causal argument to an analogue of the Design argument. The argument here is considerably more developed, involving elements of his quasi Causal argument as well as anticipating themes from Process and Reality, already in gestation. Whitehead's thought about God had come far in the year between lectures. Most important, he had dropped the indefensible view that God is not actual but still an explanatory influence. Several times in Religion in the Making he plainly states the opposite: "God is that non-temporal actuality," he writes, "which has to be taken account of in every creative phase."⁽³⁶⁾ Why so? Because (in an argument echoing the previous lecture):

The boundless wealth of possibility in the realm of abstract form would leave each creative phase still indeterminate, unable to synthesize under determinate conditions the creatures from which it springs. The definite determination which imposes ordered balance on the world requires an actual entity imposing its own unchanged consistency of character on every phase.⁽³⁷⁾

Now the argument has subtly shifted. The "imposing" is done not by a Principle but by an actual entity, and what is imposed is not simply "limitation" but, far more significant, "ordered balance." And the actual entity providing this balance from beyond the world (in one phase of the process) is also immanent in the world (in another phase), actively implementing purpose. "The purpose of God is the attainment of value in the temporal world."⁽³⁸⁾ The harmony in God's nature, constituted by God's perfectly envisioning all abstract possibilities in their mutual relationships, provides a consistent, unchanging loom on which the finite threads of the world can weave themselves, not without conflict but with underlying stability. If there were no God to provide this "ordered balance," there would be no world at all. "There would be no creatures, since, apart from harmonious order, the perceptive fusion would be a confusion, neutralizing achieved feeling."⁽³⁹⁾ Whitehead insists that the primal order is a necessary condition for, not a product of, any world.

It is not the case that there is an actual world which accidentally happens to exhibit an order of nature. There is an actual world because there is an order in nature. If there were no order, there would be no world. Also since there is a world, we know that there is an order. The ordering entity is a necessary element in the metaphysical situation presented by the actual world.⁽⁴⁰⁾

Here, as we recognized in connection with the family of Design arguments in general, we may have doubts. Must we judge that orderliness is not an intrinsic capacity of the fundamental events that constitute nature? Whitehead writes with confidence that primal orderliness must be externally "imposed," but arguments at this deep level of metaphysical intuition are awkward, and assertion tends to be met less by counter-argument than by simple counter-assertion. Further, we can quickly agree with Whitehead that "since there is a world, we know that there is an order," but we may balk at the gap between this and his next sentence where he takes for granted that this acknowledged order entails an "ordering entity." The situation, as we saw above, is not so simple a matter of inference. Apprehensional premises and value judgments are required to bridge these two sentences. Certainly many reasonable minds will be led to cross from "there is an order" to "there is an ordering entity" (Whitehead's powerful intellect being one example), but as an argument this is less than compelling.

Whitehead lists three "formative elements" as metaphysically necessary for the world of finite events. These are the boundless energy of becoming that he calls Creativity, the realm of pure possibilities that he calls the Eternal Objects, and God. He holds that the first two alone are not sufficient since "this creativity and these forms are together impotent to achieve actuality apart from the completed ideal harmony, which is God."⁽⁴¹⁾ I doubt that Whitehead has yet made a convincing case for absolutely requiring a "completed ideal harmony" before finite harmonies can begin to be woven by creativity on possibility, but we have not yet examined Process and Reality to see what further considerations he may offer.

Before leaving Religion in the Making, I should note, but not pursue, a variation on the Moral argument offered by Whitehead as a defense for having "complicated" his metaphysics by adding a God over and above the world. His reason is that the alternative would lock evil into the ultimate nature of things. He acknowledges that it would be easier to make do with the first two formative elements, creativity and possibility, and then to say, "Thus creative indetermination attains its measure of determination. A simpler metaphysic would result if we could stop at this conclusion."⁽⁴²⁾ But destruction of achieved harmonies, ugliness, lesser levels of beauty in place of higher -- all of these are copiously found in our experience of the world. If this empirical world exhausted all that is, such evils would end the story, and loss would become ultimate. All that stops the slow slide into lesser and lesser levels of complex harmony, the slide into evil, is the steady, nontemporal presence of a good God, purposefully helping to nurture innovation and the retention of achieved beauty.

Every event on its finer side introduces God into the world. Through it his ideal vision is given a base in actual fact to which He provides the ideal consequent, as a factor saving the world from the self-destruction of evil. The power by which God sustains the world is the power of himself as the ideal. He adds himself to the actual ground from which every creative act takes its rise. The world lives by its incarnation of God in itself .⁽⁴³⁾

This is a profound argument, defending against the possibility that our moral intuitions can ultimately be frustrated. It rests on basic values. What needs simply to be recognized here is that the Moral family of arguments, even more obviously than the others, reflects and relies on our deepest intuitions into what is ultimately right or wrong, fitting or absurd, decent or unacceptable. Whitehead articulates eloquently the intuitions of many when he chooses the word "good" to characterize the kind of limitation that God, according to his theory, imposes on the world. Any kind of limitation, as long as it is self-consistent, would serve the metaphysical function Whitehead earlier proposed. But quite literally this is not good enough for him at the end of this book. He writes:

The limitation of God is his goodness. He gains his depth of actuality by his harmony of valuation. It is not true that God is in all respects infinite. If He were, He would be evil as well as good.⁽⁴⁴⁾

For Whitehead, who was not conventionally religious, this constitutes a personal faith commitment of the deepest sort. The fact of order in our world is empirically indisputable; the assertion that this order proves that God must exist as its explanation is metaphysically problematic; but the affirmation that God's own conceptual order and divine purpose excludes evil is religiously powerful. Many will resonate to this. I shall return to these themes in the final section on pluralism.

From Process and Reality

Process and Reality was Whitehead's master work. It is as difficult as it is rewarding, but in it Whitehead worked out important additions to his ideas about the importance of a god for his metaphysical system as well as the religious attractiveness of God. I hope in the following paragraphs to lay out the essential points without indulging in excessive Whiteheadian scholasticism.

I shall present this in terms of three functions Whitehead proposes in Process and Reality for his fully ripened concept of God. The first two I consider principally metaphysical in motivation; the third I find primarily religious.

By the time of Process and Reality, in which the ontological principle, which I cited earlier, was fully formulated, Whitehead was fully content with the idea of God as an actual entity. God was to be offered as a reason for things, and "no actual entity, then no reason."⁽⁴⁵⁾ Moreover, "God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification."⁽⁴⁶⁾ Therefore, God would share the bipolar character of all actual entities, consisting in a mental pole and a physical pole. The one thing God would not share with the finite actual entities is their "epochal" character, coming to an end and perishing. God is the one nontemporal actual entity, a divine permanency invoked for reasons we have seen above, to provide a constant background of perfectly harmonious ideal limitation to make it possible for finite entities to actualize themselves in intelligible social relationships. This key difference between God and all other actual entities (which Whitehead did not see as an "exception" to his metaphysical principles) is expressed by calling finite, temporal events "actual occasions" while God is described as the one actual entity which is not an occasion but a permanent feature (coeval with creativity and the eternal objects) with which the world of finite occasions is in constant mutual interaction.

Acknowledging the bipolarity of God, with both mental and physical poles, gave Whitehead a systematically coherent way of "locating" the realm of pure possibilities in the context of the ontological principle. Without God, the embarrassing question might arise: "But what to do with the eternal objects? They are offered as 'reasons' but they are not actual. Have you not violated your own ontological principle?" Whitehead's reply was to place them, as Abelard did with the Forms,⁽⁴⁷⁾ in the mind of God. The mental pole of God, which Whitehead called God's "Primordial Nature," grasps all possibilities in all their abstract relatedness. They are eternal and so is the envisagement. But this abstract realm, though invoked in systematic explanations, does not violate the ontological principle, since the mental pole of God is only one pole of a fully actual entity. The other, the physical pole, which Whitehead called God's "Consequent Nature," serves another function, to which I shall return in due course.

Whitehead has here made a reasonable use of his doctrine of God to avoid the unintelligibility of a free-floating realm of abstractions. Unlike Plato, Whitehead conceived of pure possibilities as abstractions, not as mysteriously powerful Forms, real and effective in themselves. If abstractions are going to have a status in reality at all, it seems they need a mind in which to exist as ideas. God, once introduced into a system (for whatever reasons) neatly serves the purpose of providing a cosmic mind to contemplate the universal realm of pure possibilities.

But is this the only possible solution? Full-throated Platonism would decry the need, denying the characterization of eternal objects as mere "possibilities" or "abstractions," and offering instead a Realm of Forms invested with a reality superior to any mere actualities struggling to embody them in space-time. Or, more modestly, we could compromise, acknowledging with Aristotle the importance of the formal aspect of things, insisting (in keeping with the ontological principle) that they can exist only in actual substances, but (parting company from Aristotle and Whitehead) proposing that all actual entities are finite and "epochal." That is, we might hold even more strongly than Whitehead to his rejection of "exceptions" to the metaphysical principles and argue that all actual entities are actual occasions. This would retain the benefit of a "locus" for ideal possibilities, in the mental poles of the finite entities making up the world, while avoiding serious puzzles introduced by the notion of a "nontemporal" entity. Such an entity would by definition be a contemporary to all occasions, but Whitehead strongly rejects causal relations between contemporaries. How could a nontemporal entity interact with temporal occasions? God's mental pole seems eternally occupied with unchanging contemplation and incapable of temporal activity, but God's physical pole, if lacking the "epochal" grasping that could place it in some "given actual world,"⁽⁴⁸⁾ is temporally coextensive with a world made up of an endless sequence of contemporary occasions and so excluded from causal influence.

Being rid of these puzzles would be a significant advantage, but the disadvantage of losing a central mind, devoted to timeless contemplation of the eternal objects in their primordial togetherness, is that all pure possibilities might never be thought together at once in this way. In a universe made up entirely of finite entities, nothing would guarantee it. Would this be a serious loss? Whitehead was sure that it would be, as we have seen. He was afraid that without a harmonious background of contemplated possibilities there could never be a world at all. Metaphysical intuitions may differ on this. If finite entities, no matter how minimal their mental capacities, are capable of prehending one another, including the real possibilities incorporated in their immediate "given world," and if more highly evolved entities with powerful mental poles are fit to entertain alternatives to physically presented possibilities, especially when aided by sophisticated linguistic symbols, does there really need to be a central envisioning at all? The possibilities would be the same, whether centrally envisioned or not. Whitehead does not suggest that God's contemplation alters them in any way. Perhaps the loss of this function for God would not be devastating, after all.

But at this point Whitehead adds further functions, related but not quite identical. These I plan to treat together. They are the functions of God in launching and luring every actual event toward the actuality it becomes. (1) Launching. Whitehead holds that every actual occasion begins with a "subjective aim," an ideal for what it might become. This ideal is present from the very beginning of concrescence, guiding what will be excluded from the immediate environment through negative prehensions as well as offering a goal of harmony for those prehensions that are positively included in the rising of an occasion out of its predecessor world.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Whitehead attributes this primordial aim to the good purpose of God to maximize the quality of each concrescent individual entity. But, according to Whitehead, God does not leave it at that. (2) Luring. In every entity there comes a phase within the concrescent moment in which the given physical environment is compared to what might be but is not. This is the phase of "conceptual reversion" in which relevant alternative possibilities are entertained by the actualizing event. Here, too, God is at work as a lure, offering from the bottomless store of pure possibilities the relevant ones that might make for a richer outcome. At first Whitehead describes this as something that just happens, making novelty possible in a world that would otherwise merely repeat what it finds. But later he adds, "In conformity with the ontological principle, this [process] can be [explained] only by reference to some actual entity.⁽⁵⁰⁾

Every eternal object has entered into the conceptual feelings of God. Thus, a more fundamental account must ascribe the reverted conceptual feeling in a temporal subject to its conceptual feeling derived . . . from the hybrid physical feeling of the relevancies conceptually ordered in God's experience. In this way, by the recognition of God's characterization of the creative act, a more complete rational explanation is attained. The Category of Reversion is then abolished; and Hume's principle of the derivation of conceptual experience from physical experience remains without any exception.⁽⁵¹⁾

Whitehead is pleased to be able to side for once with Hume, and also to achieve a still tighter system by tying conceptual reversion to God's activity. But neither of these motives are strictly compelling. Hume's authority is not absolute, but even if we accept his strict principle here, Hume never denied that ideas can lead to other ideas. The phase of conceptual reversion could be understood as "relations of ideas," one idea suggesting its opposite, or some complex new idea not created ex nihilo but mentally constructed out of available conceptual materials.⁽⁵²⁾ Furthermore, the ontological principle only calls for explanation in terms of actual entities. But there is already an actual entity present: namely, the concrescing event itself. Calling in God is not necessitated by the principle. If God is available in the system anyway, then this is a possible use. It tidies up loose ends and ties otherwise unrelated matters more closely together, legitimate aims of all theorizing. But these functions of launching and luring by themselves are hardly enough to require that God be introduced in the first place. The rising of a subjective aim in a new entity is no more mysterious than the rising of a new entity out of creativity's relentless drive. Perhaps, in a phrase from Religion in the Making, this could be understood as "creativity with a purpose,"⁽⁵³⁾ the "purpose," tendency, or vector always being toward maximal achievement of harmony in complexity. Subjective aim need not be externally imposed for each new moment of creativity. It might instead be implicit in the meaning of creativity itself. Similarly, conceptual reversion need not be accounted for by divine spoon-feeding from outside the mental pole. It might simply be the sort of thing that minds do, namely, entertain ideal alternatives to what is given. The "relevance" of these alternatives could be provided by context, both physical and (in high orders of mentality) symbolic. The syntax of language, as anyone who loves to read dictionaries knows, can lead far into the realms of the purely possible. Entities lacking language must remain closer to "home," the physically given.

One final function for Whitehead's God in Process and Reality relates, appropriately, to "last things," understood in several senses. In one sense it refers to the final phase of an actual occasion's concrescence. This has the theoretical advantage of rounding out a role for God at every stage of concrescence. At the launching (opening) phase, God provides the entity's subjective aim. At the luring (developing) phase, God offers ideal richness for possible novel harmonies. And now at the leaving (objectifying) phase, God offers special divine preservation for whatever positive the occasion manages to achieve. Actual occasions, as we have seen, are moments of subjectivity. They "perish" as subjectivity as soon as they achieve full objective actuality. As Whitehead puts it, "In the organic philosophy an actual entity has 'perished' when it is complete."⁽⁵⁴⁾ But this perishing is only as something for itself. Once it perishes as a subject, weaving incompatible possibilities into a self-consistent actuality, it becomes available as an object with definite achieved characteristics on which future occasions can build. If its novel achievements are prehended by successive moments and incorporated into a sequence of satisfactions, perhaps even further enhanced, this reiteration of the initial occasion constitutes its pragmatic usefulness and its "objective immortality." As Whitehead says, "The pragmatic use of the actual entity, constituting its static life, lies in the future. The creature perishes and is immortal. The actual entities beyond it can say, 'It is mine'."⁽⁵⁵⁾

In contrast to its dynamic life as subjective, the occasion ends by becoming "superjective," giving itself to the future; but as subjective -- as a value for itself -- it is no more. The inevitable fact of futurity (not as actual, of course, but as the inescapable indefinite domain of creativity yet to occur) is vaguely felt in every present as a vector, assuring that present achievements mean more than simply present enjoyment. For some this could be enough: to enjoy the intrinsic values of achieving while they are subjective and also to anticipate the instrumental value of these achievements when they will have become objective. Whether this is "enough" or not, however, is a matter of judgment. On the negative side, if "objective immortality" is all we can expect, then there can be no guarantees that one's hard-won achievements will prevail in the self-determining future. Successor occasions may ignore or lose or distort what for them will be data to be processed in their own coming to actuality. Then, the subjective values having perished, the pragmatic values unutilized, there would be nothing left of those bright moments of novelty once woven with creative excitement on the loom of possibilities.

To guard against this sad demise of the "last things" bequeathed by actual entities to an uncertain future, Whitehead argues that God can and does take up these last things into the divine self and make them lasting. This is the function of the "Consequent Nature" of God introduced earlier. God, in keeping with the pattern of all actual entities, is bipolar, with both mental and physical functions. While the analogue of our mental pole, expressed in God's Primordial Nature, forever envisions the eternal objects in all their intricacies of relatedness, God's analogue of our physical pole feels the world's many concrescing entities, takes all their achievements into the Consequent Nature, and makes an indescribably rich harmony from them all, making of the Many, One. Then this pattern of cosmic achievement is reflected back again to the world in its myriad moments of individual creativity in which the One reverts to Many in a never-ending conversation between God and the world. In one phase the world is "many" in its subjective, self-determining moments; in the next phase the world is "one" in God's benevolent patterning, which always weaves the best out of the superjective heritage bequeathed by the many. This guarantees that the heedless future will not say the last word about last things. Every genuinely positive achievement of finite entities will persist, somehow, in the Consequent Nature of God, not only adding intrinsically to the beauty of the divine experience but also becoming pragmatically available again within God's lure to the temporal world when circumstances once more are right.

Reflections and Extensions

This vision of beauty is itself a beautiful vision. Perhaps its sublime scale and endless rhythmic balance are enough to justify it aesthetically. Perhaps the encouragement toward the good it offers concerning our individual "last things," where everything worthy lasts, is enough to justify it morally. Perhaps the reassurance it offers regarding a cosmos in which there are no "last," or final, things, but always fresh resurgences of creativity grounded in endless permanent possibility and good purpose is enough to justify it religiously. I personally admire the vision, but I find no compelling reason to affirm it, even in a basically Whiteheadian worldview.

If we are not to make God a metaphysical exception, it is extremely difficult to see how God's Consequent Nature can prehend the finite entities that make up the "many" of the world. Physical prehension is normally of the objective world in one's immediate past. But God, as the alleged nontemporal actual entity, is prior to every finite moment of concrescent energy. Nothing is supposed actual prior to God. Moreover, contemporaries are simply out of causal relationship to one another. God is contemporary with all temporal entities. Therefore God is simply out of causal relationship to the "many" that make up the world. God's prehension of the world cannot be by physical feelings. It is worse than incoherent, it is contradictory to take the normal metaphysical principles and apply them without making God an exception.

Other solutions have been attempted. Some abandon the concept of God as a single, nontemporal entity, making God, too, a train of "epochal" occasions, thus allowing one or another phase of the "many" to be in the past of one or another of God's concrescent moments. Others rely on the concept of hybrid physical prehension as God's method of feeling the contemporary world, implying that God feels the "many" by a sort of mental telepathy in which the physical drops out of sight. This requires a good bit of creative theoretical extension of a concept, though epistemologically important, that was barely mentioned by Whitehead himself.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Given a religious commitment to a theistic religious world model, these and other tactics may help to diminish the cognitive dissonances implicit in Whitehead's own doctrine of God. Other friendly critics have much worthwhile to add to the conversation.⁽⁵⁷⁾ My point does not depend, however, on detailed assessment of such theoretical rescue operations. My point is that for all their acknowledged beauty, and for all the plausibility that further creative speculation may bring, these proposed metaphysical functions for God are not theoretically compelling, even within a generally ecological worldview inspired by Whitehead.

Although Whitehead made several references to God in his later writings, no additional metaphysical functions were proposed. Still, before we move on, it is worthwhile reflecting on a passage in The Function of Reason, originally lectures given in March 1929 at Princeton University, just three months after the completion of Process and Reality. In these lectures Whitehead deploys his metaphysical categories in an argument from physical cosmology that resonates today with discussions of the anthropic principle mentioned earlier. Whitehead lived before the day of "Big Bang" cosmology and did not couch his remarks in terms of "fine tuning" of physical constants without which there could have been no stable universe, no solar system, no planet Earth, and no intelligent species reflecting on the remarkable coincidences that made such reflection possible. But Whitehead's general wonder at the evolutionary career of the physical order, leading to greater complexity despite the pressures of entropy, is of the same sort. It leads, in the same way, to a rejection of explanation by coincidence alone. In this variant within the Design argument family, Whitehead writes:

The material universe has contained in itself, and perhaps still contains, some mysterious impulse for its energy to run upwards. This impulse is veiled from our observation, so far as concerns its general operation. But there must have been some epoch in which the dominant trend was the formation of protons, electrons, molecules, the stars.⁽⁵⁸⁾

It is tempting for doctrinaire materialists (whom Whitehead here calls "the physiologists") to ignore or deny the problem of accounting for the physical universe's trend toward complexity, life, and mind. But this is bad theorizing.

The universe, as construed solely in terms of the efficient causation of purely physical interconnections, presents a sheer, insoluble contradiction. The orthodox doctrine of the physiologists demands that the operations of living bodies be explained solely in terms of the physical system of physical categories. This system within its own province, when confronted with the empirical facts, fails to include these facts apart from an act of logical suicide. The moral to be drawn from the general survey of the physical universe with its operations viewed in terms of purely physical laws, and neglected so far as they are inexpressible in such terms, is that we have omitted some general counter-agency.⁽⁵⁹⁾

Whitehead's analogy is organic. As mentality is to living systems, so some "general counter-agency" is to the physical universe. Something more than is known about physical categories needs to be added to account for the "appetition towards the upward trend."⁽⁶⁰⁾ Appeals to the "physical constants" will not suffice, since these are exactly what need to be explained. That they are "fine tuned" to such an astonishing degree, Whitehead did not know; but he would not have been surprised. At Princeton he did not mention the word, "God," but the cosmic actual entity who launches and lures each new moment of creative self-actualization toward its maximum potential for complex harmony was clearly implicit in what he said next:

This counter-agency in its operation throughout the physical universe is too vast and diffusive for our direct observation. We may acquire such power as the result of some advance. But at present, as we survey the physical cosmos, there is no direct intuition of the counter-agency to which it owes its possibility of existence as a wasting finite organism.⁽⁶¹⁾

The cosmos is a "wasting finite organism," for Whitehead, but full of a hard-to-detect agency pressing constantly upward against the downward trend to dissolution. What is most remarkable is that this "counter-agency" has been winning! The universe has not gone out with a whimper into its entropic death. Instead there has been more and more structure, complexity, novelty. Most complex of all, so far as we now know, is the human organism, capable of reflective symbolic thinking. And perhaps some day -- Whitehead seems to hold out this hope -- our species may acquire the power (by some technological "advance") to place this "counter-agency," God, under "direct observation."

I cannot claim to know what Whitehead had in mind at this point. It is hard to imagine what sort of instruments would be capable of observing even the quasi physical Consequent Nature, but much less the deficiently actual Primordial Nature, through which God, on this theory, works to launch and lure the world's "many" toward increased complexity in the rhythmic embrace described in Process and Reality. But it is quite possible to imagine some observations that might tend to confirm that the world contains a pressure toward life and mind. Astronomers are hard at work on them today. Planets with liquid water would increase the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe. Explorations of Mars could confirm that life once appeared on that planet. If so, this would reduce the chances that the appearance of life on Earth was sheer accident, despite being completely unpredictable from what we know about electrons, protons, molecules, and even crystals.⁽⁶²⁾ Radio telescopes are being trained on distant stars to listen for signals of intelligent life. If observations of this sort should succeed in finding intelligence elsewhere in the universe, then both the anthropic principle (broadened appropriately) and Whitehead's postulated counter-agency would be greatly strengthened in credibility. It seems likely that in one hundred years, at the turn of the twenty-second century, the human race will have quite a good sense of whether or not life and intelligence are widely supported in the universe. If they are, as I personally hope, the ecological worldview of creative, relational, beauty-generating energy will be all the more adequate to the facts. If they are not, it may be necessary to think more deeply about what it means to live on a uniquely kalogenic planet, bright with value against a dark background.

These are questions for the future to decide. Humanity has already begun to spend significant resources on answering them. If we find that Earth is not alone in nurturing life or even intelligence, nothing since Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton will have had an equivalent impact on our worldview. But even if this happens, it will not count, quite, as an empirical confirmation of God. God is a possible explanation. Whitehead, though he did not name names at Princeton, clearly believed that the best explanation of the impulse for the world's "energy to run upwards" is God, omnipresent, nontemporal, functioning as appetition and lure. But, as we have seen in the previous discussion of this point, that is not the only possible explanation. Given creativity, the energy of making new actuality, and given possibilities, then finite entities themselves in the world's character as "many" could embody the thrust to novelty. The physical categories would need to be radically revised, on this hypothesis, to include the subjective aim toward ever greater complexity and value that is currently omitted from physicists' accounts of fundamental entities. But kalogenesis, even the anthropic principle, does not need to rely on a centralized, coordinating "counter-agency." Even Whitehead was ready to call the needed agency "diffusive" as well as "vast." God is an answer, but not the only answer, to the improbabilities surrounding the evolution of life and mind.

Reasons why this conclusion could be a good thing, both for postmodern world religion and for wider ethics grounded in personalistic organicism, will be offered in conclusion.
 
 

The point of the preceding wrestle with Whitehead was not to discredit his views on God, but simply to show that they are not theoretically coercive, any more than are the other, more familiar arguments from the various families of theistic "proofs" examined earlier. When wrestling with so powerful a thinker, one hopes at best for a draw. If this was achieved, then new vistas open toward a postmodern pluralism of religious traditions -- not lazy relativism, not cynical agnosticism, not dogmatism, either theistic or atheistic, but respectful openness to alternative religious world models (RWMs) from within a positive framework that can support mutual respect and ethical cooperation in a dangerously fractured world.

I should briefly specify what I mean by "RWM"s. Taken in reverse order, the three component words tell the tale: (1) an RWM is a model, which indicates that it stands for or represents something else, (2) an RWM represents the world, which means that it is comprehensive in its reference to the entire universe, and (3) an RWM is religious, which entails that it is emotionally "hot," engaging intense valuational affect. All three components are necessary conditions. Lacking intense value resonance, we might have an interesting metaphysical model -- a purely theoretical world hypothesis -- but we would not quite have an RWM. Lacking full comprehensiveness, we might have a powerful metaphor to shape thought and feeling in some domain, but again not a full RWM. And without referential function, we might have a strong organizing image, an image capable of guiding attitudes and shaping actions, but unless it is used for guiding thought as well, it is not an RWM.⁽⁶³⁾

By enlarging the scale of discussion to RWMs, and by commending an ecologically sensitive, comprehensive worldview -- personalistic organicism -- hospitable both to theistic and nontheistic interpretations, I am hoping to pry the door open to a new, much wider, twenty-first century ecumenical movement. This would build on the achievements of twentieth century discussions among Christians within the World Council of Churches and beyond it. It would lay the basis for serious rapprochement not just among Christians, Eastern and Western, Catholic and Protestant, but also among theists, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other. Not just among such theists, but also between theists and polytheists (as Native American, African tribal, and some popular modes of Hindu religion present themselves), and between theists and religious atheists (as classical Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism may be understood). Not just among the acknowledged religions, but also between these and functioning nontraditional religions, intensely valued naturalisms and humanisms committed to social, ecological, and economic justice. Wiccans, too, embracing the divinity of the Earth, might join the dialogue, as might the environmental romantics who worship Gaia.

This sounds fanciful -- and it is! New possibilities are always introduced to the world by fancy, the power of mentality (a) to take account of what is not embodied in the immediate environment, (b) to value these possibilities "up," (c) to entertain them repeatedly, elaborating and improving them, and (d) eventually to arrange the actual world so that room is made for such fancies in actual conversations, in actual efforts to realize them, and in actual institutions created to preserve such achievements and amplify them. There were dreamers behind the creation of the World Council of Churches, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church. Before institutions materialize out of dreams powered by purpose, all such ideas seem fanciful.

In this case, what is needed to support the dream of wider postmodern ecumenism is a fundamental, independently defensible worldview (1) capable of being firm enough to support strong, life-nurturing, cooperative ethics, both social and environmental, while (2) capable of being flexible enough, at the same time, to permit alternative specific modelings by quite different traditions and imagery. This is not a wholly new conception. William James wrote seminally of the religious "over-beliefs" that outgrow their theoretical foundations.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Every religion, as far as pure theory is concerned, goes too far, beyond what is supportable by common evidence and reasoning. But this "too far" need not be the everlasting source of conflict. It can instead be the occasion for celebrations of specific historical traditions and the stimulus to wider consciousness among all participants.

I once urged that the fortunate underdetermination of RWMs by underlying metaphysical theory be noticed and embraced in a limited pluralism I called "Polymythic Organicism."⁽⁶⁵⁾ My mother tried to dissuade me, not from the concept itself, but from the jaw-breaking terminology. She shrewdly suggested that I use the acronym "PMO" instead. I rejected this at the time, on grounds that it sounded too much like a toothpaste additive. (Mother's riposte: "Good! Then it might sell!") Alas, Mother knew best, as usual, at least on the unsalability of the full phrase. I have heard, among other near-misses, my view labeled "Polymorphous Perversity" (à la Freud), but hardly ever what I intended. Therefore I now gracefully retreat. Let my wider ecumenical dream be known as "PMO," then, -- or, better, "PMPO" (Polymythic Personalistic Organicism) to embrace more than "organicism" alone but, more specifically, the personalistic organicism I have been attempting in more recent decades, and especially in my last three books, to define.

Volumes could -- and should -- be written, detailing the ways in which various major RWMs can, and cannot, be articulated in the spirit of PMPO. In the next few paragraphs I shall make just a few sweeping gestures in that direction.

The most advanced work on this program, showing the capacity of Whitehead's philosophy of organism to undergird the living imagery of current religious faith, is to be found in the writings and conferences of the process theologians. These comprise an extraordinarily able group of thinkers, broad in interests, irenic in temperament, committed to Christianity, mainly liberal Protestants, nimble theorizers well-versed in Whiteheadian literature. Many are associated with the Center for Process Studies located at Claremont Divinity School in California. They refine their ideas and communicate publicly through the respected scholarly journal, Process Studies. A substantial number of these men and women, clergy and lay, inside and outside academia, can be found in far-flung locations in America, Europe, and Asia.

Process theologians, for the most part, value Whitehead's thoughtful weaving of the concept of God into his philosophical vision. There are in-house disagreements over the question of how strictly to hew to Whitehead's original texts about God. The pioneer work of Charles Hartshorne, deeply Whiteheadian in spirit and a creative philosopher in his own right, has served as a lodestone attracting many capable theological followers. Hartshorne was the first to address seriously the weighty theoretical problems, described in the previous section, posed by the lack in Whitehead's God of "epochal" moments by which the world could in principle be prehended. Hartshorne solved these to his satisfaction by making a major change in the doctrine of God: in keeping with the metaphysical principles for all other entities, God's personal identity would be carried by a sequence of occasions. God's infinity would be expressed only in the Primordial Nature (which is deficiently actual); God's Consequent Nature would be actual but finite.

Hartshorne wrote as a philosopher, mainly concerned for theoretical consistency and coherence. John B. Cobb, Jr., although highly gifted philosophically, wrote instead as a theologian deeply versed in Whitehead and Hartshorne, above all concerned to find an adequate vehicle for Christian thinking and ultimately for Christian faith grounded in mental integrity. His A Christian Natural Theology⁽⁶⁶⁾ represents a milestone in synthesis. It remains the classic locus for interpreting a Christian doctrine of God in terms of Whiteheadian philosophy of organism. Beyond this, addressing the still more specific centrality of Jesus Christ in Christian faith, Cobb's The Structure of Christian Existence⁽⁶⁷⁾ provides a basis for thinking about the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit.

From the perspective of PMPO, Cobb's enterprise and the flood of works within the literature of process theology remain highly interesting and legitimate. The conceptual apparatus for interpreting the Christian RWM is clearly supported by personalistic organicism. It is possible to make a strong case for God from this perspective, as both Whitehead and Hartshorne chose to do, as well as most of their followers. I believe, moreover, that the theistic case is stronger when models of Christian theism are articulated by Whiteheadian theory than when they are interpreted through other theoretical vehicles, such as Platonism, Aristotelianism, or Heideggerianism. There is a closer, more natural relationship to our scientific understanding of the evolving universe when the philosophy of organism is allowed to provide the underlying interpretation. If a concept of God can be plausibly shown to play a key anchoring and stimulating role vis à vis our universe and the flux of our own living experience, so much the better for Christianity. Here are abundant resources for faith seeking understanding. In any wider ecumenical conversations carried on in the spirit of PMPO, Christian process theologians, their friends, sympathizers, and critics, too,⁽⁶⁸⁾ will have a prominent part.

Judaism and Islam are in principle open to similar interpretation, but in practice the dialogue has not moved strongly in this direction. Both are strongly monotheistic traditions, for which the single God of Whitehead, in endless, detailed dialogue with the world, would make a good theoretical substrate. But there are many historical particularities in both religions that would require internal reflection and in some cases painful accommodations. God as "Jehovah" is sharply criticized in Whiteheadian theory, for example; but in the Jewish tradition it is also held that God's "still small voice" can come as a whisper rather than a roar (I Kings 19: vss. 11-12). Jewish thinking is multifaceted and highly sophisticated. Perhaps Jews will come willingly to the ecumenical table. For Muslims, it will be still more difficult, since the doctrines of God's absolute power and inscrutable will have long been central to most varieties of Islam. A "Whiteheadian Muslim" sounds, at the moment, like an oxymoron. But there is virtue in clarifying deep differences as well as in finding points of accord. From outside the tradition it is difficult to assess the amount of flexibility of interpretation that might exist now, or later. History shows that these matters can be fluid.

Most of the world's dominant religions are forms of monotheism, but polytheisms are also widespread. The spirit of PMPO will have no trouble inviting these modes of spirituality, as well, to the wider ecumenical table. In our own culture the polytheistic gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome have vanished, but David L. Miller finds much contemporary polytheism to celebrate.⁽⁶⁹⁾ As we saw in the previous section, monotheism is a possible but not a compelling aspect of Whiteheadian organicism. Perhaps the universe is not centrally organized, after all. Perhaps there are entities, with minds and purposes, who have evolved beyond individual human minds. This would require some theoretical work to show how this could be conceived, but the notion is not entirely outlandish. Samuel Alexander (1859-1938), the distinguished British philosopher, insisted that we keep our minds open to the strong likelihood that the "nisus" toward complexity and higher orders of emergent traits may result in beings who would be as gods to us.⁽⁷⁰⁾ The idea is speculative, of course, but that is what is called for in any postmodern ecumenical movement. Let speculation soar!

Huge numbers of religious persons, especially those often overlooked in Africa, have a characteristically profound sense of temporality for which the philosophy of organism could serve as clarifying articulator.⁽⁷¹⁾ The opposite is the case for Hindu polytheists. Here is another case where ecumenical dialogue, if attempted, will reveal essential differences. South Asia's characteristic denial of the reality of time will challenge every "process" interpretation of Hindu RWMs that hang on the illusory status of history. It is not clear whether this divide can be bridged at all. Certainly organicism of any sort depends on taking time seriously. There is no such thing as a "timeless organism." The vision of the universe itself is relational and pulsational. Much will depend on whether Hindus themselves come to understand their many treasured stories set in narrative time as more precious and authoritative than their also revered theories about time as maya, mere tricky illusion. Postmodern ecumenical dialogue may merely serve to clarify insurmountable differences at this point. But this too might be healthful for all concerned.

"Religious atheism" sounds odd to Western ears accustomed to the monopoly of monotheisms in our, and immediately neighboring cultures. But for classical Buddhists it is not odd at all. Buddhism in its oldest form (and in Theravada, Zen, and other expressions) has no conceptual place for God or gods. Some forms of Buddhism are functionally polytheistic, and would be seated at that part of the ecumenical table, but the purest forms are atheistic. In the spirit of PMPO, they also would be welcome. One of the fortunate aspects of our finding that theism is not theoretically necessary in personalistic organicism is the special welcome this gives to Buddhist spirituality. Theism is a plausible path to take, as we saw; but the judgment of atheism is also fully to be honored. Again, Cobb has been a leader in Christian-Buddhist dialogue. There is much to talk about between Buddhists, convinced that there is no substantial, enduring self, and Whiteheadians, agreed that the self is best understood as a series of perishing moments. The ground is well-prepared for interpretation of the Buddhist ontology of self by the philosophy of organism. Buddhist "decentralized," nontheistic spirituality is also plausibly articulated within personalistic organicism. Other admirable work on ecumenical outreach, complementing the pioneering done by Cobb in Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism⁽⁷²⁾ and by Masao Abe in Zen and Western Thought,⁽⁷³⁾ has been done by Jay B. McDaniel, whose career has combined service under a Zen master with academic instruction from Cobb. McDaniel reports that at first he hoped that Buddhist Emptiness could be equated, somehow, with God, but: "The more I have talked with Zen Buddhists, the more it has seemed the truths to which they have awakened are different from those which enliven Christian faith."⁽⁷⁴⁾ A truly broadened ecumenical movement will not attempt to translate everything valuable into God-talk. The possibility of a rich atheistic spirituality is enhanced by the open texture of personalistic organicism, as ready to respect the absence as the presence of God.

Not all forms of atheism are recognizably religious, as Buddhism is. But on my understanding of "religious," as characterized by maximally intense and comprehensive valuations, it is none the less true that some apparently secular atheists are in fact expressing their own mode of spirituality and therefore deserve a place at the ecumenical table. I take this to be the case particularly for dedicated reformers in quest of political or economic justice for the oppressed. As it happened, the civil rights movement for the liberation of African-Americans was led by theists. But socialist or communist reformers may burn with a similar intensity without a God to meet in prayer. Here the personalism of personalistic organicism takes special prominence, accentuating the unique value of persons, rich or poor, male or female. In a postmodern ecumenical movement, the spirituality that cares widely and deeply for justice will deserve a place among other modes. Personalistic organicism stresses the underlying relatedness of morally significant beings to one another and, within the relatedness, the intense importance of the special kinds of experience of which human persons are capable. Those whose religion is to see and honor caring, empathy, and justice will legitimately participate in the dialogue, with or without God or gods, with or without temples, gongs, or rituals. I am proud to acknowledge my father's risky pioneering in this ecumenical direction through a chapter, "Light for Communists and Other Pagans," in his delightfully controversial book, The Sun and the Umbrella.⁽⁷⁵⁾

There are others whose most intense and comprehensive values are found not so much in the relationships between people, through social forms of justice, as in the relationships among people and the natural entities that make up the environment. That mode of spirituality needs to be drawn to the ecumenical table, too, and in the spirit of PMPO will have an honored place. Personalistic organicism offers a theoretical foundation for the strong sense of intrinsic value in nature that fuels religious naturalism, such as that of Ursula Goodenough.⁽⁷⁶⁾ The standard worldview of modernity has drained value from nature, reserving all worth for human valuers even while creating dilemmas for understanding the place in nature even for that restricted domain of human mentality.⁽⁷⁷⁾ In legitimate reaction against this dessication of the springs of value, romantic spiritualities regarding nature rise to counter this terrible dryness. Personalistic organicism can well interpret the RWMs of such religious naturalism. The feast is set. Let those who hunger approach!

But not everyone is welcome. Even PMPO, though widely pluralistic, is not infinitely hospitable. Personalistic organicism, if it stands for something, must also stand against something. Only in this way will it demonstrate its difference from sheer relativism. Who, then, will not be welcome at the ecumenical table? First, quite obviously, radical dogmatists will exclude themselves. Ecumenical dialogue is not a proper context for single vision, for claims to exclusive truth. By the same token, but at the opposite extreme, radical skeptics will not come. They exclude themselves from the start by discounting or scorning the quest itself, for which the dialogue is set. To be totally sure of the answers, and to be totally sure that there are no answers, both guarantee missing the feast.

Other positions will be excluded because of their content. Satanism, for example, if understood as the worship of evil and ugliness, will not allow interpretation by a worldview in which kalogenesis, the creating of beauty, is the universal and highest aim. Spiritualities of egoism, likewise, will not find any intelligible interpretation in a relational, ecological ontology where all things are to some extent part of each other, and where sympathy and empathy are the experiential roots for growing the special beauties of moral society. Likewise turned away will be all religions resting on exploitation, whether of other human beings (as in slavery) or of the natural environment. Exploitation and oppression are indivisible. Personalistic organicism will speak for the oppressed, but not the oppressor, for the exploited, not the exploiter. Therefore, there is no weak "anything goes" permissiveness in the pluralism of PMPO. Ugliness and evil occur. In a spirit of "mutual affirmation and admonition,"⁽⁷⁸⁾ the ecumenism grounded in personalistic organism will face this fact with sorrow and determination. Each participant at the generous table of postmodern ecumenism will vow -- each with a characteristic vow, and each to a characteristic ultimate -- that ugliness and evil will not be allowed to have the last word.
 
 

After reading this far, my colleagues of the American Theological Society, who are overwhelmingly theist by conviction as well as profession, may well wish to pin me down on my own personal stance toward theism. "Are you one of us, or are you not?"

My answer: I am a personalistic organicist whose view of ultimate reality is fully open to expression through the great RWMs of the Judeo-Christian tradition that once nurtured, and still surround, me. I retain membership in a mainstream Protestant church; I love to sing the hymns of faith; I do not shrink from the language of God's purposes, God's love, God's judgment on injustice. My senses and my moral intuitions respond positively to the glory of stained glass renderings of religious themes. I reverberate to the organ's glad sounds. In Jesus I find depths of inspiration as to what God's love concretely means. I am not "twice born." I feel secure in my identity as a liberal Protestant Christian personalistic organicist. I have not so much "chosen" my RWMs as affirmed them -- much as I affirm my "thrownness" into history at a given time and place, with a given gender and race, language and family.

I do not find my Christian "over-beliefs" to be required by my personalistic organicism, but, rather, to provide beauty-generating prisms through which human society and the natural world glow with special meaning. The beauty of this glow makes me want to share the vision, commend it, refine what makes it beautiful, hone off what gets in the way. If others of ecological good will and concern for social justice interpret their world through different organizing imagery, whether Christian or not, theistic or not, I want to join causes with them without waiting to coordinate doctrines. I want to see what they see and help them share what I see, in hopes of mutual enrichment. The more we share, the more we are aware. Approached non-coercively, such heightened awareness can lead to celebrations of spiritual discovery. This fresh awareness can help those united by fundamental values and at ease within mutually acknowledged ties of diversity, to work more effectively than ever before against cruelty, heedlessness, and injustice, wherever the beauties of the organic world and the fragile splendors of the personal are threatened.
 
 

1. Part of Chapter 6 of Living and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern Ethics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001) and edited for presentation at a plenary session of the American Theological Society annual meeting, April 21, 2001, Princeton, New Jersey.

2. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason. In Kant Selections, trans. Max Müller, ed. T. M. Greene (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929) pp. 245-46.

3. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. In Introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. & ed. By Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1948), p. 25.

4. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) p. 19.

5. Aquinas, op. cit., p. 27.

6. Kant, op. cit., p. 259.

7. William Paley, Natural Theology: Selections, ed. Frederick Ferré, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963).

8. Lecomte du Noüy, Human Destiny (New York: Longmans, Green, 1947), pp. 26-39.

9. P. C. W. Davies, The Accidental Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Arthur Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming -- Natural, Divine, and Human (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Nancey Murphy & George F. R. Ellis, On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).

10. Paley, op. cit., p. 52.

11. Paley, op. cit., pp. 61-68.

12. Frederick Ferré, "Theodicy and the Status of Animals," in American Philosophical Quarterly, 1986, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 23-34.

13. Frederick Ferré, Knowing and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern Epistemology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 314-73.

14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), pp. 128-136.

15. Ibid., p. 129.

16. Ibid., p. 130.

17. Loc. cit.

18. Frederick Ferré, "The Use and Abuse of Theological Arguments," in The Journal of Religion, 1961, Vol. XLI, No. 3., p. 189.

19. Frederick Ferré, Being and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern Metaphysics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 60-62.

20. Ibid., pp. 339-82.

21. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 36.

22. Ferré, Being and Value, op. cit., pp. 107-82.

23. Ibid., pp. 363-70.

24. Nels F. S. Ferré, The Christian Understanding of God (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951).

25. Frederick Ferré, Language, Logic and God (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961); and, co-authored with Kent Bendall, Exploring the Logic of Faith (New York: Association Press, 1992).

26. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, op. cit., p. 173.

27. Ibid,, p. 174.

28. Loc. cit.

29. Ibid., p. 178.

30. Loc. cit.

31. Loc. cit.

32. Ferré, Being and Value, op. cit., pp. 75-98.

33. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, op. cit., pp. 173-74.

34. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 19.

35. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926).

36. Ibid., p. 91.

37. Ibid., p. 92.

38. Ibid., p. 97.

39. Ibid., p. 100.

40. Ibid. p. 101.

41. Ibid., p. 115.

42. Ibid., p. 92.

43. Ibid., p. 149.

44. Ibid., p. 147.

45. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 19.

46. Ibid., p. 343.

47. Ferré, Knowing and Value, op. cit., p. 76.

48. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit. p. 66.

49. Ibid., p. 224.

50. Ibid., p. 250.

51. Loc. cit.

52. Ferré, Knowing and Value, op. cit., pp. 146-56.

53. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, op. cit., p. 114.

54. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., pp. 81-82.

55. Ibid., p. 82.

56. Ibid., p. 308; see also Ferré, Knowing and Value, op. cit., pp. 281-84.

57. E.g. Robert C. Neville Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2^nd edition, 1995).

58. Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1929), p. 24.

59. Ibid. p. 25.

60. Ibid., p. 24.

61. Ibid., p. 25-26.

62. Holmes Rolston, III, Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) pp. 348-70.

63. Frederick Ferré, "Organizing Images and Scientific Ideals: Dual Sources for Contemporary Religious World Models" In Metaphor and Religion: Theolinguistics 2, ed. J. P. van Noppen (Brussels: Free University of Brussels, 1983), pp. 71-90.

64. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1902), pp. 503-9.

65. Frederick Ferré, Shaping the Future (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 109-21.

66. John B. Cobb, Jr., A Christian Natural Theology, based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965).

67. John B. Cobb, Jr., The Structure of Christian Existence (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967).

68. Robert C. Neville, Behind the Masks of God: An Essay Toward Comparative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).

69. David L. Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

70. Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity (New York: Humanities Press, 1920, two volumes).

71. Newell S. Booth, Jr., African Religions: A Symposium (New York: NOK Publishers, International 1977).

72. John B. Cobb, Jr., Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982).

73. Masao Abe, Zen and Western Thought, ed. William R. LaFleur. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985).

74. Jay B. McDaniel, Of God and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life( Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989), p. 93.

75. Nels F. S. Ferré, The Sun and the Umbrella (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953), pp. 127-56.

76. Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

77. Ferré, Being and Value, op. cit., pp. 107-82.

78. Keith F. Nickle & Timothy F. Lull, A Common Calling: The Witness of Our Reformation Churches in North America Today (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), p 66.