1270. I Agree

SCANNED PDF

I agree with Hartshorne that "[t]o be God is essentially to be the supreme productive force itself, unproduced and unproducible (except in its accidents) by any force whatsoever" (M VG: 307).

This seems to me to be the only conclusion one can reach either as a Christian or as a Whiteheadian (although I should wish to stress that either would also have reasons for insisting that God is the Consummator as well as the Creator and, therefore, must be thought and spoken about essentially as being more than simply "the supreme productive force itself"). One is obliged to reach this conclusion as a Christian because it belongs to the essence of God decisively re-presented through Jesus to bef as Paul puts it, the One "from whom are all things" as well as the One "for whom we exist" (1 Cor 8:6). One is obliged to reach it as a Whiteheadian because of "the ontological principle," according to which the only reasons for things are actual entities, i.e., either God, for all reasons of the highest absoluteness, or temporal actual entities, for all other reasons that refer only to a particular environment (P Rc: 19; d. 43). therefore, reject Bracken's view that of the "several candidates" for the function of "Ultimate Reality" in Whitehead's philosophy, it is "creativity," rather than "God" that is the "genuine metaphysical Absolute_{f" in the sense that "creativity 'creates' each actual occasion by being the underlying force in its individual process of self-realization" (52 f., 54;} d. also 42, where Bracken proposes that "the Infinite is, properly speaking, not an entitYf not even God as the divine entitYf but an all-comprehensive activity").

25 September 1995