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Divine Immutability in Process Philosophy and Contemporary Thomism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
Process philosophers and theologians have long been critical of the traditional (Thomist) doctrine of divine immutability (Section I); yet until quite recently their protests had been largely ignored in Roman Catholic circles. The purpose of this present article is to draw attention to the fact that a number of contemporary Roman Catholic theologians have begun to take the Whiteheadian-Hartshornean challenge seriously, indeed to the extent that they have felt pressed, in response, to seek and exploit implicit, latent resources within Thomas' texts in order to explicate a more adequate Thomist conception of God's interrelationship with his creatures (Section II). Process metaphysics is defended versus several criticisms raised by Roman Catholic writers (Section III).
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References
1 Besides Aquinas, other theological and philosophical exponents of the “traditional” or “classical” doctrine of God include Philo, Augustine, Anselm, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, etc.: see Hartshorne, Charles and Reese, William L., Philosophers Speak of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 76–164.Google Scholar
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17 Ibid., p. 103. Felt criticizes Whitehead's God for not entering freely into interrelationship with his creatures: this issue is discussed in Section III. Felt worries, furthermore, about the inability of Whitehead's system to account for personal immortality; yet some recent process writings have argued a Whiteheadian case for “subjective immortality,” versus the more widely assumed “objective immortality.” See Griffin, David R., “The Possibility of Subjective Immortality in the Philosophy of Whitehead,” The Modern Schoolman 53 (1975), pp. 39–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meliert, Robert B., “A Pastoral on Death and Immortality,” in Cargas, Harry J. and Meland, Bernard, eds., Religious Experience and Process Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1976), pp. 399–408Google Scholar; Inbody, Tyron, “Process Theology and Personal Survival,” The Iliff Review 31 (1974), pp. 31–42.Google Scholar
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23 Ibid.
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38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., p. 151.
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41 Ibid.
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58 Ibid., p. 22.
59 Ibid., p. 23.
60 Ibid., pp. 24-25.
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75 See, for example, Hartshorne's appeal to Morris Cohen's Law of Polarity, according to which “ultimate contraries are correlatives, mutually interdependent, so that nothing real can be described by the wholly one-sided assertion of simplicity, being, actuality, and the like, each in a ‘pure’ form, devoid and independent of complexity, becoming, potentiality, and related contraries.” (Philosophers Speak of God [see note 1 above], p. 2).
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82 Following Whitehead, Hartshorne and other process philosophers employ the “reformed subjectivist principle” as the starting point of epistemology. This principle is distinguished from Descartes' “subjectivist principle” since Descartes’ well-known location of the indubitable basis of knowledge in the thinking self does not go far enough; it does not acknowledge that man does not merely think, but thinks something. Man is aware of external reality, he feels or prehends causal data. Hartshorne insists that certain basic or generic traits of human experience can be ascertained and generalized to apply to all reality as “cosmic variables” (see his Beyond Humanism: Essays in the New Philosophy of Nature [Chicago: Willett, Clark and Company, 1937], p. 112).Google Scholar As Whitehead argued, “creativity,” the “many” and the “one” constitute the “category of the ultimate”; i.e., the basic characteristic of all reality: all beings exemplify creativity, a self-determining freedom whereby the many of the causal data are unified in the one, a new creative experience. “The many become one and are increased by one.” (Process and Reality [New York: Macmillan, 1929], p. 32).Google Scholar
83 Hill, , “Does the World Make a Difference to God?” (see note 35 above), p. 149.Google Scholar
84 Ibid., p. 155.
85 See, for example, William J. Garland, “The Ultimacy of Creativity” and Reeves, Gene, “God and Creativity,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 7 (1969–1970), 361–76 and 377–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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88 Felt, , “Invitation to a Philosophic Revolution” (see note 11 above), p. 106.Google Scholar
89 Robertson, , “Rahner and Ogden” (see note 87 above), p. 403.Google Scholar
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94 See Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967, originally published by Macmillan, 1929), pp. 181–92.Google Scholar
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