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5. Hartshorne claims that he rejects "the old distinction between general and special metaphysics, unless the last means empirical cosmology" (CSPM: 39). But, surely, a properly theistic -- as distinct from a properly pantheistic -- metaphysics requires distinguishing in some sense between (1) God; (2) world; and (3) self, and hence, to that extent, also requires distinguishing between theology, cosmology, and psychology Ξ anthropology. I suspect the same kind of reasoning Hartshorne himself urges against Tillich's denial that God exists, is a being, and so on, can be urged, mutatis mutandis, against his own rejection of the distinction between general and special metaphysics.

Wiki Markup6. To what extent is Hartshorne's usual polemic against the doctrine of _creatio ex nihilo_ \ [_a Deo_\] the result of his failing to analyze the ambiguity of this doctrine and to apply his own distinction between "individual" and "event" (or however he expresses the distinction between "existent" and "actual state")? And how is it related to his tendency to overstate his own view by such assertions as that "Experience as emergent synthesis feeds on its own previous products, and on nothing else whatever" (_CSPM_: 8; cf. 12: "only freedom exists to limit freedom")?

Of course, "even God's creativity is his higher form of emergent synthesis, or response to stimuli" (12). But, radically unlike everything else, there is that in God's creativity, or in God as causally efficacious, that is not and could not be itself a "product" of creative synthesis as such; and the abiding legitimacy of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo a Deo is precisely to express this truth.