The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Theism, in a proper form, makes life incomparably more intelligible than any nontheistic view is able to make it.

One way in which this can be seen is to pursue the question, What is the long-run aim of a rational person, and so, in this sense, the summum bonum? Arguably, unless the cosmos, the encompassing reality, creatively. synthesizes the past better than any of us as individual persons is able to do, it is not at all intelligible that there is any such long-run rational aim or summum bonum. But, then, if "God" stands for, among other things, cosmic memory or perception of all actualized value, there can be the rational aim of serving God by contributing to cosmic memory or perception.

Another reason for belief in God, properly understood, is the orderliness of nature. How, given the universality of creativity, and thus of genuine de novo decision-making, not fully anticipated by any causal necessity, can there be an ordered world? Arguably, one of God's functions is so to influence the creativity of all other agents that it results in such a world. Any world-order can only be contingent; and contingency means free decision—in the case of cosmic contingency, cosmic or divine decision. This version of the traditional argument from order, or design, differs from the older versions in just the ways necessary to obviate the objections to them. The problem it seeks to solve is not to find an ultimate sufficient reason for the contingent world, the very notion of any such reason being self-contradictory, but rather to find a reason for there being some contingent world rather than none at all. There has to be some contingent world, and any contingent world has to be ordered. But if God's invincible power and will suffices to explain why this is so, only God's contingent decision for this world rather than that or any other can explain the order of this contingent world.

(Closely following Hartshorne's argument in "The Individual Is a Society": 82 f., 86 f.)

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