Louisville Process Theology Network

“Process theists follow Whitehead in eschewing ‘dogmatic finality’ in their pronouncements. For process philosophy, philosophy itself is a process that is ever subject to revision and critical examination. As far as justifying religious belief is concerned, Whitehead and Hartshorne try to navigate between appeals to blind faith and knock-down proof. In metaphysics, says Whitehead, ‘The proper test is not that of finality, but of progress’

If process theism is not based on revelation, neither is it based on naïve appeals to science, including the social sciences. It is no more characteristic of process thought to give a ‘scientific’ argument for the existence of God than to give a reductionistic account of religious belief by means of a theory in sociology or psychology.

As far as Whitehead and Hartshorne are concerned, the working assumptions of the sciences are no more or less secure than the working assumptions of religion. Process thought teaches a modest skepticism about the competencies of science that is arguably in the spirit of science itself ….

Process theism is not based on religious doctrine or theology and it is not a scientific theory; it is a product of metaphysics, or what Whitehead calls ‘speculative philosophy.’ It is, however, metaphysics ‘in a new key’ …

Whitehead says that, ‘Speculative philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted’ Metaphysics, so defined, is an audacious enterprise, for experience is open-ended and every claim to knowledge is perspectival and conditioned…

Whitehead and Hartshorne reject the idea that metaphysics proceeds best by deducing theorems from self-evident axioms. To be sure, inferences must be made from the categories of one's metaphysics, but it is the categories themselves that are continually on trial.

When it comes to the ‘God question’ Whitehead says that he is not offering proofs. ‘There is merely the confrontation of the theoretic system with a certain rendering of the facts.’

Having established to his satisfaction an alternative to scientific materialism—that is, the philosophy of organism—he asks whether that philosophy's categories require reference to God. Ford suggests that Whitehead was surprised to find that they do, for he began his reflections on the philosophy of nature as an agnostic…

In Whitehead's view, God customizes the general potentiality of the universe for each emergent occasion, providing it with its initial aim. The graded relevance of these potentialities answers to our sense that there are objectively better and worse options.

A related problem is how the activities of the many actualities that make up the cosmos happen to obey a common set of natural laws. Order implies an ordering power; however, all localized order presupposes cosmic order; thus, order on a cosmic scale requires a cosmic ordering power …

The debate among Whiteheadians over the existence of God is complicated by the fact that Whitehead's views rapidly evolved in the few years that he devoted serious thought to the topic. His view of God is less a completed philosophical theism than a work in progress that it was left to others to try to complete, and many have tried.”

From http://plato.standford.edu