By Schubert Ogden
Although Hartshorne naturally allows that the relation between creatures and God is a double one, in that God is both -– as I would put it -– the Creator and the Consummator of all things, he also commonly speaks as though the relation were single, as though only God the Consummator were to be reckoned with. Wiki Markup
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Thus he can say, for instance, that "any entity, according to the meaning of theism, \[is\] related to God as its creator and sole adequate knower. . . . Thus if there must be entities, there must be entities divinely created and known" (_AD_: 285). In the very same context, however, he can also say that "the necessary nonemptiness of the class of divine states is related to the necessary nonemptiness of the only seemingly broader class of states in general (concrete particulars as such) in this way, that for any nondivine state there must be a divine state in which the former is known" (_AD_: 285) -- as though being created by God were not just as essential to the existence of any entity as being known by God. Similarly, he can say that theism is not a factual hypothesis but "a theory of what it means to be a fact -- i.e., to have a certain relation to omniscience" (AD: 276) -- again, apparently ignoring that being created by God, or, as we could also say, having a certain relation to _omnipotence_, is as essential to a fact's being a fact as is its being known by God. |
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Hartshorne himself corrects this one-sidedness when he says that "God is not. . . a fact among facts, but any fact as differing from nothing only through a love which sways and registers all occurrences" (_AD_: 108; dcf. 186, where he says that the preeminence of God's decisions, or "fiats," "means that all other decisions are swayed \[_sic_\] and kept within appropriate limits by the influence of these supreme decisions"; and 148, 204 for his further use of the term "registering"). |
In any event, it is important to state the relation so that both sides of it come through clearly and explicitly.