In recent year one topic of sustained attention among philosophers of religion, at least among those with a metaphysical bent, has been the debate between proponents of a classical or Thomistic doctrine of God and proponents of a process doctrine.¹ In both cases the doctrine of God is only part of a broader metaphysical tradition, which I term “classical metaphysics” and “process metaphysics” respectively. The former term refers most particularly to Thomistic metaphysics, but more generally also to metaphysical systems which share with Thomism certain features, especially its use of the concept of substance to designate the primary entities and its understanding of causation. The term “process metaphysics” refers most particularly to the metaphysical systems of Alfred North Whitehead and of Charles Hartshorne and more generally to systems which take process and temporality as basic features of all reality, including God. During the last forty years Hartshorne and other proponents of process philosophy have leveled many criticisms at classical metaphysics, particularly with respect to its concept of God.² More recently, adherents of classical metaphysics have begun to respond, both criticizing process metaphysics and attempting to defend their own position against criticisms made by proponents of process philosophy.³ These exchanges often show that adherents of each tradition have a reasonably good grasp of the other tradition; moreover, they often reveal considerable dialectical skill by each tradition in defending its own claims. But all too often the exchanges are inconclusive because they deal with differences that are not basic to the two traditions.⁴ Therefore, each side winds up defending disputed claims in terms of more basic claims, but if these more basic claims are never made the topic of sustained consideration, there is no likelihood of ever resolving the issues between the two traditions. This paper is written in the hope of promoting such sustained consideration by delineating what I take to be the basic differences between the two metaphysical systems, contrasting them with each other, and showing their implications for the concept of God in each system.

The term “basic differences” might itself be understood in at least two different ways. It might be taken to suggest merely that one could analyze each metaphysical tradition and postulate a set of axioms from which the other claims in the tradition could be generated; differences between these axioms would be basic differences between the two traditions. Or the term might be taken to suggest that these axioms are not simply something postulated after analysis of the traditions, but are convictions consciously and explicitly recognized as basic by adherents of each tradition and deliberately employed as basic convictions in arguments against opposing positions.

In this paper I am concerned with the term in the former sense; therefore, my procedure will be to list the issues with which the basic differences deal, then to state the position of each tradition on these issues, and finally to show the implications that these differences have for the concept of God. In this way I hope to show that many of the differences between the two metaphysical traditions, including their concepts of God, can be understood as consequences of these few basic differences. I might also add that though I am concerned with basic differences in the former of the two senses distinguished above, I also believe that a careful examination of the literature of the debates will reveal that the points which I define as basic often do figure as reasons given by adherents of one tradition for some position taken in opposition to some claim made by the other tradition. That is, I believe that these basic differences which I distinguish often do function as reasons for other differences which are explicitly debated by adherents of the two traditions. But I would add that usually their basic role is not noted by the adherents. In any event, I shall not attempt to show that these “axioms” are in fact appealed to as basic reasons for differences in the debates in the literature; here I wish only to note my conviction that they do so function.

Certainly even a clear delineation of the basic differences will not be sufficient to resolve the disputes between adherents of the two traditions, for one must also decide which tradition has the more adequate position on these issues. But resolving metaphysical issues is notoriously difficult. In the present case, moreover, this general difficulty is enhanced by a difference regarding the proper procedure for metaphysical argumentation. This difference is particularly sharp between Whitehead and adherents of the classical tradition; therefore I shall formulate it first with respect to his views and then modify it as needed for Hartshorne's view.

Whitehead's procedure in metaphysical argumentation is to formulate a scheme of metaphysical categories and principles of explanation and to use this scheme to interpret the world. The correctness of the scheme is, he says, to be judged by its own internal consistency and coherence and by its adequacy and applicability to interpret all items of human experience.⁵ Therefore, he writes that “the verification of a rationalistic scheme is to be sought in its general success and not in the peculiar certainty, or initial clarity, of its first principles.”⁶ He believes that “philosophy has been haunted by the unfortunate notion that its method is dogmatically to indicate premises which are severally clear, distinct, and certain; and to erect upon those premises a deductive system of thought.”⁷ In contrast to this position, he asserts that “metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious; they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities,” for “the accurate expression of the final generalities is the goal of discussion and not its origin.”⁸

But classical metaphysics employs a procedure very much like that which Whitehead rejects. Somewhere Aristotle speaks of some things as being better known than others; and he says that it would be folly to try to use the latter as evidence for the former. Descartes speaks of things known by the light of natural reason, one of which is the principle that the cause contains at least as much reality as the effect.⁹ These things known in this way are not subjected to the method of radical doubt and are taken as having a certainty beyond dispute. I know of no place where Thomas Aquinas expresses as clearly as do Aristotle and Descartes a reliance on the unquestioned truth of certain basic metaphysical convictions, but I believe that an analysis of the arguments which he uses will reveal that there was such a reliance on certain basic convictions, including those discussed in this paper as the classical position on those issues concerning which the basic differences exist.

Hartshorne's differences from the classical procedure is less than Whitehead's. For Hartshorne believes that basic metaphysical truths can be established without reference to empirical matters by showing that any supposed alternative to them is impossible. This might seem to make his procedure similar to that of classical metaphysics, for he seems to say that certain truths can be known without considering the adequacy of the entire system of which they are parts. But this conclusion must be qualified because Hartshorne also insists that the crucial terms in these principles have a meaning derived from experience and that in some cases only careful attention to the experientially based meaning of key terms can allow us to determine the truth of claims which include them.¹⁰ Moreover, in some cases, he shows the impossibility of a supposed alternative to one of his basic metaphysical beliefs by arguing that the alternative could never be known to be true. For example, he believes that the statement “Something exists” is necessarily true because its denial “Nothing exists” could never be known to be true or even imagined to be true and therefore is necessarily false.¹¹ Thus, Hartshorne argues for what he takes to be the basic metaphysical truths rather than taking anything as obviously true.

These methodological differences certainly contribute to the difficulty in resolving disagreements between classical and process metaphysics. The classical metaphysician is convinced of the correctness of his position on what I am calling the basic issues, and there is, I think, a certain common-sense plausibility to his position on these issues in contrast to the process metaphysician's position on these issues. But as we have seen, the process metaphysician is not convinced by initial plausibility; this is particularly true of Whitehead, who argues that his position avoids certain difficulties into which the classical position falls, while the classical metaphysician is sure that there must be a solution to these difficulties because he has reasoned correctly from true principles.

But our focus in this paper is not on the methodology of metaphysical argumentation; it is rather on differences over some basic metaphysical issues which divide classical and process metaphysics. I would suggest that there are three issues which are basic to other differences; these are:

1. The nature of the primary entities

2. The idea of efficient causation, including (a) the metaphysical interpretation of the causal relation and (b) the determination of what things need to be explained in terms of an efficient cause.

3. The idea of perfection or value.

That there are differences over these three issues is probably widely recognized, but I suspect that the importance of the differences regarding the latter two issues is insufficiently recognized. In any event, the balance of this paper will be devoted to describing the differences on these issues and showing their implications for the idea of God in the two metaphysical traditions.

THE NATURE OF THE PRIMARY ENTITIES

One basic difference between classical and process metaphysics concerns the nature of the primary or basic entities which comprise reality. According to the classical tradition, the primary entities are substances—ordinary things like people, animals, plants, and rocks. The basic model for these substances is probably a biological organism, which has a genuine unity and an inner drive toward some appropriate fulfilling final state. For the process tradition, on the other hand, the primary entities are moments of experience, which occupy small spatial and temporal locations—i.e., they are not mathematical points either spatially or temporally; moreover, in most cases they are not conscious. Each such entity, which Whitehead termed an actual occasion,¹² is a unification of its experience of various other entities. The basic model for these entities is a moment of human experience, which has a genuine unity and which exhibits derivation from some past and (it is claimed) some self-determination in becoming the definite thing which it finally is. It follows that the interrelatedness of the primary entities is essential to their very being, according to process metaphysics, but only accidental, not essential, according to classical metaphysics.

Each of the two traditions has, of course, an analysis of the sorts of entities which the other takes to be primary. The classical tradition interprets experiences as accidents of substances—i.e., as further determinations of the concrete reality of a thing which nevertheless do not affect the essential nature of the thing, the defining character of the sort of thing it is. The process tradition interprets a physical object as a spatially and temporally extended group of occasions all of whose members derive their defining qualities from their experience of earlier members which exemplified these qualities.

Furthermore, within the classical tradition, every finite existing thing can be understood as the actualization of a possibility which is identical to the finite thing except that the finite thing actually exists while the possibility exists only as an idea in the mind of God. The finite thing has no character, quality, or determinateness which the possibility lacks; the only difference—and it makes all the difference—is that the finite thing exists, it is, it has its own act of existence (esse), while the possibility lacks this and exists only as an idea in the mind of God, the idea of something which he might create. But in the process tradition, no possibility is as determinate as an actuality which exemplifies it. To put this another way, the possibility always has some indeterminateness; and no finite thing can be precisely defined in terms of any universal or complex of universals antecedent to its actualization. To become actual is to eliminate all indeterminateness from the idea of the thing as a possibility. This elimination of all indeterminateness is effected by the occasion in its development; therefore, the process tradition holds that every primary entity is partially self-determining and that some freedom is a metaphysical necessity for every primary entity. The classical tradition has usually affirmed that at least human beings are free, but this freedom has been seen as a gift of God, not as a metaphysical necessity; moreover, this tradition has also recognized a tension between this affirmation and its concept of God as the first cause of all beings and as the source of every motion.

Within the classical tradition God too has been conceived on the model of substance, though certain modifications were needed because of the metaphysical role God played within the system of classical thought. Other substances exist because they have received their act of existence from God; obviously, this account will not do for God. So God is conceived as the “substance” which does not receive its esse from anything else. God is his own esse. This idea, when combined with certain consequences of the classical idea of causation and of what needed to be explained in terms of an efficient cause, gave rise to the doctrine that God is the self-subsistent act of existence—Esse Ipsum Subsistens. We shall explore this idea in more depth in the next section of this paper.

Within the process tradition, two somewhat different ways of conceiving of God are to be found. One conceives him as an unending sequence of momentary occasions with certain defining characteristics to be found in every member of this sequence; this is similar to the manner in which this tradition interprets enduring physical objects.¹³ The other way conceives of God as one unending act of unification (or concrescence); this way, which is Whitehead's, simply removes from God the requirement that the act of concrescence occupy only a brief time. Many questions have been raised concerning the coherence of this idea with the rest of Whitehead's scheme, but we shall not go into them here.¹⁴ Indeed, for our purposes in this paper, the difference between these two ways of construing God within process metaphysics can be ignored.

The foregoing differences between classical and process metaphysics are fairly well known, but they are a necessary background for what follows. There I shall be attempting to show that the remaining differences between the classical and the process ideas of God are all consequences of their different ideas of causation and of perfection and value.

THE IDEA OF EFFICIENT CAUSATION

Classical and process metaphysics have in common a rejection of Hume's analysis of causation as constant conjunction; they also agree that in any instance of causation, something is happening in the effect. But they differ on what is active in the causal relationship. The classical view sees the cause as active and the effect as passive. The cause does something; it makes the effect occur. It produces a motion or brings about the presence of a new form in the effect.¹⁵ If one takes a Humean view of causation, he or she tends to think of the cause and the effect as two events such that the one occurs before the other and such that events like the earlier one are regularly followed by events like the later one. But on the classical model of causation, one rather thinks of the cause and the effect as two substances; the cause possesses some form or quality which it causes to be actualized in the effect by the exercise of its causal power.¹⁶ That is, the causal relationship is the exercise of some power by the cause such that some form or quality found in it comes to be present in another substance, the effect. Thus, in contrast to the Humean analysis, in which the cause precedes the effect, the classical analysis of causation sees cause and effect as simultaneous in the sense that the exercise of causal power by the cause is simultaneous with the actualization of the form in the effect (though not simultaneous in the sense that the substance which is the effect begins to exist simultaneously with the substance which is the cause, for the cause qua substance might exist for an indefinite period of time before exerting its power in such a way as to bring about the actualization of the form or motion in the effect).

In light of this classical understanding of causation, we see why Thomas Aquinas could claim that he had proved, by an analysis of motion and of efficient causation, that the universe is the effect of a creator who is the unmoved mover and the first cause, while also admitting that reason is not competent to determine whether or not the universe began some finite number of years ago.¹⁷ We can see too that with respect to these first two of Aquinas' five ways of proving the existence of God, it is irrelevant to offer objections based on the claim that an infinite temporal regress is possible. Certainly Aquinas' argument does not rule out such a regress; indeed, he admitted that it is possible. But such objections to Aquinas' arguments rest upon an understanding of the relation between cause and effect as successive, not simultaneous.

Correlated with the classical notion that the exercise of causal power by the cause is simultaneous with the actualization of the form in the effect is the conviction that all composition needs to be explained as the effect of a concurrent efficient cause which is the cause not simply of the initial introduction of the form into that thing (what Aquinas called a causa in fieri) but of the continued presence of the form in that thing (what Aquinas called a causa in esse). By “composition” Aquinas meant the occurrence in the same substance of two or more ontologically distinct features. I say “features,” not “forms” or “qualities,” because the combination of form and matter in a particular physical object or the combination of esse and essence in a particular finite being are both examples of composition, though neither matter nor esse is a form. But since creatures cannot create ex nihilo, they cannot be the causa in esse of forms, matter, or esse; therefore, a creature can be no more than the cause of the presence of a form in some matter or in a substance. God, however, can be not simply the efficient cause of the presence of some form in matter or in a substance; he can be and is the efficient cause of all features of all finite beings and the first (ultimate) cause of all composition of these features. The attribution of this role to God and several distinctive aspects of Aquinas' doctrine of God follow directly from the classical idea of causation and of what needs to be explained in terms of an efficient cause. Let us look in more detail at how this comes about.

Each of the finite beings we know is a composite of several features—form and matter, substance and accidents, essence and esse. Each of these types of composition would have a causa in fieri and a causa in esse, but we shall focus on the latter in our discussion. In some instances, a finite being can be the proximate causa in esse of some composition in a finite being; for example, a human being may be the cause (causa in esse) of the persistence in him or her of some accidental form, say some habit (though not the causa in esse of the form itself). But the ultimate causa in esse of any creaturely being can be only God. The reason for this is twofold. First, any other finite being will itself be composite; therefore, the principle that requires a causa in esse of every composite being requires that any finite being which is itself a proximate causa in esse of any other composition also have its own causa in esse. The only point at which this regress can stop is with a being who is not composite in any way. Second, every existing composite is a composite of existing features; and any existing feature (except esse itself) is itself a composite of that feature considered as a possible existing thing and esse. Therefore, the ultimate causa in esse of anything would have to be the causa in esse of all the features of the thing considered as possibly existing features and of the esse by which they existed. This must be a being who is the ground of all possibility and who has esse in himself, not by derivation from some other entity.

From these considerations arise perhaps the most distinguishing features of Aquinas' doctrine of God: God is simple, not composite in any way; and God is Esse Ipsum Subsistens. For if God is not composite and if God has esse per se and not per aliud, then he must be just esse, esse ipsum, not esse and something else nor anything else but esse. Finally, God must be pure act with no unactualized possibilities because no being could actualize a potentiality in God. Clearly no finite being could do this, since God is the source of all creatures; therefore, no creature could do anything that would reduce any potentiality in God to act, for God would himself have to be already in act in this regard to be the source of the actuality which the creature possessed. Nor could God himself reduce himself from potentiality to act, since only an entity who already possesses a form in act can actualize it in another. Moreover, esse is the principle of actuality, and as pure esse God cannot contain anything not actual.

We have looked at the classical notion of causation, and we have seen how the most distinguishing features of the classical idea of God follow from this notion of causation. In contrast, there is a very different idea of the causal relation in process metaphysics, and this different idea gives rise to a different idea of God. According to the process view, causation is the experiencing, or prehension,¹⁸ at one spatiotemporal location (“here and now”) of some aspect (or all) of an entity at some other spatiotemporal location (“there and then”). Thus, in the causal relation, it is the effect, not the cause, which is active, and the effect is always subsequent to the cause. At any one spatiotemporal location, there will be many experiencings or prehensions, for there are many previous spatiotemporal locations to be experienced. These several prehensions at one spatiotemporal location grow together into one definite experience, which is an experience of the entire past actual world of the new entity and that experience is what the entity is.

This idea of the causal relation is obviously very different from the classical one; and with it is associated a different idea of what needs to be explained in terms of an efficient cause. For the classical view, as we have seen, any instance of composition needs to be explained in terms of an efficient cause (both causa in esse and causa in fieri) of that composition. But for the process view, every actual entity will involve composition, for every actual entity is the unified experience of other entities. There fore, the fact of composition does not need to be explained in terms of an efficient cause. Since every actual entity is a unification of its prehensions of other entities, there is no more basic or ultimate feature of reality, and therefore there is nothing more basic in terms of which this composition could be explained. Whitehead's term for this basic fact about reality is creativity. Every actual entity is an instance of creativity, but not the effect of creativity, for creativity is not the transcendent cause of actual entities. It is the unceasing “drive” to unify an antecedent many into a new one. This must be borne in mind in interpreting Whitehead's statement that actual entities are creatures of creativity, for this should not be understood to mean that creativity is an efficient cause of actual entities. Rather, creativity is the material cause of actual entities; they are instances of it, not effects of it.¹⁹ Creativity has no actuality apart from its instances; it transcends them only in the sense that it will never be exhausted by the temporal process; there will always be new instances of creativity developing, attaining full determinateness, and being succeeded by new instances. Why an actual entity develops as it does can be explained in terms of the particular features of the entities which it prehended and in terms of its own decisions in its process of concrescence (becoming determinate). But that it exhibits composition, that it is a unification of qualities, cannot be explained in terms of some external efficient cause of this composition; composition is fundamental to all actual entities.

But if, given the principles of process metaphysics, it is illegitimate to require an efficient cause of the compositeness of actual entities, still it might be asked why there are actual entities (or perhaps just actual occasions) at all. If this question seeks an efficient cause of the existence of an actual occasion, we should realize the fundamental incoherence of the question within process metaphysics, given its understanding of efficient causation. In a relationship of efficient causation, if the effect is active, then it must already exist, it must already have some actuality, in order to be an effect. Therefore, there is no way that an efficient cause could cause the actuality of the effect unless one adopts a different understanding of the relationship of efficient causation.²⁰ But if it is illegitimate to seek an efficient cause for the being of an actual occasion, how should we reply to the question of why an actual occasion is actual? One possible answer to this question—we shall later explore some others—is simply that this is the way things are; it is an ultimate fact about reality that there are always new occasions developing.

Proponents of classical metaphysics are particularly likely to be unsatisfied with this answer to the question. Because of their own metaphysical principles, they are so accustomed to thinking that an efficient cause (causa in esse) is needed to explain the existence of finite things that they find it paradoxical or simply inadequate to say that the unending coming-into-existence of finite things (actual occasions) is an ultimate fact needing no further explanation. For instance, E. L. Mascall writes that Whitehead's cosmology

assumes without argument that Creativity, in the sense of self-creativeness, can be taken to be the fundamental characteristic of finite beings, and that, in consequence, whatever may be needed in the way of a God to provide what is lacking in them as an aesthetic final cause or formal cause, they have no need of any efficient cause outside themselves. … But this simply means that Whitehead has concentrated his thought so thoroughly upon the way in which things behave as never really to inquire why they are. He has never properly understood what finite being is and so has never apprehended its radical contingency. … For even if the account of finite beings which is given in Process and Reality be accepted, we still want to know why they are there at all. … The one thing that they are clearly not is self-explanatory, but this is the one fact that Whitehead never allows himself to think about.²¹

There are several comments which should be made about this passage. First, Mascall is technically in error about efficient causes and about self-explanatoriness; as we have seen, the new occasion's prehension of antecedent entities is Whitehead's interpretation of these entities' being efficient causes of aspects of the new occasion, and it shows that he does not regard the new occasion as self-explanatory. In terms of what concerns Mascall, however, he is quite right: there is no efficient cause of the existence of the new occasion, no cause that it is (though there are causes of what it is), and a fortiori no explanation of its existence can be given in terms of an efficient cause. Second, it is not true that Whitehead “assumes without argument that creativity … can be taken to be the fundamental characteristic of finite beings.” This is not assumed without argument, but is argued for in the total elaboration of Whitehead's metaphysical system. As we have seen, Whitehead does not believe that the fundamental metaphysical principles are obvious; on the contrary, “the accurate expression of the final generalities is the goal of discussion,” and “the verification of a rationalistic scheme is to be sought in its general success, and not in the peculiar certainty, or initial clarity, of its first principles.”²² Therefore, Whitehead's failure to present a detailed argument about the issues to which Mascall takes exception does not mean that he is assuming something without argument. Finally it is not true that Whitehead ignores the question of why finite things exist. He ignores it only in the sense that he does not think that it requires an explanation in terms of an efficient cause. I have suggested that he regards it as an ultimate fact about reality that there are always new occasions beginning to develop. If I am correct about this, Whitehead is simply disagreeing with the classical analysis, not ignoring the issues. Thus, when Mascall says that actual occasions are “radically contingent” and are not “self-explanatory,” he is loading these terms with meaning, and applying them in light of standards, derived from his own classical metaphysics.

Moreover, if one might be permitted a tu quoque, the discussion of the classical idea that every finite being must have an efficient cause of its existence is more of an assertion than of an argument. Mascall, for instance, asserts (but does not argue) that for a finite being, “unless something was preserving it it would collapse into non-existence.” He therefore labels finite beings “insufficient,”²³ and he speaks of “the contingency which is radically inherent in [their] very being.”²⁴ But this contingency is not something that can be established by ordinary observation, even though Mascall sometimes points out that finite beings come into existence and pass away. For Mascall does not consider the possibility that their coming into existence when they do, continuing in existence as long as they do, and passing out of existence when they do is itself necessary and not contingent. Or if he does consider it, he would account for this necessity in terms of other finite beings, and he labels the totality of finite beings insufficient. But how could he know this, for surely it is not a fact of observation? We get a clue to answering this when we see him write that we must “perceive finite beings as they actually are,”²⁵ that we must “put ourselves in the right frame of mind for seeing things as they really are.”²⁶ Such seeing is a seeing of a metaphysical truth about them, not a physical truth, and the physical truth that they endure for only a finite period of time does not establish the purported metaphysical truth.

To point out that the claim that a finite being is insufficient to account for its own existence is a metaphysical claim is, of course, not to refute that claim, or even to give any reason to doubt it (except to one who doubts all metaphysical claims). But it does allow us to clarify the nature of the issue between classical and process metaphysics at this point. The classical metaphysician believes that if we correctly see finite things, we shall realize that they require an infinite cause; the process metaphysician denies this. How is the issue to be resolved? The classical metaphysician can invite us to look at finite things again; he can trace and retrace considerations which lead him to the convinction that he is seeing finite things rightly. And the process metaphysician can reply in kind. He can ask us to consider whether the contingency of finite things is not just a contingency about what is there, rather than a contingency that something is there at all. (Is it really possible that there should be nothing where, say, this chair is—nothing, no air, not even electromagnetic radiations in a space empty of all matter?) And beyond the differences about this issue, there is the already noted difference about the methodology of metaphysical argumentation. The classical metaphysician is confident about his analysis of finite cause. But Whitehead would rest the case for his analysis of finite being on the general adequacy of his metaphysical scheme. In what sense finite beings are contingent is surely a rather fundamental metaphysical issue; and as we have seen, he proposes that we determine the adequacy of proposed metaphysical principles by testing the adequacy of the interpretations they allow one to make of one's experience in general, rather than in terms of the clarity of their purported basic principles. In the difference between a method which argues from first principles of which it is assured and a method which justifies first principles by their interpretive success lies an important reason for the difficulty in resolving this, as well as many other, conflicts between classical and process metaphysics.

The discussion thus far in this section of the paper has presupposed one particular answer to the question of why there are always new occasions beginning to develop: that is the way things are. Nevertheless, the principles of process metaphysics allow a variety of answers to this question, and I should mention a couple of others before concluding this section. Within a Whiteheadian approach, one very interesting answer was developed by Lewis Ford, who proposed that in creating his primordial nature God also created the fundamental metaphysical principles which made a world—i.e., a realm of non-divine actual entities—necessary. He writes:

These principles could have been otherwise had God so created them. God's primordial envisagement could have so determined possibility and impossibility that his own act of concrescence would completely exhaust all creativity, permitting him to exist in solitary splendour. In that sense God could have existed without the world, for God is free to create the conditions rendering the world either necessary or impossible, though not contingent.²⁷

Ford's point is that logically God could have so determined the metaphysical principles that he exhausted all creativity within himself, thus making the world metaphysically impossible; or he could have so determined them that he did not exhaust all creativity within himself, thus making the world metaphysically necessary. In this sense, then, there is a reason why there are always new finite occasions: God has so determined the metaphysical principles that creativity can and must be exemplified everlastingly in non-divine actual entities. This does not make God the efficient cause of their being in a classical sense of “efficient cause”—we have seen that that would be incoherent within a process understanding of efficient causality; but it does make God's decision the reason why creativity has both divine and non-divine instances. God's decision permits creativity to have non-divine instances, and he might therefore be said to be their efficient cause in this process sense of making a decision that provides a condition to which an occasion is subject. But each actual occasion is an instance of creativity in its own right; God is not the efficient cause of its creativity. God's decision makes it possible for creativity to have non-divine instances, but God is not the source of non-divine (or divine) creativity; creativity has no source, for it is ultimate.

Hartshorne gives a different answer to the question of why there continue to be non-divine occasions. His answer is simply that no other putative possibility is really possible. He regards it as a basic metaphysical truth that there are such occasions, and he believes that all metaphysical truths are such that their alternatives can be seen to be not really possible if one analyzes them sufficiently.

But regardless of how we account for the fact that new occasions are always beginning to concresce, we can already see how the process analysis of causation will yield very different implications for the doctrine of God than will the classical analysis of causation. First, no efficient cause of composition is needed, according to the process analysis. Therefore, there is no metaphysical reason to insist on God's noncompositeness (or simplicity). Indeed, given the process idea of an actual entity as a concrescence of prehensions, one would expect God to be composite. Second, since the drive to unify past actualities and thereby to create a new actual entity is inherent in reality, the process metaphysician does not have to postulate that God already and eternally actualizes any possibility that any creature actualizes; an actual occasion may well actualize (concretely realize) a possibility before God does. Thus God's experience of the concrete realization of the possibility may be derivative from and conditional upon some creature's experience and realization of it. God therefore is not pure act; like all actual entities, God is active, but with an activity conditioned by antecedent actual entities. God has infinitely many unactualized potentialities for experience.

In this section we have looked at the classical and the process ideas of efficient causation and of what sorts of things require an explanation in terms of an efficient cause, and we have seen that several of the most basic differences in the two ideas of God are direct consequences of the ideas on causation.

VALUE AND PERFECTION

The other difference between classical and process metaphysics which we were going to discuss concerned certain issues in their axiologies. More particularly, we shall examine some differences in their answers to the question “What is good?” In our examination, we shall prescind from any consideration of normative answers to the question—i.e., we shall not be concerned with whether love is good or justice is good. Rather we shall be looking at the ontological status of the referents of normative answers to the question—e.g., if it is said that love is good, then we shall be concerned to discover what ontological status love is thought to have (in Thomistic metaphysics, it would be a habit, which is a form characterizing a substance). If we conduct this sort of examination, we quickly discover that classical metaphysics speaks most often of perfections while process metaphysics speaks most often of values. As we shall see in our discussion of these concepts, the difference in terminology is not accidental.

Classical metaphysics understands a perfection to be an actus, the actualizing of some capability which the entity possesses. The understanding correlates well with its model of the primary entities. They are modeled on biological organisms, and the perfection (or fulfillment) of a biological organism is for it to exercise the capacities which it has; more generally, the perfection of a being is the exercise of its capacities. Thus, for two entities of the same type or species, the better or more perfect one is the one which exercises more of its capacities, or which exercises them more completely, or which exercises the higher capacities. For entities of different types, the better one is the one which has and exercises the higher capacities. For there is a scale of value associated with various capacities, though the nature of the scale and the standards involved are not germane to our purposes in this paper.

In process metaphysics, on the other hand, value is understood basically in esthetic terms. The only thing intrinsically good is a certain kind of experience, one which involves strong contrasts harmoniously integrated and intensely felt. All other value is dependent on esthetic value. In a derivative sense, then, something may be valuable because it is an abstract characteristic of valuable experiences or because it conduces to or is a consequence of such valuable experiences. Moral values such as honesty and justice would, on this view, be held to be good because entities characterized by such qualities tend to conduce to more experiences of a more valuable nature than do entities not characterized by such qualities. Seen from a process viewpoint, what are perfections in the classical sense are thus doubly derivative entities. They are derivative in the sense that they designate an abstract characteristic of a group of entities. And they are axiologically derivative in the sense that they are good only by virtue of a relation to something else which is intrinsically good (a certain kind of experience). Conversely, seen from a classical viewpoint, what are intrinsically valuable in the process tradition are simply accidental ways in which some substances actualize one or another of their capacities; moreover, the classical tradition would deny that these “values” applied at all to inanimate substances, to which the classical tradition does attribute some perfections.

There are several important consequences of the different ways in which perfection and value are understood in the two traditions. In the classical tradition, it is natural to think of each actualization of a capacity as a different perfection and thus to say that an entity has many perfections at the same time. But in the process tradition, it would be natural to think of the total experience as the value and thus to say that an entity has only one value at a time. (In a derivative sense, one can think of an entity including as part of its experience the experience—and thus the value—of another entity, and this would give some sense to saying that an entity included many values at the same time; but in process metaphysics this would be derivative, for the total experience—the Gestalt—is the primary subject of attributions of value.) A second consequence of the distinction in the ways in which perfection and value are understood is that in the classical tradition a perfection can, in principle, be continued indefinitely, that is, an entity can continue indefinitely to exercise whatever capacity defines the perfection. But in the process tradition, the value is inherently of short duration. This is both because the primary entities (which are the experiences which are valuable) are inherently of limited temporal duration (except possibly for God); and also because even if entities were of longer duration, if they continued to experience new things, the addition would change the total experience and make what had been the total experience into only part of a new totality—what formerly had been the entire experience would become a memory remembered more or less vividly and completely. A third consequence of the difference between classical and process metaphysics on the nature of perfection and value is that it makes sense to speak of a maximum of perfection in the former tradition, but not of a maximum of value in the latter tradition. For in the former, an entity which was completely exercising all its capacities would be as perfect as it could be; no higher degree of perfection would be conceivable for such an entity. And if a being had all capacities and exercised them all (as God is thought to do in this tradition), it would be unimprovably perfect. But adherents of the process tradition would insist that the idea of a maximum richness of experience simply makes no sense, any more than the concept of a largest number makes sense. Given an experience, another can always be conceived which is richer, which integrates stronger contrasts more harmoniously. Of course, it is possible for there to be a maximum of value when value is considered in its derivative sense, for the abstract characteristic of, say, seeking the maximum richness of experience for all entities could not be improved upon; it is a maximum already. But this possibility does not apply to value in its primary sense.

One other related difference between the classical and process ideas of perfection and value might be mentioned here, though it is not a strict consequence of their basic difference. It is that thinkers in the process tradition seem to have a keener appreciation that certain values or perfections are incompossible with each other than do thinkers in the classical tradition. The former would stress that the precise quality of any value depends on the contents which it includes and on how it puts them together. But if it includes certain contents and puts them together in a certain way, then it excludes other possible contents and other possible ways of putting them together. And it cannot put together all possible contents in all possible ways in the same one experience. Thus, attaining one value excludes attaining another. Something of this same point might be made by thinkers in the classical tradition, for they might well point out that running, flying, and swimming are all perfections, but no entity can do all three at once. But though some such point might well be made within the classical tradition, it was not; and as we shall see, certain aspects of the classical idea of causation were used in such a way as to give a purported basis for the claim that God contains all perfections. Let us then turn to a consideration of how the foregoing differences about perfection and value affect the idea of God in the two traditions.

Both traditions assert that God is perfect, the most perfect (or most valuable) being conceivable, but their different ideas of perfection and value give this claim two somewhat different senses. Within the classical tradition, God is conceived of as eternally actualizing all his potentialities. He is unchangeably at a maximum of perfection, for he is said to have all good potentialities and eternally to actualize them. But how does the classical tradition handle the problem of the incompossibility of various perfections? Its claim is that any perfection in an effect is also in its cause, either in the same way or in some higher way. This follows from its analysis of the causal relation and its idea about what things need an explanation in terms of some efficient cause. It holds that if there is any positive quality (and therefore any perfection) in any thing which has a cause external to itself, then that same quality must be present in the cause or it could not produce that quality in the effect. But the quality, the tradition adds, can be present in the same way (formally) or in a higher way (virtually). Thus, incompossible perfections in creatures can all be present virtually in God, who is their cause; indeed, if they are present in any creature they must be present in God, and since they must all be present, their compresence (usually in a virtual mode) must be possible. Moreover, God's creative power infinitely exceeds the power he actually used in creating the present creaturely order. There are infinitely many other possible creatures which he could have created, and whose perfections he must therefore include. Thus we can say that God's perfection includes (again, usually in a virtual mode) not only all the perfections of all the actual creatures, but all the perfections of all possible creatures—or, more briefly, that God includes all possible perfections.²⁸ One sympathetic writer expresses this idea as follows:

It is not as though an addition sum is being done of all the perfections, in their various grades, and then designating God as the possessor of the whole lot as we have come to know them. What we are doing is more akin to “allowing for,” within the divine Reality, a transcendent totalization of the perfection of existence as we have come to know it.²⁹

In the process tradition, God's perfection is understood primarily in terms of the esthetic quality of his total experience and secondarily in terms of the characteristics of included parts of his total experience and certain abstract characteristics of that total experience. Thus there are several aspects to the divine perfection. First, God's experience includes the experiences of all the creatures; therefore, whatever values they attain in their particular experiences are included as parts in the total divine experience. Second, the experience of each creature is included without loss in the total divine experience while a creature's experience of other entities is very limited. Therefore, God's experience will be the most inclusive of any entity's. Third, God will integrate the experiences of various creatures into one totality in such a way as to yield the richest possible resulting experience. Thus, his experience will be the richest possible to any entity at that time. Finally, each divine experience exemplifies moral and intellectual virtues such as knowing and loving all things, and thereby God has moral perfections, whose value is, as I said earlier, derivative from esthetic value in process metaphysics.

The foregoing differences between the classical and the process ideas of God's perfection imply certain other differences. First, in the classical tradition, God's perfection is underived from and unconditioned by anything outside himself; but in the process tradition, the precise features of the value God attains depend upon the qualities of creatures, for the content of the divine experience is derived in part from the content of creaturely experiences. This difference is partly the consequence also of a difference in the way in which the primary entities are understood. If the primary entities are substances and their perfections are actualizations of their potentialities, then it would be an imperfection to be dependent on other beings, for a dependent being could attain only those perfections which other beings caused him to attain and thus could not be sure of attaining his full perfection. But if the primary entities are actual entities, then dependence on other entities is metaphysically necessary and therefore could not be considered an imperfection. The best being would be the being who attains the greatest value from the data furnished him by other beings. Thus, it follows from very basic features of the two traditions that the perfection attributed to God in classical metaphysics is unconditional while the value attributed to God by process metaphysics is conditional.

Second, in the classical tradition, God is said eternally to have all perfections—i.e., eternally to be actualizing all his potentialities—but in the process tradition, God's total experience is continually increasing in content and therefore in richness, for the increased content means more data to include in the overall harmony. Third, in the classical tradition, God is said eternally to have all perfections; therefore, none are omitted or left out. But in the process tradition, it would be said that there are many values which never were actualized and which therefore God does not and never will include. For example, it was once possible that Beethoven would live longer than he did and write more symphonies; he didn't, and the values represented by these possible symphonies are everlastingly gone—known and experienced neither by any creature nor by God. Of course, since these values, these experiences, were not actualized, some others were, with which the unactualized values were incompossible. But there is no guarantee that the values which in fact were actualized were as rich as those which were not. This difference between the classical and the process traditions is given added significance when it is combined with the difference between the two traditions over the distinction between the possible and the actual. As I pointed out earlier in the paper, the process tradition holds that actuality is always more definite, more concrete, than is possibility. Therefore, not even God could imagine in its full concreteness or definiteness a possible unwritten Beethoven symphony. But in the classical tradition, the difference between the possible and the actual is only that God actualizes the latter; it contains no determinateness that the possibility in the mind of God did not already contain; therefore, when a possibility is not actualized, the created universe loses the value, but God does not. That value, that perfection, is eternally present in God as a possibility to which he might have given actuality, but did not. All creaturely perfections are virtually or formally present in him whether or not he actualizes them in the created order.

CONCLUSION

If the argument in this paper is basically correct, certain conclusions regarding future discussions between the two traditions would seem to be warranted. It would seem that greater recognition should be given to the central role of the topics that I have delineated as basic differences. Such “greater recognition” might involve devoting more attention to the direct analysis of issues with which these basic differences deal. One must not, however, assume that more attention to direct analysis of these issues is a methodologically adequate procedure for resolving the differences between the two traditions, for making that assumption would be tantamount to accepting the classical rather than the Whiteheadian methodology for resolving metaphysical issues. Therefore, if one is to avoid prejudging the methodological questions, one must pay attention to the import that differences over basic issues have for other differences between the two traditions.

One consequence of increased attention to the import of these differences might be that it would be seen that differences regarding the metaphysical interpretation of certain entities or phenomena are the consequences of these basic differences. This point might be illustrated by reference to discussions by adherents of each of the traditions of the religious adequacy of the concept of God found in the other tradition. Let us suppose that any religiously adequate concept of God must include the idea that God possesses certain characteristics such as being the best (most perfect, most valuable) being conceivable and being in some sense ultimate. If we take these as religious requirements, we must also beware of importing into them ideas derived from some particular metaphysical tradition. To be sure, if it is to have a religiously adequate idea of God, any metaphysical system must include in its doctrine of God some aspects which can be interpreted as ways of meeting these religious requirements. But it is a highly suspect procedure to criticize one system's way of meeting these requirements because it gives an interpretation of them which is not adequate when judged by the standards of some other metaphysical system's interpretation of them. Thus, if I am right that certain metaphysical differences underlie the different doctrines of God, then proponents of one metaphysical tradition may be criticizing the other's idea of God as religiously inadequate when really the issue concerns, say, a dispute about the idea of causation or the idea of the ontological status of value or perfection. Since these are hardly matters of primary religious import, it is somewhat questionable to argue that deficiency in these matters makes one's doctrine of God deficient. On the other hand, I do think that it is possible to argue that a metaphysically derived idea of God is religiously inadequate, but one must be careful to do so on the basis of the religious requirements of the idea of God, not on the basis of requirements imported from one's own metaphysical system. It is my hope that this paper will aid participants in the ongoing discussion between the two traditions to make this distinction.

Notes

1. The research for, and writing of, this paper was done while I was participant in a NEH summer Seminar for College Teachers, led by Prof. William Alston of the University of Illinois. I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to my fellow participants and especially to Prof. Alston for their stimulating ideas, and I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to the National Endowment for the Humanities for its support that enabled me to write this paper.

2. For example, Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1948) and Schubert Ogden, The Reality of God and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

3. There are many articles, but the reader might refer to the following: W. Norris Clarke, “A New Look at the Immutability of God,” God Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Robert J. Roth (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 43-72; Joseph Donceel, “Second Thoughts on the Nature of God,” Thought, 46 (1971), 346-70; William S. Hill, “Does God Know the Future? Aquinas and Some Moderns,” Theological Studies, 36 (1975), 3-18; William J. Hill, “Does the World Make a Difference to God?” The Thomist, 38 (1974); 146-64; and Anthony J. Kelly, “God: How Near a Relation?” The Thomist, 34 (1970), 191-229. A more recent work which attempts to accommodate more of Whitehead's idea is W. Norris Clarke's The Philosophical Approach to God: A Contemporary Neo-Thomist Perspective (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest Univ. Publications, 1979).

4. An older, but instructive, example of such an exchange is that generated by John Wild's “Review-article of The Divine Relativity by Charles Hartshorne,” in The Review of Metaphysics 2 (1948):65-77. Hartshorne replied in “The Divine Relativity and Absoluteness: A Reply,” The Review of Metaphysics 4 (September 1950): 31-60; and Wild countered in “The Divine Existence: An Answer to Mr. Hartshorne,” ibid., 61-84. I should, however, add that some of the inconclusiveness of this exchange was also based on misunderstanding.

5. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 4.

6. Ibid., p. 12.

7. Ibid., pp. 11f.

8. Ibid., p. 12.

9. René Descartes, Meditations, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1951), p. 36.

10. Charles Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1970), pp. 75, 171.

11. Ibid., pp. 161f.

12. Whitehead also used the term “actual entity” to refer to these primary entities; the two terms differ slightly in their meaning and extension in that God is an actual entity but not an actual occasion.

13. This way of conceiving God is characteristic of Charles Hartshorne, Schubert Ogden, and John Cobb.

14. The interested reader may refer to John B. Cobb, Jr., A Christian Natural Theology, Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), pp. 188-92, where Cobb argues that it is more coherent to conceive of God in the way noted above.

15. Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. L. K. Shook (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 178f.

16. This sentence is obviously not a definition; if it were, it would fail because it includes the definiendum in the definiens. Rather, in the sentence I wanted only to stress certain distinctions between the Humean and the classical notions of causation. As far as I know, classical metaphysics gives no further analysis of what “causing” or “causal power” is. I suspect that the next sentence in the text gives as good a brief statement about causation as can be given for this tradition; and even it speaks vaguely of “some power,” which can be glossed only as “causal power.”

17. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I. 2 and 46.

18. “Prehension” is Whitehead's technical term for this experiencing; he also uses the term “feeling” as a more concrete, but possibly somewhat misleading, term to help the reader get some intuitive idea of what he is driving at. Hartshorne almost always uses the latter term.

19. Whitehead, op. cit., pp. 10f.

20. Failure to see this vitiates Cobb's attempt (op. cit., p. 213) to create a Whiteheadian doctrine of God according to which “God is the cause of the being as well as the form of actual occasions.”

21. He Who Is (rev. ed.; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), pp. 158f. Italics his.

22. Whitehead, op. cit., p. 12.

23. Op. cit., p. 46.

24. Ibid., p. 69.

25. Ibid., p. 74.

26. Ibid., p. 75.

27. “The Viability of Whitehead's God for Christian Theology,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, (1970): 148.

28. One may well wonder whether this virtual possession of a perfection is a genuine possession of it. I may make something which has the power of flight, and therefore I must virtually have this power, but it is hard to see what this amounts to except the bare notion that I am able to make things with the power of flight. When one comes right down to it, the fact remains that what I make can do something which I cannot do: fly. And one may be tempted to think that the idea that a quality is virtually present is a doctrine invented to shore up an analysis of causation (in particular, the idea that any form present in an effect must be present in its cause).

    In correspondence with me, Prof. Norris Clarke of Fordham suggested another, and perhaps better, way to think of the virtual possession of a perfection. He writes that “it does not mean to possess the same specific perfection of an effect in its own formal nature, such as the specific perfection of flying as flying. … It means rather to possess another higher type of perfection which contains the positive contribution of the effect in quite a different higher way. E.g., the core of perfection of flying, or any other locomotion, running, etc., is to make oneself rapidly present to other places and things without hindrance from things on the surface. But since God is omnipresent simultaneously to all beings at once, this is the supereminent fulfillment of all speed in a higher way, transcending motion entirely to pure total presence.” (Compare: “Perfect speed is being there.”—Jonathan Livingston Seagull.)

    This is an interesting and helpful suggestion for a way to think of God's supereminent perfections as virtual possession of the perfections found in the creatures. But in another way it only further illustrates the difference in the way that the classical and the process traditions understand perfection and value. For the process tradition would not see flying as just a way to make oneself rapidly present to other places and things, though it is certainly that. Instead, the process tradition would speak of the value that lies in the specific experience of flying—the experience of muscular exertion, of gliding on air currents, of seeing the ground slip more or less rapidly by. Similarly, swimming would be seen as not just another form of locomotion either; rather, the process thinker would speak of the experience of feeling the water on one's body, of the muscular exertion of swimming, etc. For the process thinker, the experience of an omnipresent being is certainly a valuable experience, a more inclusive (and therefore richer) experience than that of a (non-omnipresent) being that swims or flies (or walks or runs), but it is not the same experience, nor is it a higher form of the same experience. To be omnipresent is a perfection, but so is the ability to fly or to swim. The former makes possible a more inclusive experience than the latter, but that more inclusive experience can include the latter experience only derivatively—i.e., only because some creature has the experience can God, who perfectly knows the experience of all creatures, share in, and thereby have, the experience of flying or swimming. If no creature had ever flown or swum, God would not have the experience of flying or swimming, nor would he have some higher perfection that somehow included all the value to be found in the experience of flying or swimming. All value ultimately is based on the value of particular experiences in their full concreteness. As I said, this vividly illustrates the difference between classical tradition, which grounds its axiology on the actualization of perfections, and the process tradition, which grounds its axiology on the having of valuable experiences.

29. Kelly, op. cit., p. 224.