God and Time in Whitehead

While it is generally agreed that Whitehead conceives of God in Process and Reality as a single nontemporal actual entity, several interpreters have suggested that there are difficulties in that conception which should be remedied by thinking of God as a society of personally ordered actual occasions. This article focuses upon John Cobb's argument for the societal view and suggests that that argument, as well as the alternative proposal offered by William Christian, is based upon a confusion of Whitehead's two kinds of process (the process of becoming, or concrescence, and the process of transition) and their relationship to time. The author seeks to demonstrate that Whitehead's system in Process and Reality not only allows a conception of God as a single nontemporal everlasting actual entity but, in fact, demands it. Bowman L. Clarke is Professor of Philosophy and head of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Georgia. He is the author of "Language and Whitehead's Conception of Speculative Philosophy," Language and Natural Theology, and other publications. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:44:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 564 Bowman L. Clarke Most interpreters of Whitehead agree that God in Process and Reality is conceived by Whitehead as a single nontemporal actual entity. A number of interpreters, however, have argued that this view involves difficulties which can be remedied if we reconstruct God along the lines of a personally ordered society of actual occasions, or a nexus. Let us refer to this first view as the entitative view and to the second as the societal view./l/ In this paper I want to examine these apparent difficulties posed by the entitative view, which seem to suggest that a societal view is more coherent, or consistent, with the Whiteheadian metaphysics -primarily those difficulties posed by John Cobb in his A Christian Natural Theology. There may be reasons external to the Whiteheadian metaphysics, such as religious, philosophical, or scientific reasons, to prefer a societal view,/2/ but I want to focus solely on those apparent problems internal to the writings of Whitehead which seem to suggest that a societal view is preferable. And I shall use the problems raised by Cobb as an occasion for investigating anew the problem of the relation of God to time in Process and Reality. Cobb's argument that a societal view is preferable to the entitative view can conveniently be summarized in eight steps and a conclusion as follows: 1. "From the point of view of physical time the actual occasions are temporally atomic" (185). This assertion is understood to mean that "they perish as soon as they have become" (187). This is taken to mean, Cobb writes, that "the temporal extension happens all at once as an indivisible unit" (186). Or again, Cobb writes, "the occasion must be said to become all at once" (186), and this is taken to mean that the occasions "are indivisible into earlier and later portions" (185-86). The second step concerns the sequential ordering of physical time: 2. "[P]hysical time [is] derived from transition from one occasion to another" (185). It is in this way, Cobb tells us, that Whitehead's reference to Locke's "time is a perpetual perishing" is to be understood. He writes, for example, "For Whitehead 'time' is physical time, and it is 'perpetual perishing"' (187). Time, then, is a series, each member of which is to be conceived as the becoming "all at once" of a temporally atomic actual occasion which is "indivisible into earlier and later portions" and "which perishes as soon as it has become," and is then succeeded by another such atomic actual occasion, and so on. 3. "Whitehead recognizes process in the consequent nature of God" (188). This, of course, is a rather important premise since it is taken by most interpreters of Whitehead to be what distinguishes his view of God from the classical views. And it is generally taken to be his major contribution to theology. Cobb summarizes Whitehead's view this way: "It is quite clear that the description of God as non-temporal does not This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:44:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms