“It is nonsense to conceive of nature as a static fact, even for an instant devoid of duration. There is no nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration.” –Whitehead
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“It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent. It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many. It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently. It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World. It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God. It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God.” –Whitehead, Process and Reality
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“[God] is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness” –Whitehead, Process and Reality

I’ve recently been interested in learning about philosopher Robert Corrington’s work, and specifically his criticisms of Whiteheadian process-relational panentheism (of which I’m a big fan).

Corrington calls his system of thought “ecstatic naturalism,” or “deep pantheism,” and like all versions of naturalism, it assumes that nature is all there is and insists that no recourse be made to supernaturalistic forces or entities. So, as far as I can tell (and again I’m just beginning to explore Corrington’s criticisms), one of Corrington’s main beefs with process theology (as it’s commonly understood) is that it introduces God as a necessary super-order/unity/ground that is bigger than nature. Nature is not all there is because nature cannot “be” without an infinite divine mind and consequent nature to save it from sheer chaos.

I realize it’s important to distinguish between metaphysical naturalism and methodological naturalism at this point, but I have to be honest that accepting any type of supernaturalism feels weird to me, personally. I realize some process-relational thinkers are fine with settling for methodological naturalism as a label (and additionally maybe “ultra-naturalism” as David Ray Griffin might say), but besides my uneasiness with the term, and the confusion it brings with it, I really don’t think it applies to Whiteheadian process-relational thinking.

As the quote above indicates, for Whitehead (as it is for Corrington I have learned) there really is no “nature” to speak of (apart from process that is). Adrian Ivakhiv explains that “There is no Nature (or actuality, or reality, or world, or universe) except what is happening, and what is happening is happening all at once…The universe is a patterned complex of actual occasions selectively prehending the worlds that impinge upon them. Causation (determination by things that have already happened) and self-creation (determination according to a subjectively felt aim) are both part of every actual occasion…”

Accordingly, as for Whitehead’s God, my admittedly perfunctory understanding (which I get mostly from Whitehead himself, and interpreters like John Cobb, Catherine Keller, Marjorie Suchocki, Philip Clayton, Tripp Fuller, Matt Segall and others) is that Creativity is, as Whitehead says, “the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matters of fact.” God and nature/cosmos/universe arise together out of the chaotic process of Creativity, and God and world/nature/cosmos are constantly co-creating each other and are intricately entangled. As Catherine Keller might say, Tehomic chaos was in the beginning which gave rise to a divine lure that evolved along side (and inside) nature/world/cosmos. In this sense God can be thought of as both distinct and yet part of nature, just as we humans can indeed think of ourselves as distinct and yet part of nature…to speak about “nature” then, is to speak about God, and to speak about God is to speak about “nature.”

I guess I sort of understand that a critic might be accurate in saying that there is a lingering “supernaturalism” at play if one tries to say that God and Creativity are equipromoridal, and that God infinitely encompasses nature (which I suppose is one way to understand the consequent nature of God) and is still the necessary super/prior condition that took the risk to “get things going” in the beginning (as some process theologians might want to say). However, I really have always understood both the primordial nature of God and the consequent nature of God in Whitehead’s thought the way I understand my own “mental” and “physical” poles—both are completely “natural.”

Primordial Nature
One could say that the primordial nature of God (‘the Realm of Eternal Objects’) is both transcendent and eternal I suppose, but we might say it is eternal in the same way that our memories or ideas are eternal (it certainly seems like, for humans, some idea of God/god/gods has been around for an eternity, am I right? 😉 ), and it is transcendent in the way that our mental activities transcend our bodies and surroundings…

Whitehead’s idea that God envisages, or contemplates/conceives of fresh, new possibilities and then presents them to us is so imaginative, compelling and, honestly, convincing that I can’t get over it. At the risk of sounding very, very anthropomorphic here (and honestly, I’m not scared of being anthropomorphic when it comes to theology anymore, I think an argument could be made ((and someone probably has made it)) that Western Christian theology, up until very recently, has been way too misanthropic), when I compare this to my own experience (and let’s be honest, what else do we have?) as a creative human it makes sense to me. Personally, as a designer, before I can actualize anything I need to contemplate and conceive of some sort of plan. Brainstorming in tandem  with thumbnail sketching (a sort of visual thinking) is my very first step. During this brainstorming and sketching/thumbnail process I am essentially presenting myself (an actual entity, constituted of many complex societies of actual occasions of experience) with possibilities that could be actualized or followed up on and turned into a completed design. But in order for a design to be created I do need to decide on a route, and I can’t decide on a route if I don’t first present myself with at least one or two possibilities. To be clear, these ideas/possibilities don’t come from nowhere, the objective “data” I use when brainstorming/sketching is available to me precisely because of the past decisions of other subjects. For example, if I think about creating a poster in which I would set type inside of a star, I am in no way going to try to convince anyone that I pulled the idea of a star out of nowhere. The idea of a star was freely available for me to use as an abstract form. Now, I’m the first to admit that many of the possibilities which I conceive of/present myself with during this brainstorm/sketch session are complete trash and should not be followed up on/actualized; they should be crumbled up and thrown away. However, I’d like to say that more times than not I choose a good starting route and that possibility starts to become something else, something other, something more complex and “fleshed out” and, ever so slowly, it ceases to look like a simple pencil sketch.

I understand why some people may get hung up on Whitehead’s primordial nature of God or ‘the realm of eternal objects’ and want to say that it’s “supernatural” or something. It’s all very confusing, and weird, and the word “eternal” sounds very Platonic and doesn’t help things much (what’s the word ‘eternal’ doing in a process metaphysic anyway?!?). Matt Segall helpfully points out that “Whitehead did not conceive of eternal objects in abstraction from concrete occasions. These two categories are not to be conceived separately, as Cartesian substances like mind and matter; their coherence depends upon their explanatory coincidence. There can be no occasions of experience of a definite character unless there are eternal objects to so characterize them; and there can be no external objects with actual effects unless there are real creatures to value them.”

In other words, we rely on God to provide us with possibilities/reasons/values, but God also relies on us for the same exact things. We’re entangled together like a community where each entity is determined by its relation to everything else; God is simply another member of this community.

Consequent Nature
The consequent nature of God is probably the one that makes the most sense, traditionally speaking, as being “natural,” I would think. My understanding is that the consequent nature  is essentially the body of God. Paraphrasing Charles Hartshorne, Rem B. Edwards writes, “we human beings are related to God in something like the way the cells of our bodies are related to us. Our cells are themselves localized units of feeling with some measure of autonomy. We cannot willfully control their actions in most cases, and they cannot willfully control our actions. But the whole and the parts do interact and influence one another. As the localized cells of my body are injured and suffer, I suffer, and I enjoy their well-being…We are all members of the body of God, autonomous parts of that divine whole in whom we live and move and have our being…”

Matt Segall, again, has some very astute observations regarding the consequent nature of God:

“Perhaps “God”–a term weighed down by thousands of years of ontotheological baggge–is no longer appropriate as a descriptor. Whitehead suggests that his divinity is more like ancient conceptions of a World-Soul, or anima mundi, in that it is involved in and not external to the universe. Indeed, it is in some sense nothing other than the universe itself as a social actuality, or organismic togetherness. The divine is the cosmic animal, the universal organism.”

I’m completely fine with this description of God as “cosmic animal,” because again anthropomorphism doesn’t bother me as much as it seems to bother some Christians. I also think Steve McIntosh makes a simple and convincing point in his recent book, The Presence of the Infinite, where he essentially argues that, given evolution, we humans have evolved to be both conscious and personal, so it’s perfectly plausible to imagine that the Divine, if there is such a thing, must be at least (if not more than) conscious and personal (among other things of course…).

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Ultimately, I think what I like most about Whitehead’s approach to philosophy is that he is less concerned about explanation and more concerned with inspiration. As a creative person I appreciate this. It’s pretty clear to me that Whitehead is less of a traditional philosopher and more of an artist in this sense. Maybe this is his weakness? Segall again on this:

“Whitehead’s philosophical method has nothing to do with explanation. He describes the task of philosophy as “sheer disclosure,” making it akin to poetry in the sense that its propositional expressions succeed only when they increase, rather than erase, our wonder at the astonishing fact(s) of existence.”

I don’t like it when one entity, or a set of entities, attempts to reduce or explain away another entity, it seems like a mean, “tough guy” sort of thing to do (the kind of thing that white Euro-American guys ((like me)) like to do, actually). I like the phrase ‘religious naturalism’ because, as a process-relational panentheist, the term “nature” is expanded in S-I-Z-E to reach beyond the Modern objective, impersonal, Godless, mechanistic, lifeless conception of the world/cosmos and, conversely, comes to mean subjective, personal, organic, Divine, sacred, conscious and full of life. But look, if liking Whiteheadian inspired process-relational panentheism makes me a supernaturalist or an “ultra-naturalist” then so be it. I guess I’ll stop resisting.

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Photograph above from the ESA archive.

Tags:naturalismpanentheismpantheismprocess theologyRobert Corringtonwhitehead