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Does Process Thought Allow Personal Immortality?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
If by personal immortality one means that the soul is naturally eternal and passes as a substance through physical death to another life, then the answer to this question is a firm No. Both Alfred North Whitehead and his most famous student Charles Hartshorne disavowed such personal immortality as philosophically incompatible with the basic tenets of process thought. For Whitehead, and all philosophers who claim to follow him, process is the ultimate metaphysical generality describing how actual entities (occasions) instantiate themselves from the causality of entities in their past to then become objectified as they influence successor actual entities. To claim that there are multiple exceptions to the sway of universal process in the form of eternal souls introduces a radical and unacceptable philosophical incoherence into the Whiteheadian metaphysical system. Hartshorne held that a belief in eternal souls was not only incompatible with process thought but also compromised the philosophy of Berkeley, Descartes and Kant. In addition, he considered such belief bad religion and argued forcibly against it.
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References
1 Hartshorne, Charles, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), p. 45.Google Scholar
2 Hartshorne, , A Natural Theology for Our Time (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1967), pp. 106–13.Google Scholar
3 Davis, Stephen T., Risen Indeed: Making Sense of the Resurrection (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1993).Google Scholar
4 The distinction here is between the integration of feelings that are internal to the concrescing entity and those that include the past feelings of entities. It is the latter that constitute causality.
5 The soul event is also directly influenced by events beyond the body. Whitehead specifically referred to evidence for telepathy as support for this influence of non-contiguous occasions (Process and Reality, corrected edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, 308).
6 By almost overwhelming causal determination I do not mean complete causal determination. Each entity has some transcendence even over the causality of God.
7 I should point out that Whitehead himself left open the possibility that the human soul might be sustained by God apart from the body and that some process thinkers (such as John Cobb and David Griffin) develop this possibility. My position follows Whitehead's own evident belief that this probably does not actually occur. I prefer a position of God's resurrection of the human soul and body as presented later.
8 Davis, pp. 90–1.
9 Joseph Bracken uses a process social picture of God in an attempt to develop an understanding of the orthodox Trinitarian concept of God. The ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Holy Spirit’ are each personal (sub)societies unified as a Whiteheadian society of subsocieties to form the society of ‘God’. They are also unified by a divine intersubjectivity that Bracken identifies with the ultimate principle of Creativity in process thought. Furthermore, the whole of creation, once it is obtained, becomes a subsociety of the ‘Son’. Bracken, Joseph A., S.J. Society and Spirit: A Trinitarian Cosmology (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1991), chapter 6, pp. 123–139.Google Scholar
10 I am indebted to David Griffin for the suggestion of creation from a left-over chaos of events. See his Evil Revisited: Responses and Considerations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 23,Google Scholar and his response to criticism of this idea, pp. 185–8.
11 Notice that the doctrine of ‘continuing causality from something’ does not suggest that God creates the world out of God's own being – that the world is therefore divine. To get this pantheistic doctrine one has to believe that God's divine parts subsist through time as traditional substances. The creation out of nothing doctrine is not strictly Biblical. The closest reference to it occurs obliquely in the book of 11 Maccabees (7.28–9).
12 Davis, pp. 17–19.
13 Although Newton provided the mathematics for a closed system of natural order, he insisted on the need for God's intervention.
14 Davis, pp. 17–18.
15 Davis, p. 18.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 John, Polkinghorne, Reason and Reality: The Relationship between Science and Theology (London: SPCK, 1991), p. 47.Google Scholar
19 Griffin, David Ray, Evil Revisited: Responses and Considerations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 6.Google Scholar