1272. Reflections

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Reflections on II God and "Creativity"

If one takes seriously both (1) the interconnections on which Whitehead insists between "creativity," "God," and "temporal creatures"; and "meaning," and, therefore, logicat necessary, not merely factuat contingent (Pl~: 344)-it seems clear enough that God could not be a single actual entity and that the notion of God is no more a "derivative notion" than the notion of "creativity." On the contrary, it lies in the nature of the case that "the ultimate creativity of the universe" (344)1 (2) the mode of such interconnections-namely, that they are matters of "which is actual [only] in virtue of its accidents" (10), always and of necessity occurs under the twofold condition of (1) God, as the "primordial, nontemporal accident [of creativity]" (11), or as its "aboriginal instance," and hence "aboriginal condition" (344); and (2) the temporal creatures, which are, in a sense, as necessary to God as God is to them, sharing with God the "double character" of being at once "a creature of creativity and a condition of creativity" (47; d. 374: "God and the actual world jointly [sic] constitute the character of the creativity for the initial phase of the novel concrescence.") This is not to deny1 of course, that, in another sense, God is necessary to the creatures in a way in which they neither are nor could be necessary to God. Whereas creatures are necessary to God only in that God requires some creatures, not any particular creature, God is necessary to creatures in that each of them requires not merely some Godl but the one and onlV God that there either is or could be.

At the same time, the fact that Whitehead can seem at least to imply a temporal limit to creativity-as when he saysl for example, that "the oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element in the universe repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature" (34JU-may be an indication that the necessity he implies for all three notionsl "creativity," "temporal creatures," and "God/ is something other than the strictest possible kind of necessity. In other words, Whitehead may be talking about a kind of factual necessity, as distinct from the logical necessity insisted upon by Hartshorne.

21 April 1977; rev. 21 March 1994