Whitehead by John B. Cobb, Jr
Chapter 5: A Whiteheadian Doctrine of God
3. God and Space
number, incredibly large to our limited imaginations. The number of successive electronic occasions in a second staggers the imagination.
God’s self-actualizations must be at least equally numerous if he is to function separately in relation to each individual in this series. Since electronic occasions are presumably not in phase with each other or with other types of actual occasions, still further complications are involved.
Obviously, this is altogether unimaginable, but since all the dimensions of our world revealed to us by physical science are also quite beyond imagination, in this sense, we should not be surprised that this is true of God.
My conclusion, then, is that the chief reasons for insisting that God is an actual entity can be satisfied by the view that he is a living person, that this view makes the doctrine of God more coherent, and that no serious new difficulties are raised.
which then also characterize whatever occasions, in fact, occur in our spatial cosmic epoch.
Space and time conjointly constitute the extensive continuum in our cosmic epoch. Every occasion occupies as its standpoint some region within this extensive continuum. In an epoch lacking spatiality, this region would be temporal only, but in ours, again, it is spatiotemporal.
Now the question is whether the fact that in our epoch occasions occupy spatiotemporal regions means that God also occupies a spatiotemporal region. There seem logically to be only three possible answers. Either God occupies some particular region, or his mode of being is irrelevant to regions, or he occupies the entire continuum.
The first of these alternatives may be rather readily dismissed on philosophical grounds. Since God’s functions as philosophically identified are related with equal immediacy to every occasion, any special spatial location is impossible. The choice between the remaining alternatives is far more difficult. Since God’s own being is independent of spatiality, it is clear that there is an important sense in which God transcends space. But that does not settle the question as to whether in a spatial epoch he is characterized by spatiality.
To deal with this problem in the face of Whitehead’s silence, we must begin with the relevant principles that he does provide us. God does prehend every spatiotemporal actual occasion and he is prehended by it, both in his primordial nature and in his consequent nature. Furthermore, these prehensions in both directions are unmediated.
Normally we think of unmediated prehensions as prehensions of occasions immediately contiguous in the spatiotemporal continuum.
This suggests the doctrine of God’s omnispatiality. Indeed, if contiguity were essential to unmediated prehensions, it would be necessary to posit God’s omnipresence throughout space. However, even apart from
consideration of God, we have seen that Whitehead qualifies this
principle. He holds that in our cosmic epoch, prehension of the physical poles of other occasions seems to be dependent on contiguity, but that prehensions of the mental poles of other occasions may not be
dependent on contiguity.(SMW 216; PR 469; AI 318.)By this principle we could explain our prehension of God’s primordial nature and God’s prehension of our mental poles quite apart from any spatial relations.
Further, since no metaphysical problem is involved in affirming that physical experience may also be prehended apart from contiguity, the
doctrine of the radical non-spatiality of God is compatible with all the functions attributed to God by Whitehead. Indeed, since his thinking about God was largely formed with the primordial nature in view, it is probable that nonspatiality was assumed by him.
If the nonspatiality and omnispatiality of God are both equally allowed by Whitehead’s metaphysics, we can choose between them only on the basis of coherence. My own judgment is that that doctrine of God is always to be preferred which, other things being equal, interprets his relations with the world more, rather than less, like the way we interpret the relations of other entities. If we adopt this principle, there is prima facie support for the doctrine that God, like all actual occasions, has a standpoint. Since that standpoint could not be such as to favor one part of the universe against others, it must be all-inclusive.
The only serious philosophical objection to this doctrine arises from the rejection of the possibility that actual standpoints can include the
regions that comprise other actual standpoints. This problem was considered in some detail in Chapter II, (Near the end of the chapter.) and the arguments in favor of the affirmation of such regional inclusion of standpoints will here be only summarized. The argument is that whereas Whitehead neither affirmed this relation nor developed its implications, it does seem to be implied by the most natural reading of some of his cosmological assertions. It is compatible with his
metaphysical doctrines and his understanding of the relation of space- time to actual occasions. Further, it is compatible with the doctrine that contemporaries do not prehend each other, since each of the entities participating in this special regional relationship would still prehend the other only when that other entity had passed into objective immortality.
Finally, the doctrine that the regions that constitute the standpoint of actual occasions of human experience include those of subhuman occasions in the brain has several specific advantages.(Ibid.)
If we can think of the spatiotemporal regions of the occasion of the human person as including the spatiotemporal regions of numerous occasions in the brain, then we may think analogously of the region of God as including the regions comprising the standpoints of all the contemporary occasions in the world. If we follow the argument of the previous section, there would be some difference, for whereas the occasions of human experience have considerable temporal breadth in relation to the electronic occurrences in the brain, we have seen that the occasions of God’s experience must be extremely thin in their temporal
extension. The regions of other occasions would be included, not in that of a single occasion of the divine experience, but in the regions of a succession of such experiences.
Once again we have a choice of treating God as an exception or of speculating that he is more like other actual entities. If God occupies no region, yet is related to all equally, it is as if he were regionally
contiguous with all regions. Whitehead may deny this and intend that, unlike all other actual entities, God’s immediate physical prehensions of other entities do not involve him in having a regional standpoint. Since regional standpoints are not introduced into the categorial scheme, no self-contradiction is entailed. However, if God is related to every occasion as if he were physically present, it seems more natural and coherent to affirm that he is physically present. That could only mean that his region includes all other contemporary regions.