Philosophy of Religion 20:49-53 (198C 9 Ni]hoff PubIishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands

Review Article

Charles Hartshorne and the Existence of God, by DONALD WAYNE VINEY *

DAVID F. HAIGHT Department of Philosophy, Plymouth State College, Plymouth, Nil 03264

Charles Hartshorne, America's foremost process metaphysician, is a rare Godenthusiastic thinker. For more than a half century he has been the major champion of the modal version of the ontological argument for divine existence according to which God exists because necessary existence is part of the definition of God as "that than which no greater can be conceived." If God did not necessarily exist, S/He would not be that which is Unsurpassable. For Hartshome, this does not mean that God cannot surpass Himself/Herself, only that nothing else can. God, for Hartshorne, is in process like everything else. The book Charles Hartshorne and the Existence o f God, by Donald Wayne Viney, is an admirably lucid, readable and accurate explication of Hartshorne's philosophy of God. Its originality consists in an attempt to explain and defend Hartshorne's "global argument" for divine being - a combination of six arguments, which together are supposed to mutually support and make coherent a process view of the Divine. The global argument consists of a version of each of the following theological arguments: the ontological, the cosmological, the design, the epistemic, the moral, and the aesthetic argument, each of which is the subject of a chapter under that title. Viney elucidates these arguments all very well. I have no quarrel with the fidelity of his interpretations (nor, more importantly, has Hartshorne who wrote the preface congratulating the author). Where I do demur is with the thinking of Hartshome himself. If Saint Anselm's "discovery," according to Hartshorne, is that God necessarily exists - if the concept of God is coherently conceivable (Hartshorne admits that it may not be) - Hartshorne's "discovery" (like A.N. Whitehead's) is that God contains potentiality for growth just like everything else in the universe. (This, for Hartshome, removes some of the possible incoherence from the concept.) God is no exception to the metaphysical principle of Creativity according to which all events are both active and passive at the same time. As opposed to classical theists (e.g., Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, etc.), who hold that God is Pure Act with no potency for change or creative interaction with anything else, * Albany: State Universityof New York Press, 1985,157 pages,s

paperback.

50 Hartshorne claims that God is di-polar and changeable, namely, infinite and finite, necessary and contingent, cause and effect, etc., each contrary being true with respect to a different aspect, or "pole," of Divinity. Hartshome calls this the "divine relativity." Even though God is a necessary being and cannot fail to exist, the way that S/He is actualized is contingent upon, or relative to, the ongoing process of creation. One benefit that Hartshorne claims for this revolutionary view of God is that evil and suffering are no longer serious problems since God is not allpowerful even though S/He is all-good. Another is that time and death also do not create embarassments the way they do when God is conceived of as eternal, immutable, simple, and all-everything, as in the classical view. After all, if God is allpervasive, omni-present, timeless, omnipotent and all-good why is there death, suffering and time at all? Only a God who is both infinite in certain respects and finite in others can "save the appearances" of the real world of everlastingness and change, suffering and redemption, life and death, freedom and causality, etc. Moreover, Hartshorne argues, contrary to classicism, that there can be no creation out of nothing, thereby making the cosmos everlasting, which he claims is an a priori truth. Finally, as if much of this were not revolutionary enough, Hartshorne, unlike most theological thinkers, argues that all six of his arguments for God are not empirical but a priori, that is to say, are prior to all sensory experience whatsoever and are therefore necessarily true of all such experiences. Such in brief, is the substance of Hartshorne's neoclassical revisionism, as made clear in Viney's book. But, we might ask, if all of this is true, why couldn't an argument be "discovered" to prove that a worst conceivable being necessarily exists since it is indeed much worse if it necessarily exists than only contingently, and certainly much worse either way than if it did not exist at all? After all, which is worse - a demonic being that necessarily exists or one that does not? Moreover, concerning the other five arguments, could they not be reversed to prove that a worst conceivable being exists given the amount of suffering, evil, disorderliness, etc., that exists in the history of the universe? Or at least could it not be asserted that the open question argument is applicable in that a necessary being is not necessarily God any more than the First Cause, First Mover, etc., of classical theism? Hartshorne's answer is in the negative because on the whole he thinks that the universe is more perfect than not, and therefore requires a perfect Being. The crucial question then becomes, How can this "whole" be known and made sense of?. And how can it be known that it is perfect (in his sense)? Not by experience alone, but a priori, Hartshorne says. To some thinkers, this is a questionable a priori in that it depends upon the fallacy of composition in thinking of the whole universe as if it were like a "thing" or series of events that is orderly, aesthetic, designed, perfect, etc. (A school of fish is itself not a fish, nor does it seem to be at all like a fish.) Here I wonder if Hartshorne isn't up against a trilemma between (1) committing the fallacy of composition, (2) losing the meaning of the words "perfect," etc., as taken from ordinary experience, and (3) the fallacy of circular reasoning. I want to suggest, either he has to say that knowing the whole is a matter of experience, which of course no one has or could have since one can never

51 stand "outside" the whole; or he can say that the whole is a priori - beyond all experience - thereby at least diluting if not losing the meaning of these predicates as they are understood through and by means of experience. He avoids the first of these two lemmas by claiming that there is a priori knowledge of the whole which does show that the whole has indeed perfection (in his sense of perfection). But this can only be true if the whole is totalizeable - made into a whole - by a preexistent God, which is what is in need o f proof, thereby making the whole argument circular, or at least question-begging. That God exists is supposed to be the conclusion of the argument, not the premise - the consequent, not the ground of the argument. God is needed to make the universe into a "thing" or series of events that is therefore known a priori to be similar enough to its parts so as to have similar properties, thus preventing the commission of the fallacy of composition and allowing the inference to God's existence. In avoiding the fallacy of composition, it would seem, Hartshorne falls into circularity. This circularity is also an example of mistaking the result for the cause, which is the medieval fallacy of hysteron proteron, namely, trying to explain the higher in terms of the lower, thereby inverting the order of reason. An error common amongst philosophical theologians is to beg the question as to the existence of the Divine by unconsciously presupposing it somewhere way back in the premises of their arguments. For example, Descartes argues for the existence of God on the basis of clear and distinct ideas which have their ground and justification, he says, in God's existence. Another problem with Hartshorne's metaphysics as a priori, which Viney raises, is that it conflicts with the empirical science of relativity physics according to which there is no absolute frame of reference for all spatio-temporal events. God, for Hartshorne, is exactly this absolute framework - or else it does not make sense to speak of God as "a single linear series of events which can include all other events, etc.," (pp. 135, 136). How can that which is metaphysically necessary be contradicted by any science, particularly physics? In perhaps the most interesting chapter of the book (the final one), Viney writes: "The answer that is given to these questions is going to involve a more complex view of God (or relativity physics) than we now have" (ibid.); then he suggests that divine time might be different from the time of events. This, I think, is a fruitful recommendation for the reason that time is different in different dimensions, which is what the socalled "new physics" is discovering. Hartshorne himself takes great delight in the conclusions of J.S. Bell and H.P. Stapp that there can be influence amongst events even though not enough time has passed for light and sound, etc., to be exchanged. This means that the principle of the mutual exclusiveness of contemporaneous events due to the lateness of light in Einstein's theory has to be rejected or at least revised. If there is asynchronous order, then "To be is not to be the value of a bury-able," (to re-xvord W.V.O. Quine's celebrated remark) - least of all, a bound bury-able, namely, something that has being only as having passed away and is no longer contemporary. But this also means that we are not just fodder for God, as I think everything becomes according to Hartshorne's views (the "God-fodder" position it might be called). According to recent interpretations of unified field

52 quantum mechanics, contemporaries may indeed be present together; and in theology this might mean that there is contemporaneousness with God, the latter being interpreted as like a higher, more inclusive dimension (or, perhaps even the dimensionless point which is everywhere and nowhere, the source of all dimensions). Of course, Hartshome would deny the more extreme version of the new physics according to which future events and objects are real existents n o w - the t o t u m s i m u l - on the grounds that it contradicts his a priori metaphysical principle of Becoming. But, here the question emerges once again: in what sense can this principle be a priori when it is contradicted by what may well be the case empirically, at least according to some quantum physicists? A further issue we might raise: Hartshorne's neoclassical a priori of totalism may not be a priori enough. About panentheism Hartshorne writes: God is "both the system and something independent of it" ( D i v i n e R e l a t i v i t y , p. 90; see Viney, p. 36). How is this any less objectivistic than pantheism which Hartshorne defines as "God is merely the cosmos, in all aspects inseparable from the sum or system of dependent things or effects" (ibid.)? Or theism, for that matter, wherein he says, "God is not the system, but in all aspects independent" (ibid.)? Note the language: "system," "independent," "sum," - such words treat the universe not just prephenomenologically, but pre-critically, as if we could somehow get outside of it. Shouldn't all three positions - theism, pantheism, panentheism - be "destroyed" in favor of a more authentic holiness, namely, Being as wholeness, not Being as a whole, sum, or system, or totality, whatever? As long as we thing-ify the cosmos - sum it up - we will fail to reach the summit of Being since we are already "in" it, and cannot totalize it from without. Summing up the cosmos is abit like trying to give an account of one's life: How can my life be j u s t i f i e d ? This same will-to-totality in Hartshorne's thought manifests in his acceptance, though hesitatingly, of the actual infinite with respect to the everlastingness of time. Is the universe everlasting? If not, is there a beginning in time (and space) to the cosmos? There are difficulties either way, as Viney points out (pp. 66f.). If there is a beginning, how can time come to be when time is itself the measure of coming to be? If not, how can we ever know since an actual infinity of events in time can never be traversed to know whether or not there is an end? Hartshorne confesses to being puzzled in the matter (Viney, p. 66), though he chooses the actual infinite - the everlasting totality of all time u p t o n o w - in spite of his attraction to Kant's argument in the first antinomy according to which the actual infinite is self-contradictory. Why not take Kant's argument against both the finitist and the infinitist views seriously and declare spacetime to be metaphysical m a y a - namely, a mystery, that which both is and is not, like the surface in a solid? That way, we de-objectify the universe entirely, and substitute mystery for totalization, the a priori of wholeness for the a priori of summation. Perhaps what Hartshome and Viney have done is provide us with an unintentional reduction to absurdity of the classical idea of God conceived of as all-powerful, all-good, etc., a n d as p e r s o n - l i k e , when all along the classical idea of God should have been interpreted trans-personally. In other words, instead of letting go of the

53 classical properties and retaining God's person-hood, Hartshome should have kept the former and let go of the latter. For example, how can God be "all-powerful" and "all-good" if human beings (and everything else, for Hartshorne, to some degree) have some freedom and therefore make mistakes? Not possible, he says; therefore, God must be finite (and therefore personal) in power and knowledge even. But suppose divine "power," "goodness," and "knowledge" have a transpersonal meaning, namely, as pure Being in which power is an inactive action (like water washing itself), goodness is beyond good and evil, and knowledge is not knowledge of objects and events but rather Self-knowledge. Then we would understand what Plato meant by time being a moving image of timelessness, perception being a moving image of authentic knowing, movement being an image of real power, and moral goodness being a moving image of the real, transcendental Good ideas which so much influenced the West in terms of the notion of the simplicity of God. With this translation of these divine "transcendentals," as they were called, a remarkable reconciliation and synthesis of Western classicism and Eastern transcendentalism might be attained which would remain faithful to the highest realizations and intuitions of both. But all this would require going beyond the personalism of Western philosophy that Hartshorne has so consistently and carefully worked out and that Viney has so faithfully explicated. -