993. Hartshorne expressly confirms in one place . . .

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Hartshorne expressly confirms in one place what careful readers of his writings would have long since concluded—namely, that his "favorite arguments for belief [sc. in God] are the argument from order and the argument from what Kant called the summum bonum and [he calls] the rational aim: what rational beings could reasonably accept as the final purpose of their existence and activity" ("Our Knowledge of God": 60).

One excellent summary of these two arguments is given in "Man's Fragmentariness": 23 f.:

"One [argument] is . . . that the belief in a divine life is the only way to render our fragmentary situation intelligible in terms of purpose. The whole must possess the values of the parts; but only a conscious life, inclusive of all lesser lives, could possess the values of these lesser lives. An unconscious whole cannot possess the values of its conscious parts. Only a higher consciousness can contain the worth of all inferior consciousnesses. Without the belief in a conscious whole, the conscious parts, such as we are, will be forced to deny in practice, and in terms of purpose, their incurably partial role in the system of things, to pretend that somehow they are more than the fragments which observation shows them to be.

"The second argument is in connection with the idea of order. The world is ordered, and any world must be ordered. (For a mere chaos is unthinkable.) But how, or by what, are things ordered? There are in principle only two theories we can form: either things order themselves relative to each other, or there is one superior Something by which all else is ordered. In political analogy [sic!], we have either a cosmic democracy, or a cosmic monarchy. There might seem to be other possibilities, such as oligarchy, as it were, rule by a cosmic committee. But within the committee the issue breaks out again: there is either a rule by one, or there is not. The rule of one, or the rule of many, this is the final alternative. Now the rule of one solves the problem, and the rule of many does not. Given a supreme directive and a chairman, the members of a committee can cooperatively determine certain details, but with no directive and no chairman, a committee is useless. It is vain to say, let each adapt to all the others. For until there is a general system of adaptation already established, there is no possibility of adaptation. One cannot conform to chaos. So the proposed solution begs the question. But it is quite different to say, let all adapt to One and the same supreme Reality. For then a common element is injected into all lesser agents by the one Supreme agent. The laws of nature express this common element. Other laws are conceivable, in effect there has been a choice of just these laws. Can the atoms have made this choice? Surely a supreme creative power must have made it, able by its superiority to gain the acceptance of all lesser powers."