Whitehead by John B. Cobb, Jr
Chapter 5: A Whiteheadian Doctrine of God
2. God and Time
if this is simply identified with God’s physical prehensions of the world.
Whitehead’s own writings about the consequent nature seem to attribute to it a synthesis of the physical prehensions with the conceptual ones.
(PR 524.) If so, there need be no quarrel -- only an insistence that there can be no sharp distinction between the reception of the initial aim and the other prehensions of God.
According to my view, the actual occasion is initiated by a prehension of all the entities in its past, always including God. Some of these
entities, always including God; have specific aims for this new occasion to realize. The subjective aim of the new occasion must be formed by some synthesis or adaptation of these aims for which it is itself finally responsible. In addition, the past entities, including God, will be
objectified by other eternal objects. What these other eternal objects will be, complex or simple, is determined partly by the past entities and partly by the new subjective aim.
temporally atomic. That is, they are indivisible into earlier and later portions, but they are not, like points, indivisible because unextended.
Each actual entity has temporal extension, but the temporal extension happens all at once as an indivisible unit.(PR 434.)
However, one can analyze the process of becoming of the actual occasion, and indeed, Whitehead develops an extremely elaborate analysis.(PR, Part III.) Each occasion begins with an initial phase
constituted by its initial data and its initial aim. It ends in its satisfaction through which it becomes a datum for further occasions. Between the indeterminateness with which it begins and the determinateness with which it ends, each occasion passes through a succession of phases in which complex syntheses of data replace the mere data.
There is, clearly, some continuity between the physical time derived from transition from one occasion to another and the process internal to the becoming occasion. In terms of physical time the occasion must be said to become all at once, yet it is eminently clear that some phases of the becoming presuppose others; (PR 225, 234.) and Whitehead does not hesitate to use such temporal terms as earlier and later.(E.g., PR 132, 337.)
The complexities of the relation between time as an aspect of the succession of occasions and the process internal to occasions need not be resolved here, since the basic principles necessary for understanding God’s relation to time have already been noted. However, some further effort to explain Whitehead’s meaning will not be amiss.
Physical time is observed or measured time. Observation and
measurement presuppose objective occurrences. The absolute unit of objective occurrences is the becoming of an occasion of experience.
This occasion is related to other occasions only at its initiation (as
prehender) and at its consummation (as datum for prehension) Hence, in principle, its own inner process of becoming is irrelevant to its
observable relations. For every perspective other than its own, the occasion either is not at all or is completed. One cannot observe, from without, an ‘occasion in the process of becoming. From the perspective of the becoming occasion, of course, the situation is different. It does experience itself as a process of becoming, and indeed only as such.
We are now prepared to ask how Whitehead relates God to time. We have already noted that his most frequent formulations seem to deny
temporality to God altogether. God is the nontemporal actual entity.
However, in the brief treatment of God as consequent as well as
primordial in the concluding pages of Process and Reality, Whitehead introduces a threefold distinction.
Actual entities other than God are temporal. This means that they perish as soon as they have become. For Whitehead, "time" is physical time, and it is "perpetual perishing." The primordial nature of God is eternal.
This means that it is wholly unaffected by time or by process in any other sense. The primordial nature of God affects the world but is
unaffected by it. For it, before and after are strictly irrelevant categories.
The consequent nature of God is "everlasting." (PR 524 ff.) This means that it involves a creative advance, just as time does, but that the earlier elements are not lost as new ones are added. Whatever enters into the consequent nature of God remains there forever, but new elements are constantly added. Viewed from the vantage point of Whitehead’s
conclusion and the recognition that God is an actual entity in which the two natures are abstract parts, we must say that God as a whole is everlasting, but that he envisages all possibility eternally.
It is then quite clear that the description of God as nontemporal does not mean that there is no process in God. Before and after are relevant terms for describing this process. There is God before he has prehended a given human occasion and God after he has prehended that occasion.
Time and history are real for him as well as for temporal occasions.
God’s being as affected by temporal events also, in turn, affects subsequent temporal events.(PR 532.)
The easiest way to understand this would be to regard God, like human persons, as a living person.(See early part of Chapter II where
Hartshorne prefers this doctrine.)A living person is a succession of moments of experience with special continuity.(See the discussion of personal identity, Ch. II, sec. 4.) At any given moment I am just one of those occasions, but when I remember my past and anticipate my future, I see myself as the total society or sequence of such occasions. God, then, at any moment would be an actual entity, but viewed
retrospectively and prospectively he would be an infinite succession of divine occasions of experience. It is clear that Whitehead himself thought of God as an actual entity rather than as a living person. The thesis I wish to develop is that, despite this fact, the doctrines he
formulated about God compel us to assimilate God more closely to the
conception of a living person than to that of an actual entity.
The argument begins with the fact that Whitehead recognizes process in the consequent nature of God. Such process must be conceived either as the kind of process that occurs between occasions or as that kind which occurs within an occasion. Whitehead’s position that God is an actual entity requires the latter doctrine. But the chief distinction between internal process and physical time is that the process occurring within an occasion has no efficacy for other occasions except indirectly through the satisfaction in which it eventuates. If the process in God’s
consequent nature is thought of in these terms, it cannot affect the events in the world. Yet Whitehead explicitly affirms just such an influence. Furthermore, if in the light of the discussion in the preceding section, we recognize the indissoluble unity of the primordial and consequent natures of God even in God’s function as principle of limitation, then we must acknowledge that what is involved is not only the special case of the causal efficacy of God’s consequent nature, but also the basic efficacy of God in the provision of the initial aim for each occasion. God’s causal efficacy for the world is like the efficacy of completed occasions for subsequent occasions and not like that of phases of the becoming of a single occasion for its successors.
It may be objected that it is my development of Whitehead’s thought in the preceding section that is in trouble here rather than Whitehead’s usual formulations. If only the primordial nature of God were causally efficacious for the world, and if it were indifferent to time, then the problem would not arise. But if, as I hold, God can function as principle of limitation only by entertaining a specific aim for each becoming occasion, that aim must take account of the actual situation in the world.
In that case, the problem does arise. Furthermore, since Whitehead unquestionably affirms the causal efficacy of the consequent nature of God, the problem also occurs for his explicit formulation. We must either reject this doctrine of the causal efficacy of the consequent nature and also affirm that an entirely static God can have particularity of efficacy for each occasion, or else we must recognize that the phases in the concrescence of God are in important respects more analogous to temporal occasions than to phases in the becoming of a single occasion.
The same problem may be posed in terms of God’s satisfaction. In all other entities satisfaction is not attained except as the completion of the entity. If God is a single entity who will never be completed, then on this analogy, he can never know satisfaction. It would be odd that God
should eternally aim at a goal that is in principle unreachable, and Whitehead explicitly refers to God’s satisfaction as something real.(PR 48, 135.)Apparently, satisfactions are related to the successive phases in God’s becoming as they are related to temporal actual occasions, and not as they are related to successive phases of the becoming of such occasions.
In at least these two respects Whitehead’s account of God is more like an account of a living person than of an actual entity. Yet Whitehead never suggests this position. Are there any systematic reasons for affirming that God is an actual entity rather than a living person? First, it is clear that as long as the primordial nature is chiefly in view, God would be thought of as a singular entity. If this were the only reason, we could easily set it aside. But we have seen that even when the
consequent nature is in view, Whitehead avoids speaking of God as temporal. Unless we speak of him as temporal, we cannot speak of him as a living person, for the living person is defined by a temporal
relationship among actual occasions.
There are two closely related characteristics of living persons that Whitehead wishes to deny with respect to God. They are, first, lack of complete self-identity through time and, second, loss of what is past.
God must, without qualification, be self-identically himself, and in him there must be no loss. Whether or not these are strictly philosophical requirements of his system, they are powerful intuitions one must hesitate to set aside.
In my earlier discussion of the personal identity of living persons, I suggested that such identity is attained to the degree that there are immediate prehensions by each new occasion in the person of the
occasions constituting the past of that person.I recognized there that this did not entirely solve the problem since there would also be prehensions of the temporally noncontiguous experiences of other persons that
would complicate the picture. In God’s case, however, prehensions of all earlier entities would not be something other than his prehension of his own past, since they would all be included in his consequent nature.
Therefore, his unity must be complete. Similarly, loss in the temporal world is the result of the very fragmentary way in which past occasions are reenacted in the present.
The vast majority of such prehensions are unconscious, and even in the unconscious we assume that the past is only fragmentarily effective. At
any rate, the unconscious memory of a conscious experience loses a very important part of the remembered experience. In God we may suppose that no such loss occurs. He vividly and consciously remembers in every new occasion all the occasions of the past. His experience
grows by addition to the past, but loses nothing.
One may still object that the concrete individuality of the past in its own subjective immediacy is lost. That is true. But if the same living person now enjoys a new experience that includes everything in the old and more, this loss seems to be no loss of value. While we humans are alive, the passing of time entails loss in two ways. First, the beauty of most past occasions seems to be gone beyond recall. Second, we move on toward the time when as living persons we will be no more.(I am
assuming here that we are not destined to live again beyond death. If we believe that we are, the sense of loss is greatly mitigated. For my
discussion of this possibility, see Ch. II, sec. 3.) This means that all the beauty we have known will have only the most trivial value for the future.(I am omitting from consideration here the preservation of these values in God, so important to Whitehead at just this point. See Ch. VI.) It also means that the compensation of novel experiences is nearing its end. But the passage of time in God would entail none of this loss.
The final objection to identifying God as a living person is that the envisagement of the eternal objects is a primordial and unchanging act and not an endless succession of acts. There is a certain plausibility to this argument, yet it is essentially arbitrary. When I gaze at an aesthetic object for one minute, I might well describe this as a single act. Yet Whitehead speculates that as many as six hundred acts may have taken place. Insofar as what is enacted in each successive act is the same, we may well conceive it as a single act. In our continually fluctuating experience no such absolute identity obtains from moment to moment, but in God’s one unfettered envisagement of all possibilities, the absolute identity from moment to moment means that in our normal language it is a single unchanging and eternal act.
Specific problems remain, but for the most part they are already raised by Whitehead’s formulation and should not be regarded as peculiar difficulties of this interpretation. For example, we may ask how many occasions of experience would occur for God in a second. (Hartshorne asks this question of Whitehead with respect to the phases of becoming in God and suggests a similar answer. "Whitehead’s Idea of God,"
Schilpp, pp. 545-546.) The answer is that it must be a very large
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.