The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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That God is "modally all-inclusive," and that divine potentiality, therefore, is inclusive of all potentiality does not mean that it simply is all potentiality. For there is and must be also nondivine potentiality, which is distinct from divine potentiality even if it is included therein.

To say that a subject is possible is to say both that it is made possible by God as the all-inclusive object of every subject and that it will be included in God as the all-inclusive subject of every object, and thus also of every subject, if and when it has become actual.

If all possibility—nondivine and divine—can be said to belong to any one thing, it presumably belongs to creativity, or concrescence—along the lines of Hartshorne's statement that "the very idea of potentiality or possibility is to be explicated through the idea of an existing creativity and its [sic!] capacity to decide the previously unsettled" ("Can We Understand God?": 83. But what can be meant by "an existing creativity" except creativity as somehow necessarily instantiated in God and the world? Of course, to speak of God and the world is really to speak of God as including the world.)

Can it be really correct, then, to say that "the realm of possibility, for a theist, is the power of God, God as able to do, rather than as doing" (MVG: 243)?

5 February 1998

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