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Don’t kick yourself, like virtually everyone you have a lifetime of conditioning to think in a substantialist paradigm that predisposes you to understand creativity in terms of the modification of something that’s already actual. And on the level of meso objects creativity often does involve modifying or “disrupting” something that’s already actual. For instance, when Picasso created a painting his creativity involved the modification of an already existing and actual canvas by the mixing and application of already existing paints. That is, the world also contains Whitehead’s enduring objects, societies, which are the tangible things that we interact with (such as when a Picasso applies paint to a canvas). This is the world that we see, that we’re most familiar with, a world where we do behold existents being modified, so it’s very forgivable if it’s difficult for someone to do a paradigm shift over to thinking of creativity as a process of originating new actuality from energy, feelings, divine lures, possibilities, valuations, mentality, and subjective aims; but, and I’m admittedly biased as someone who subscribes to process ontology, at the fundamental ontological level of the world a process of the synthesis of all of these elements is what creativity seems to boil down to, rather than bits of matter in motion disrupting each other. Which is all to say that the “modification of actuals”, and “disruption” are, I think, valid observations on the plane of particles, people, and planets, but not on the plane of actual occasions.

Thanks for sharing some thoughts. Thinking along the lines of Whitheadians such as Garland, to my mind for it to be possible for the lure of ideals or creative possibilities to be a “motive force” for creativity; for actual occasions of creativity to be susceptible to being moved by the lure of ideals, including the initial aim received from God, the intrinsic “creative drive” that Garland posits would have to be the case. I agree with Garland’s assertion that: “The subjective aim of any actual entity, including God, is a particular manifestation of the creative drive in the universe toward the unification of diversity.”. I agree with process thinkers such as Nobo and Cloots, that creativity needs to be reconceptualized as (still not actual or substantial, but nevertheless) a “transcending activity”, or power, and drive, which actual entities and their subjective aims at self-actualization are individualizations of. For my mind this understanding clicks better than the more standard idea that creativity is just a general characteristic of actual entities. I would also clarify that this understanding of creativity is not a matter of thinking in terms of a source or ground for creativity; rather, it involves reimagining creativity to be, to use a term of Dr. McDaniel’s, a creative abyss, or a dynamic emptiness (to use a term of Masao Abe’s), a nonsubstantial power that’s characterized by, and the source of traits exhibited by actual entities such as their drive for unification and actualization, their drive for value-realization, and envisagement or subjectivity.

To touch on your statement that “What becomes new is a modification of actuals”, I would say that this isn’t quite the understanding of process ontology. My understanding is that according to Whitehead and process ontology the creativity of actual occasions is not to be confused with change, it doesn’t involve an entity that’s already actual undergoing modification; rather, it’s a process of the synthesis of experience and possibilities and decision into a new actuality. We don’t have at the start an already existent actuality that experiences creativity and change, instead we initially have a process of integration and valuation and selectivity which leads to actualization. That is, actuality is something that comes out of an occasion of process, not something that an occasion works over and modifies into novelty. This also applies to your view that things don’t emerge, that creativity “disrupts”. On the contrary, the process view is that things, actualities are indeed emergent from the process of concrescence, not “disruptions” or “modifications” of existing actualities.

Regarding your view that the unification of diversity in any act of creativity is local, I would say that that is and isn’t the case. An actual entity has a locality or place, but its ontology involves its interconstitution with the rest of the world. Remember Whitehead’s rejection of simple location. An actual entity isn’t independent, it’s ontologically entangled with the entire the universe. Its unification of diversity is actually a unification of the diversity of the universe.

As for the “emergent people” “throwing a lot of words” at the mystery of emergence without explaining it, I would say rather that it’s just the case that the explanations are difficult to wrap one’s mind around, but that if you keep at it you’ll eventually appreciate the explanations that you currently find to be inadequate.

I would say that the rap against Whitehead’s conception of God according to which it negatives or diminishes God’s holiness and worshipfulness by making God out to be less than morally perfect, and perhaps ascribing a bit of a “dark side” to God, involves a complete misreading. In my personal interpretation the process theological God is the “primordial” subjective embodiment of creativity and creativity’s contributive-relational-axiological impulse (drive to contribute constructive values to others and the world) and therefore 100% in the business of promoting what I’ll term the creative good, which to my mind for God necessarily includes an agathological dimension, a dimension of moral goodness; i.e., social-relational goodness, since I would expect that God recognizes that the good of any individual entity is not merely its narrow private and selfish good, but rather its good in the broader situational perspective of its interbeing with other individuals. This means, for instance, that if John Smith is a drug dealer God’s initial aims for him will not be asocial and amoral, aiming him merely at being a good (in the sense of a high-earning) drug dealer; rather, God would seek to motivate as much moral-relational decency as possible in him. For example, if he was contemplating adulterating his product with a harmful substance God would seek to lure him to not do so, etc. And when any opportunity for Smith to get out of the game presents itself, God will provide an initial aim to inspire the decision to do so. God will not inspire a drug trafficker to shoot for the ideal of becoming another billionaire kingpin à la El Chapo. The ideals that God supplies are always geared to our real good, which is ethical-relational, not the anti-relational and destructive selfish ideals that we sometimes prefer.

But why wouldn’t Whitehead’s God simply and without delay plant the decision in the drug dealer’s conscience to reform his ways and stop selling a destructive product? According to Whitehead’s ontology that isn’t possible, every actual entity is an embodiment of creativity and creatively self-determining; ergo, God can’t make our decisions for us. And God can’t just sow any ole initial aim in our minds either. God has to work with the situation that an actual entity arises in. God is not supernaturally omnipotent, not capable of taking control and always promoting the most ideal ideal; sometimes God has to promote lesser ideals because they’re the best that a situation makes available. But in every case God always lures us toward the best good that’s possible. It isn’t that God isn’t keen on our actualizing the highest good, God is constrained to only promote the highest contextually possible good. So, again, God is always engaged in calling actual entities to do “the right thing”, and the right thing always has a moral in the sense of relational dimension, but it’s always the right thing given the limitations of an actual entity’s circumstances.

As for Whitehead saying that sometimes God can be personified as a goddess of mischief (Até), in my reading he doesn’t mean that God per se, God in Godself is mischievous or “dark”; rather, he merely means that this is sometimes how God presents, being forced to sometimes lure us to choices that are less than optimally holy (such as when God has to encourage a drug dealer to sell a relatively safe product because a path to his switching careers and becoming a drug treatment counselor is not yet open to him and therefore not something that God can immediately direct him toward). And it should be noted that Whitehead says that God is sometimes “personified” as a goddess of mischief, not that his God is a mischievous divinity. Whitehead never actually paints God as agathokakological, as consisting of both good and evil.

People sometimes transfer expectations from supernaturalistic theism regarding what God can and should do, the God of naturalistic Whiteheadian theology can’t fulfill all of those expectations and I think that that’s what leads to dissatisfaction with Whitehead’s concept of God, and the erroneous view that Whitehead’s God is less than worshipfully good. But I don’t think that that interpretation is tenable once Whitehead’s God is fully understood. In my view the process theological God is every bit as good as the God of conventional theology (and arguably characterized by a greater benignity in some ways than the deity of orthodox believers; the Whiteheadian God can’t and doesn’t create a hell and doom people to eternity in it; or reserve salvation exclusively for those who believe in the Nicene creed, for instance).

Thank you for your thought-provoking posts in this thread. You offer some cogent critical reflections, such as your statement that “I am struck that Whitehead’s God is so obviously a solution to complete the philosophy of organism.”; which Jason elaborated with his description of process theology’s God as a “custom-made philosophical construct”. Yes, Whitehead admittedly did work God into his naturalistic cosmology, did devise his conception of a de-transcendentalized God because he was constrained to do so, having found that for reality to work the way that he conceives it to a primordial actual entity who fills the role of repository of eternal objects, and supplier of initial aims is necessary. But to my mind that’s not at all a strike against his philosophy, or process theology. Rather, it’s a merit for a theology that intends to be, to borrow the title of John Cobb’s classic text, a Christian natural theology. A perspective on reality that doesn’t start from revelation or supernaturalistic theological preconceptions and that not only enables but forces us to see our way clear to the conclusion that God is a necessary and important feature of reality is precisely what a naturalistic theism needs.

And the God of such a naturalistic worldview, a God that can hold up as a necessary part of a naturalistic and rational worldview is necessarily a rational construct, that’s simply as it should be, not a weakness. And I would further argue that the fact that one’s God is a philosophical construct doesn’t mean that one’s God is merely notional and not ontic. God being imaginary and objectively existent aren’t mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the God of human beings is after all always a combination of our ideas about God and the concrete reality of God. No theism, whether biblical, revealed, traditional and supernaturalistic theism; or rational, philosophical, naturalistic theologies, consists of nothing but pure objective truth about God. If as theists we can accept this, if we can believe in the existence of God while accepting that the God of the authors of the Bible, the God of tradition and the churches, the God of classical theologians such as Aquinas, the God known to us from the subjective experiences of the great mystics, the God known from the testimony of ordinary believers, the God of all of our various religious sources of knowledge of God is to some extent mediated to us by human minds, and shaped and constructed by human minds, why should process theology’s God being a “construct” be such a drawback? That is, if we can hold that God is always in part a construct, but not entirely a construct; rather, a construct based on an actually-existing God, then that the God of process theology is an intellectual “construct” doesn’t seem to necessarily be something that should make It stand that far out from the crowd and diminish Its religious availability.

To put it bluntly then, no, it’s not really a big deal that Whiteheads’ God is a human product; the God of the quadrilateral, the God of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience is a human product without being a total fiction, and so arguably is process theology’s God. And that Whitehead’s God was rationally designed to fit a need in his system just goes to show once again that a brilliant rational mind can arrive at God rather than the atheism of a Dawkins or a Weinberg.

Well, that Whitehead started out with no agenda of fashioning a philosophy that would feature God in a key role, and that would give birth to a new theological tradition, if anything gives the process God greater credibility as it means that the process God is not merely an outcome of theological motivated reasoning, biased reasoning determined by an underlying and ulterior theological motive or goal. Rather, it’s a solution that a great intellect settled upon purely because it was the most sound and valid solution available. Personally, I rather like that about the process God.

In any event, the real obstacle to mass acceptance of process theology is of course supernaturalism. For traditional theists, and the popular imagination, theism is wedded to supernatural revelation, and to the supernaturalistic idea that God has to be omnipotent. Getting conventional theists to divorce themselves from supernaturalism is the challenge. Unfortunately it’s just too radical a theological paradigm shift for most. In the low-income countries of the world, where supernaturalistic Christianity is going strong, I don’t foresee a naturalistic theology catching on any time soon. In the secularized rich countries where the failed gods of consumerism, nationalism, and technology have lured the masses away from traditional religion there’s more openness, but even in those societies the likelihood of process thought becoming a mass movement I’m afraid is not great. But this has no bearing on the merits of process thought, which are considerable.

As for the grieving victims of evil not being likely to find much solace in Whiteheadian theodicy, yes, I’m sure that many grieving individuals wouldn’t be too receptive to it. But then there really aren’t any magic philosophical or theological words that will take away the pain of someone who’s grieving a murdered loved one. It’s often ineffectual, and a mistake to try to supply philosophical wisdom to someone who’s grief-stricken, it’s usually best to merely be with them in a caring way.

Wow, those are great. Thanks for sharing.

I think everyone has to strain her/his brain a good bit to understand some of what’s been written in the process tradition. I especially like the anecdote about how when the faculty & students at the Chicago Theological Seminary first discovered Process and Reality they had a sense that it contained much value that they needed to explore, but they couldn’t even see how to get started wrapping their minds around its complexity. They became completely frustrated and eventually hired Wieman, if I recall correctly, just to read and explain the book to them. Stick with it and I’m sure that you’ll find that your effort will be richly rewarded.

I just approved the request to share the file, you should be able to download it now. Happy reading.

Thank you very much for such kind feedback. Like you I’m very happy that I decided to take part in the program both because it’s a great opportunity to learn more about process philosophy, and also because of the people I’m encountering. If the character and caliber of a philosophy is exemplified by the kind of people that it attracts, then from my experience of learning with Drs. McDaniel and Davis, and fellow students such as yourself, I’d say that the community of people interested in process philosophy and theology speak very well indeed for its merits.

Yes, I agree with the process view that our fundamental nature, our nature on the ontological level, is a creative-experiential process that is both self-creative and social. We are individuals, but social-relational individuals. We create ourselves interrelationally with others and a society. This means that to a considerable extent we’re creatures of context, as I like to put it. We’re shaped by a social and historical context, perhaps what you mean by a “climate”. We’re conditioned by the beliefs, norms, and expectations that that context or climate comprises. This is why I agree with the emphasis of liberation theology on combating evil in the world by changing structures, not only individuals. If we’re going to change individuals and the world for the better on a large scale we need to transform the sinful social structures that socio-culturally condition individuals. It will be much easier to mass produce virtuous human beings in a virtuous society than it is in a society geared for amoral and asocial egoism and economic self-interest, commercialism, and consumerism. In any event, there’s no path for humanity out of its current Babylonian captivity in an unsound and sin-fostering value system that doesn’t involve eventually undergoing a metanoia, a profound conversion, at the level of the public sphere and social structures, not just the level of private individuals.

I think that this bit from your post indicates that you already have a good grasp of Whitehead’s philosophy: “… the cosmology of Taoism and Confucianism according to which the human being shares the same force of evolving as the cosmos has and is the conscious exemplification of its principles. The Whiteheadian philosophy seems to me provide a metaphysics that explains my experience with Taoism and Confucianism …” I think that one of the great selling points of process ontology is that it, arguably, describes and throws considerable light on the fundamental creative and evolutionary process of the cosmos, and sees human beings as instances of it.

You raise a very astute question, and make an excellent point regarding how Whitehead’s theodicy might be received by a survivor, or a loved one of a victim of evil. It would, for instance, be the height of insensitivity and evidence of delusionality to try to claim that the Holocaust could ever in any way be redeemed. However, that being said, I think that our definition and understanding of “redeemed”, and our choice of words is really what’s at issue more than Whitehead’s theodicy. The word “redeem” won’t really serve one well in explaining Whitehead’s theory because if (as it does in common usage) redeeming an evil suggests negating its evilness, or justifying it, or in any way making it okay or forgivable, then no, nothing redeems a genuine evil. Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes, which NetFlix is currently milking for entertainment value, or the rape and murder of a child, can, it goes without saying, never be made okay.

No, the word “redeem” is too problematic, too liable to cause Whitehead’s theory to be misunderstood. I prefer the first word that Hosinski uses to describe what God does with evil, “overcome”. God overcomes evil in the sense of helping the constructive possibilities of the world to eventually overthrow and outstrip its destructive possibilities, by promoting whatever path forward to better possibilities evil allows for—recall that God works with the situation that exists in the world, God takes account of the world-situation that actual entities emerge in and offers them their ideal possibilities given the limitations of their particular situation. God only “redeems” injustice in the sense of making it the springboard forward for justice, not in the sense of retroactively making it righteous. God’s overcoming of evil is a matter of not letting evil have the last word, and making it in part the agent of its own supersession by good.

Again, none of this is to say that all’s well that ends well. The victims of the Holocaust are still dead, the fact that they died in a horrific fashion isn’t changed, or made an iota less tragic and evil. It only means that the Nazis, that evil didn’t have the final word; that evil will never be the world’s default mode, because God is always working to reset the world back to the mode of constructive value-realization (God doesn’t have supernatural controlling power, so God can’t do this in a spectacular way, but this is a divine MO that saves the world from being worse off than it is).

Still, none of this may be terribly comforting to the survivors of evil, but at least it isn’t insensitively claiming that the evil of the crimes perpetrated against them is justified or offset. The transformation and harmonization that Whitehead speaks of God effecting is not the transformation of evil into good, but rather the transformation of the world toward harmony and beauty from out of the ashes of the evil that we do. It’s a matter of not leaving the world in ashes, of God instead finding in the ashes left by evil a jumping-off point, initial aims and lures for building back better.

One solution is of course Hartshorne’s. He replaces the theory that God is an actual entity with the theory that God is a society of actual entities, in which there are divine occasions that have reached satisfaction and are prehendable. Personally I prefer to conceive God to be an actual entity, and I resolve the problem that you’re wrestling with with the help of the solution that Suchocki brilliantly worked out. To nutshell and simplify her argument, she conceives God to originate in God’s primordial nature/mental pole (Whitehead also held that the two poles are reversed in the case of God, Suchocki astutely zeros in on the significance of this); which is eternally actual, actualized, in a state of completeness/satisfaction. But she stresses that the priority of God’s mental pole/primordial nature is only logical, not temporal. And that although dividing God into God’s complete primordial and processive consequent natures is useful for rational analysis of God’s nature, we shouldn’t assign an individual, separate concreteness to these two aspects of God (doing that would be another instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness); rather, she emphasizes that God’s nature is one, a unity of God’s complete primordial and processive consequent natures. This means that God is always and ever a definite actuality, an actuality in satisfaction, due to God’s primordial nature; and in process due to God’s consequent nature. God then is processive but nevertheless an actuality susceptible of being prehended by finite actual entities. That is, in the ongoing concrescence of God’s consequent nature the element of God’s determinateness derived from God’s primordial nature is present and makes for a successive determinateness in God that can be prehended. I don’t know if this solution will work for you, but it works well enough for me (if I’m not mistaken John Cobb, who for some time held Harthshorne’s view, that God is a society rather than an actual entity, also eventually came around to accepting Suchocki’s reasoning; he magnanimously acknowledged that the pupil had transcended the teacher and had worked out a better solution to the prehendability of God problem). In any event, I hope that this was helpful and not confusing. The key concepts are: the satisfaction characterizing God’s primordial nature; the reversal of the poles of God’s nature; the unity of God’s nature; and the interpenetration of God’s endless concrescence by a successive determinateness that originates in God’s primordial nature.

A few years ago I had my copy of Johnson’s book, Whitehead’s Theory of Reality, scanned. Here’s a download link for a PDF of the book:

Whitehead’s Theory of Reality, by A. H. Johnson

Btw, Johnson promoted an understanding of creativity that isn’t shared by most Whiteheadians. He understood creativity to be a special eternal object. He also provided documentation that Whitehead may have possibly agreed with his interpretation. However, even if Whitehead did endorse his interpretation that doesn’t necessarily make it correct and unchallengeable. In Process and Reality creativity is certainly not an eternal object, and like the Rabbi in the Talmudic story who disagreed with an opinion of God spoken directly from Heaven that was inconsistent with what’s written in the Bible and who chose to stick with what the Bible says, we can certainly stick with what Whitehead wrote in Process and Reality and not adopt an inconsistent interpretation that he might have endorsed in conversation with Johnson, which is what the majority of Whitehead scholars and process philosophers have preferred to do.

Yes, the title is partly intended to be amusingly oxymoronic. But it also makes the point that there are valid and valuable insights about the nature of evil, and the nature of human beings with respect to evil, to be found in both the ponerological thinking of Augustine, and in the hamartiological views of Pelagius (yes, I’m a theology nerd, hence the jargon; sorry).

I think that Augustine gets it right when he conceives evil to be insubstantial (of course if he had shared some of the insight of process thought he would have realized that a good deal more than just evil is insubstantial), and a privation or perversion of the good. As I wrote, I think that from a process perspective we might understand human moral evil to be the actual entity’s ontological drive for creative individuality and self-actualization going haywire and becoming twisted into an egoistic drive for asocial and harmful selfishness. This is an understanding that’s consistent with Augustine’s, but that incorporates some Whiteheadian ontology.

I would further speculate that the corruption of our ontological instinct, as it were, for self-realization is a result of the complex subjectivity of human beings engaging in unsound thinking about their being (misontology). The more complex subjectivity is, the more potential there is for that complexity to go awry; with the capacity for discursive consciousness, for thinking, comes the capacity to think incorrectly and unsoundly. To my mind the obvious explanation of the debasement of our ontological drive for self-actualization into a pernicious egoism would then seem to be that it comes about when we fail to recognize the interrelational nature of our individuality, that we’re internally not just externally related entities; and instead mistakenly think of ourselves as substantial, separate selves for whom it makes sense to be selfish, and to disregard the well-being of others.

An illustrative case is the historical evil of slavery. An evil such as slavery was only possible because those who perpetrated that evil only thought in terms of having an exploitative external relation to their slaves. If they had thought and appreciated that they were internally related to, nonseparate from their slaves they arguably would have been disinclined to subject them to the horrors of chattel slavery.

So wrong ontological self-perception, i.e. incorrectly perceiving ourselves to be substantial and private islands of being is I think one part of the perversion of our drive for self-fulfillment. The other part is wrong axiological thinking. We crudely misidentify the values that self-actualization and shalom involves embodying. Instead of cultivating creativity and authenticity; mental excellence; moral or relational virtue; and spiritual growth—awareness of and attunement to the fundamental nature of reality; in a word, arete, the full realization of our best human potential; instead of cultivating all of these values we go for lower level materialistic values in our hierarchy of needs and wants. Our lives become all about economics, pleasure, and power. In Whiteheadian terms, we form not so good subjective aims that aim us at possibilities that don’t make for our best satisfaction. Aims that instead divert, misdirect our drive for self-actualization into egoism, and the will to dominative power, i.e. the roots of moral evil. (Yes, I think that it’s not just the case that egoism leads to having aims such as money, pleasure, and power; I think that the reverse is also true, that it’s also the case that when those aims are dominant they lead to egoism, they condition us to be destructively egoistic, to antisocially and destructively misexpress our nisus toward self-actualization.)

In my view then the perversion of our ontological orientation to creative individuality and actualization is the essence of human moral evil, and is the outcome of a sense of self, and values that miss the mark. This missing the mark is what the Judaeo-Christian tradition calls “sin”. And I think that Pelagius’s libertarian (the term has nothing to do with modern political “libertarianism”) view, according to which we don’t suffer from a nature that’s dominated by an inherited propensity to sin, but rather are just as free to choose the good as we are to choose to be evilly egoistic, can be easily Whiteheadianized, to coin a word. Process philosophy agrees that we’re free to be sinners or to pursue sanctification, or something in between. Our minds and character are a series and society of actual occasions that take in influences from our bodies and the world, but that are also instances of creative freedom, that are self-determining. We can make a decision to sin, to be selfishly materialistic and consequently do evil; or, we can decide for better, more righteous subjective aims. So yes, I think that we can say that process theology, its theory of sin, is definitely Pelagian. And its theory of the root cause of human moral evil is Augustinian. That’s mainly why I combined the two terms in my title.

Yes, I absolutely agree that the ultimate of ultimates is the metaphysical gestalt of differentiable but ultimately mutually immanent irreducible elements of reality (creativity, i.e. the creative processes of unification and differentiation; and creativity acting as receptacle, as I think Garland phrases it; eternal objects; the multiplicity of actual entities that is the world; and the divine “primordial” actual entity). Personally I like Jorge Nobo’s term for this gestalt, he calls it the ontogenetic matrix. (I think that there’s much value to be found in Nobo’s one book, btw.)