Ponder Anew 1!

David R. Larson            Loma Linda, California 

Observation:

 

Traditional Free Will Theism and the Ten Core Doctrines of Process Philosophy

by David R. Larson

 

How much difference persists between traditional free will theism and the kind of process philosophy that we find in the writings of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne when both are well formulated? Not much, I submit. 

This is a promising development because it suggests that these two schools of thought can cooperate with each other, and with some other theological orientations, in providing attractive and persuasive alternatives to what Alfred North Whitehead called "the deeper idolatry." This is the widespread tendency to depict God as a despotic dictator.

The following paragraphs support this claim by contending that traditional free will theism can be reformulated so as to receive at least 9.75 points on David Ray Griffin’s 10 point test for the minimal qualifications of process philosophy. Among other places, this list of "core doctrines" is available on pages 5-7 of Griffin’s Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), an excellent and detailed exposition.

Following Griffin and others, this discussion uses the expression "traditional free will theism" to distinguish a school of theological thought, whose features will become increasingly evident, from process philosophy, which is also a form of free will theism.  Nevertheless, when viewed from other angles, the alternative developed here appears much less "traditional" than more frequent forms of traditional free will theism.  This confirms Griffin's earlier observation that "traditional" free will theism can be adequate only if it becomes "untraditional."    

This inner transformation of traditional free will theism is both possible and desirable, particularly when considered from its own point of view.  The outcome is an alternative that is more traditional than process philosophy but less so than earlier and less coherent and adequate expressions of traditional free will theism.  Without losing itself, traditional free will theism benefits in many important ways from aligning itself more closely with process thought.    

Without hesitation, qualification or equivocation, traditional free will theism can and should affirm 9 of the 10 "core doctrines" of process philosophy as identified by Griffin. These are:

1. "The integration of science and religion into a single worldview."
2. "Hard-core commonsense notions as the ultimate test of the adequacy of a philosophical position."
3. "Whitehead’s nonsensationist doctrine of perception."
4. "Panexperientialism."
5. "All enduring individuals as serially ordered societies of momentary ‘occasions of experience.’"
6. "All actual entities have internal as well as external relations."
7. Please see below.
8. "Doubly Dipolar Theism."
9. "Cosmological support for the ideals needed by contemporary civilization."
10. "A distinction between verbal statements (sentences) and propositions and between both of these and propositional feelings."

Some may doubt that traditional free will theism can accept "core doctrine" # 6:  "All actual entities have internal as well as external relations."  The crucial question is whether God's relationship to a universe of some sort is constitutive of God and therefore "internal" to God in that sense.  Process philosophy usually says that for God this relationship is both necessary and essential, rather than contingent and accidental, often using the two technical terms interchangeably.  Using these words in the same way, traditional free will theism often says or implies that God's relationship to a universe of some sort is neither necessary nor essential.  

By taking greater advantage of the difference in the meanings of the relevant terms, it is possible for traditional free will theism to suggest that for God the the relationship to a universe of some sort is not necessary, at least not in a purely logical sense, but essential.  From this point of view, God's relationship to a universe of some sort is constitutive of God, as process philosophy holds.  Nevertheless, in harmony with the greater voluntarism of traditional free will theism, precisely how God is constituted is partially contingent upon God because in God there is, as Richard Rice puts it, an unparalleled coincidence of nature and will.  This suggests to me, but not necessarily to Rice, that God has never been and never will be "home alone" but is everlastingly related to a universe of some type that nevertheless depends upon God for its sheer actuality.   

From this point of view, it is questionable to account for God's relationship to any sort of universe without taking both God's nature and God's will into account.  In this way, traditional free will theism can agree with "core doctrine" # 6 that "all actual entities," including the sequence of occasions of experience that comprise God, "have internal as well as external relations" while offering a partially different explanation of why this is so. 

Even if 9 were as high a score as traditional free will theism could achieve on Griffin's 10 point test, this would be a respectable grade.  It deserves another .50 of a point for the half of "core doctrine" # 7 that it can also affirm, however. According to Griffin, this is "the Whiteheadian version of naturalistic theism, according to which a Divine Actuality acts variably but never supernaturally in the world."

By "supernaturalism" Griffin means "the idea of a divine being who could (and perhaps does) occasionally interrupt the world’s most fundamental causal processes." (21) Traditional free will theism does and should hold that the most basic laws of physics that apply in our cosmic epoch, and the most fundamental principles of metaphysics that pertain in every cosmic epoch, are both established and exemplified by God.  "Both" here means "both physics and metaphysics."  It also means "both established and exemplified by God." 

This is why traditional free will theism can and should reject "supernaturalism" as Griffin defines it. If it accepts this form of supernaturalism, traditional free will theism risks depicting God as contradicting what God establishes and exemplifies, something that all theological positions should be hesitant to do.

This rejection of supernaturalism as Griffin defines it leaves room for miracles, plenty of it. Contrary to David Hume in the eighteenth century and C. S. Lewis in the twentieth, even provisionally miracles should not be thought of as violations, interruptions or contradictions of the most basic organizing and operating principles of this and every cosmic epoch.  They should be understood either as violations of what we now know about these principles or as statistically infrequent occurrences that are explicable in principle, or, better yet, as events, such as the birth of a healthy baby, that rightly astonish and amaze us even when we understand much about them.

Here is what traditional free will theism can and should affirm in core doctrine # 7: "Although there is a divine actuality that influences human experience and, in fact, all finite beings, this divine influence never involves an interruption of the normal pattern of causal relations, being instead a natural dimension of this normal pattern." Here is what it cannot and should not affirm: "The reason for this absence of divine interruptions, furthermore, is metaphysical, not merely moral, being based on the fact that the fundamental God-World relation is fully natural, grounded in the very nature of things, not in a contingent divine decision." (6; emphasis in original)

The problem occurs in the second sentence’s last six words: "not in a contingent divine decision." Traditional free will theism can and should agree that the reason there are no supernatural interventions as Griffin defines them is "metaphysical, not merely moral" if it underlines very heavily the word "merely." It also can and should agree that "the fundamental God-World relation is fully natural" because, as Griffin elsewhere makes clear, in process philosophy "the fully natural" includes both the immanence and transcendence of God. The problem for traditional free will theism  is that in process philosophy none of this is thought to flow from "a contingent divine decision," a construal that underplays God's volition.

Nevertheless, depending upon what the word "contingent" means in this and related passages, even here more agreement may be possible between traditional free will theism and the ten core doctrines of process philosophy than it first appears. If "contingent" describes divine decisions that do not fully express God’s true nature, both metaphysical and moral, then traditional free will theism can and should agree with process theology  that, thankfully, they never occur.  

If, however the denial of "a contingent divine decision" means that in God’s own experience there is no top-down causality, such that God’s nature wholly informs God’s will but that God’s will in no sense informs God’s nature, if we can use such terms when speaking about God, then traditional free will theism cannot and should not agree. 

Because it seems contrary to so much else that process philosophy holds, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine that process philosophy intends to deny top-down causality in the experience of God. Contrary to process philosophy's mandates, this would make God an exception to rather than an exemplification of the basic metaphysical principles because all other living persons experience top-down causality to some degree.

All of this sets aside the fact that now and then Whitehead expressed himself in ways that can be understood to mean that he occasionally supposed that both the most basic laws of physics that apply to our cosmic epoch and the fundamental principles of metaphysics that pertain in every cosmic epoch are the result of a divine decision, something that should not be said of Hartshorne.  This is neither the general direction of Whitehead's thought nor the standard interpretation of it, however.     

In any case, as Griffin correctly pinpoints, the remaining key difference is that traditional free will theism holds that the creativity by which all actualities partially determine themselves is a divine gift whereas process philosophy usually holds that it is a given, even for God. He also holds that, although traditional free will theism moves in a helpful direction, it still is handicapped by four major problems. (220-223)

The first problem is that traditional free will theism often finds it difficult to address the problem of natural evil because it so often presumes that only human beings possess any degree of libertarian freedom. Griffin rightly indicates that traditional free will theism can wholly dodge this problem by endorsing panexperientialism. Because this is something traditional free will theism can and should do in any case, even when the problem of evil is not front and center, this issue rapidly and effortlessly disappears on its own.

The third problem dissolves on its own at least as rapidly as the first. This is the alleged implication of traditional free will theism that "God could have created beings identical to ourselves except that they would not have really been free to sin." (222)  Because this implication does not make sense, we can hope that that traditional free will theism rarely expresses it! 

Beings who are identical to us except that they cannot sin are not identical to us at all because they differ from us precisely at the most decisive point of comparison, not in some peripheral or irrelevant way. God can no more create such beings than God can create a circle that is identical to all other circles except that it is not circular.

This point is not restricted to human life.  Any living organism that is effectively distinguishable from God is for that reason and to that degree able to exercise libertarian freedom with which it can resist God even though, according to traditional free will theism, it receives this capacity as a gift from God.  Otherwise, such organisms would be effectively indistinguishable from God just as the key boards on which we type are effectively indistinguishable from us even though they differ in many other obvious ways.  This is why we neither praise nor blame our keyboards for what we type on them.  For all effective purposes, they are extensions of us.  They have no agency of their own. 

There are some things God cannot do, even when we understand God as both "Supreme Volitional Essence" and "Supreme Essential Volition," not because God is deficient, but because some requests are ill conceived.  Asking God to bring forth living beings who are effectively different from God but wholly devoid of any trace of libertarian freedom is one of these.  This point is both valid and important even if some or many forms of traditional free will theism miss it

Although they do not dissolve on their own as swiftly and easily as the first and third problems, with some time and effort traditional free will theism can resolve the second and fourth ones. The second problem is that, according to traditional free will theism, "God could intervene to prevent any specific instance of evil." (222). The fourth is that, "given the idea that human freedom was freely granted, this freedom could always be temporarily interrupted," something that would have been desirable in cases like that of Hitler. Because these problems are related, it seems appropriate to address them together.

Some, perhaps many, forms of traditional free will theism do hold that God can prevent specific instances of evil and that on occasion God does specifically withdraw the varying degrees of libertarian freedom God generally grants to all actualities. Unfortunately, particularly from the point of view of properly formulated traditional free will theism, these positions are almost certainly mistaken.

Well conceived traditional free will theism holds that libertarian freedom is a basic organizing and operating principle that permanently pervades our entire cosmic epoch. It holds that, thanks to God's gracious benevolence, we live in a comprehensive and interdependent ecology of libertarian freedom that either permanently functions on this basis as an integrated whole or not at all.

The concept of "ecology" is helpful at this point because it refers to the principle that it is difficult to alter an interdependent system in only one significant way.  Because everything is more or less related to everything else, any significant intervention, interruption or modification, substantially alters the entire ecological order. This is why, according to well-conceived forms of traditional free will theism, it is impossible for God to withdraw or interrupt the exercise of libertarian freedom in specific instances without adversely affecting the entire ecology of libertarian freedom, and probably thereby destroying it.

The case of Hilter illustrates this ecological point.  In order to prevent the evils of Nazism, God would have had to withdraw whatever libertarian freedom Hitler possessed, which may have been very little because of his traumatic upbringing. The rise of Nazism probably cannot be attributed to just this one pathetic man, however.  Therefore, God would also have had to withdraw the libertarian freedom of the thousands of people with whom he was more or less related in Germany and elsewhere, including the United States, who either actively supported Hitler, or more passively chose to look in other directions, when he and others began to act so terribly. 

Because these thousands of people were not isolated individuals but had lives that were interwoven with the lives of millions of others who were also alive at the time, it is likely that God would have had to withhold or withdraw their libertarian freedom too. Yet even this is not all. Because these millions of people were related to billions and billions of other living beings in the recent and remote past who had influenced the entire course of history up to Hitler's time, it is very likely that God could have prevented the horrors of Nazism only if from the very beginning of this cosmic epoch God had never granted any degree of any libertarian freedom to any living organism, human or otherwise.

In order to guarantee that no Hitler would ever emerge, it would have been necessary for God to refuse to bring into being a comprehensive and interdependent ecology of libertarian freedom like the one in which we live.  So as to prevent this specific instance of incredible evil, God would have had to leave everything as it was at the outset:  "without form, and void."  (Genesis 1:2)

To make this point is not to render it foolish to ask whether from the point of view of traditional free will theism God could have prevented the rise of Hitler or the occurrence of any other specific evil.  It is to demonstrate that such valid questions can be answered only at the appropriate level of generality. 

To ask if God could have stopped Hitler, or to ask if God could have prevented any specific evil, is also to ask whether God should have brought into being the ecology of libertarian freedom in which people like Hitler and all the rest of us live. This is a fair question; however, it deserves to be acknowledged explicitly and addressed directly.

Process theology and traditional free will theism explicitly acknowledge and directly address this more general question in several similar ways. They agree that in some limited sense God is responsible for the actuality of genuine evil, without being indictable for it. They agree that at this point our cosmic epoch, our ecology of libertarian freedom, is good on the whole but not as a whole. They agree that the triviality, as Whitehead described such conditions, that prevailed when our portion of the universe was "without form, and void" was also evil in its own way, or at least not as richly endowed with self-determination and the possibilities for both good and evil. They agree that, because there are inevitable correlations between degrees of self-determining freedom, on the one hand, and the extent to which living organisms can experience good and evil and make positive and negative contributions to others, on the other, it is not possible for there to be beings who are "exactly like us except that they are not free to do evil."  

Process philosophy often rejects the doctrine that God created our cosmic epoch and the universe more generally "out of nothing" whereas traditional free will theism usually accepts it.  There are at least three senses in which "creatio ex nihilo" makes sense from the point of view of process philosophy, however.  One of these is that the primordial chaos out which it says that God coaxed increasing order and intensity of experience included no enduring objects, or "no thing."  Another is that each moment of experience emerges from its slice of history partially in response to a divine invitation, or "initial aim," apart from which it could not become itself.  A third is that every occasion of experience partially determines how it will constitute itself in light of its past and the invitation it receives from God and in this sense is created out of nothing.  Whether it is better to continue using the expression "creation out of nothing" with these and perhaps other newer meanings or wholly to abandon it is a question thoughtful people can answer differently, just as some process and traditional free will thinkers reject the term "divine omnipotence" and others retain but redefine it.

Why God apparently chooses to create by way of evolution is a difficult question for traditional free will theism to answer, particularly when one considers how ruthlessly painful and destructive evolution is for so many organisms.  Process philosophy does not have to answer this question because it holds that, given the power of self-determination that all those who are not God intrinsically posses, this is the only available method.  Traditional free will theism is not entirely without resources even at this point, however.  

One of its options is to challenge the coherence and adequacy of theistic as well as atheistic evolutionary theory, at least at the macroscopic level.  This is not an easy route to take because evolution is a paradigm that increasingly seems confirmed by many different lines of converging evidence and because the relevant portions of Scripture probably neither meant nor mean what many presume.  

Yet, like all successful paradigms, evolutionary theory is based upon certain fundamental premises that deserve attention.  One of these is the almost universally accepted  principle of uniformitarianism.  It holds that the basic laws of physics have been constant.  If this is not entirely so, some conclusions may need to be reconsidered.  For example, if as a few are now beginning to suggest, it turns out that the speed of light has not been absolutely constant, it may  be necessary to revise some positions.  The general point holds even if this particular illustration doesn't.  

Although challenging evolutionary theory at this basic level is now exceedingly difficult, we can be thankful that some researchers are sufficiently alarmed by its possible theological and ethical implications ("Is a God who creates via evolution worthy of worship?  Should we organize our personal and communal lives in conformity to evolutionary principles?") that they are willing to devote their energies to exploring the possibility of alternative paradigms that thoughtful and informed people can evaluate in the open marketplace of ideas.  

Another alternative for traditional free will theism is to suggest that the only way God can create an ecology of libertarian freedom is to establish and follow from the outset its basic organizing and operating principles. Arguably, it is intrinsically impossible to use completely coercive methods to bring about a non-coercive ecological system.  

If varying degrees of libertarian freedom eventually are to be essential features of all forms of life, then in principle libertarian freedom has to be present from the very beginning.  It cannot be inserted somewhere down the line without violating the basic laws of physics and principles of metaphysics that, according to free will theism, God establishes and exemplifies. If this is so, for somewhat different reasons, traditional free will theism can agree with process philosophy that God creates by way of evolution because this is the only possible way.  In view of these broad and important areas of agreement, traditional free will theism deserves another .25 of a  point.             

In summary, then, well-conceived traditional free will theism can receive up to 9 points for endorsing that many of the 10 "core doctrines" of process philosophy. It can receive another .50 of a point for agreeing with half and disagreeing with half of one more of these 10 "core doctrines." Finally, it can receive .25 of a point for either dissolving or resolving four of its remaining problems, and for answering very much as process philosophy does whether God should have brought into being an ecology of libertarian freedom like ours in which genuine evil is possible.  

This score presupposes that the ten "core doctrines" of process philosophy as expounded by Griffin are equally important, so that it makes sense to accord each one of them 1 point.  Things turn out differently if the ten "core doctrines vary in their importance.   If "core doctrine" # 7 is worth 5 points and the other nine "core doctrines" share the remaining 5 points, traditional free will theism's score is much lower, for example.

Because process philosophy's denial of "a contingent divine decision" most probably does not imply a denial of top-down causality in the experience of God, something that is very important for traditional free will theism, the actual score is probably even higher than 9.75.  As a basis for collaboration in the struggle against the "deeper idolatry" and its negative consequences in our individual and communal lives, this much agreement is enough! 

This is the point.  The question is not whether traditional free will theism should "convert" to  process philosophy or vice versa, something that is unlikely because of their somewhat different contexts, constituencies and conceptualities, but whether these two schools of current theological thought have enough in common to cooperate in resisting the "deeper idolatry."  Yes!