A Process Theology in Rhyme
or, A Poetics of God
By Hyatt Carter
One might find it odd
That God is not God.
Even a word the most precise and pristine,
Is, in this usage, malapropos and obscene.
Must we, then, of the word completely beware?
Rather, like radium, it may be handled with care.
Let me offer, now, a word to the wise,
God is not God in any verbal guise;
God is ineffable, true enough, but also, yes,
May be limned with metaphysical finesse.
To mistake abstractions for the concrete
Is, for metaphysics, a decisive defeat.
This is the fallacy most to be eschewed
By the savvy few and logically shrewd.
So said Whitehead, and Hartshorne, too,
And to this, above all, one must be true.
Be scrupulous of what you mean by “God,”
Hold only what holds you in adoration awed,
But also beheld with clear and cognitive rigor
Illuminated by the beauty of rational splendor.
In verbal formulations be watchful and wary,
Let them be precise, penetrating, and lapidary.
In a word—be not slipshod
In forming ideas about God.
The One who is worthy of worship and adoration
Adores ideas coming from deepest contemplation.
God, the Creatures, and Creativity
Is God the ultimate, you may wish to know.
I answer, yes, of course—but also, no.
For some in process thought there are three:
God, the Creatures, and Creativity.
Of these three, Creativity favors first in creation,
Since God is, of the Creativity, an instantiation.
But all three are required for any universe to exist,
As Whitehead made clear and was right to insist.
And not only to merely exist, but also required, you see,
For any advance into beauty, exuberance, and novelty.
It is by determination, and necessarily by chance,
By two types of process does the world advance:
Concrescence, as final causation, achieves self-actualization;
To pass on what is achieved is transition or efficient causation.
And, in beauty, these two interweave in perpetual oscillation.
(The latter, to be clear, is David Ray Griffin’s innovation.)
Omniscience, or In All Ways Wise
If God, in essence, cannot be otherwise,
Or cannot be other than wise,
God is, always and ever, other-wise.
That is, of each and every other,
In all ways wonderously wise;
Otherwise, God would be otherwise.
And so, as God is in nowise otherwise,
God is all-wise and everywhere other-wise.
This being said, one may go on likewise —
Let us suppose
God only knows
All there is to know.
Does it, then, follow
That God can forever and in detail foresee
How the decisions we make turn out to be?
There is little in eternity that God does not know
But always a little that God can never foreknow
(How our decisions from here to entirety may go)
Because there is simply nothing yet there to know.
Process philosophy can without contradiction show
That this is the case and is, indeed, apodictically so,
And that within the divine and everlasting purview,
God is always everywhere, waiting for something new.
At every time and, yes, at every where,
God is always here, yes, and always there,
With all entities, yes, in every new moment
Giving to one and, to all, lures of bestowment,
And as a participating partner in the dance,
Enjoying novelty, yes, in the creative advance.
This is rhapsody (Yes!) a rollicking robust romance,
This is, now and forevermore, the divine Jouissance.
Omnipotence
Can we not say —
God’s power must exceed all other power,
Is the highest conceivable form of power,
Is beyond question the greatest power,
An exponentially greater power,
Beyond imagination, than any other power,
An all-surpassing power
Including even self-surpassing power,
And still say that even the greatest power
Is among many powers,
Only one power.
Omnipresence
We are sometimes here, sometimes there;
God is all times . . . e v e r y w h e r e.
Initial Aim
The Poet of the World, She,
In reverie
Today to me,
Whispered intimations of a verse
Wherein only a line or two were clear;
And then persuaded me
In further reverie
To let mind in imagination immerse
And inclined down, close to my ear,
Within the hollow, to whisper near:
You take it from here.
It Never Really Is
So processual is an actual entity,
So in becoming in its identity,
That Whitehead startles by saying, viz.:
An actual entity never really is.
What Cannot Be, Yet is
It is as true to say
that God is one and many
as that the World is many and one.
It is as true to say
that the World requires God
as that God requires the World.
It is as true to say
that the World cannot exist without God,
as that God cannot exist without the World.
It is as true to say
that the World is created by God
as that God is created by the World.
If you say, “This cannot possibly be!”
(and there are many who will agree)
then hear what Whitehead has to say:
“The concept of ‘God’ is the way
we understand this incredible fact:
that what cannot be . . . yet is.”
To get this is like a eureka act,
and is just as a joke you get is.
This may make you squint
Or may not be as you like it,
But, look, it glints like flint
No matter how you strike it.
Charles Hartshorne’s
Cumulative Proof for the Existence of God
Likening the argument to a cable
made strong by many strands
Hartshorne adduces six arguments:
(that will be his logical bands)
Ontological, cosmological, and design,
Epistemic, moral, and aesthetic, forsooth,
That constitute his cumulative proof.
Saint Anselm famously said:
“God cannot be conceived not to exist” (with a canny nod),
And, “That which can be conceived not to exist is not God.”
Hartshorne, ancient mariner of the metaphysical realm,
Shows how this is key to an original discovery by Anselm,
And that, to any possible theistic argument, is the clue,
And helps to correctly reformulate the original six anew.
Anselm’s argument is not empirical or what one can see;
It is conceptual or modal, as any such argument must be.
He presents each argument as a set of choices, to wit,
And, for example — the Ontological, as he voices it:
1 Deity cannot be consistently conceived.
2 Deity can be consistently conceived,
whether as existent or as non-existent.
3 Deity can be consistently conceived,
but only as nonexistent.
4 Deity can be consistently conceived,
but only as existent.
And when these are analyzed in a logical view,
He concludes that only number four can be true.
Hartshorne presents the ontological argument, in toto,
In a simple three-step form, as shown, briefly, below:
p* for “deity,” defined in the following way, he insists,
as unsurpassable by any other conceivable being, exists.
1. ◇ p*
2. ◇ p* → ~ ◇ ~ p*
3. ~ ◇ ~ p*
(The meaning of number 3:
p* is true by logical necessity.)
And there you have it. as anyone can logically see,
How p leads to p and p, as easy as pi, or — 1, 2, 3.
Q.E.D
Does God Have a Future?
Does God have a future? — this question I pose,
It presents an ambiguity, as an ideal reader knows.
One concerns Nietzsche, whose claim that Gott ist tot,
Denies God any future, period! (atheists take note).
The other wonders if God is temporal, in any way,
And whether God is immutable, as Medievals say.
In the divine cry of our time, Our Lady of Process, She,
Through boundless love and an embracing affinity,
Who is as intimate with us as is mother with fetus,
Calls for a return to “Yin” virtues, as a new treatise.
Hartshorne observes that it is a Western idea to dispute
The feminine relativity, and exalt the masculine absolute.
For Hartshorne it was a necessary and an obvious fact
That God is both actual and, at the same time, abstract.
As concrete actuality, God’s objective modality is time,
But timeless as abstract essence, in a neoclassical paradigm.
Whitehead says the same in gist,
But with other terms for these facts,
God as primordial may merely exist,
But as consequent, God concretely acts.
And now we can have it both ways,
With no nonsense or conceptual haze.
God is timeless, yes, in essence, and wholly absolute,
But, in actuality, temporal, relative, and slowly evolute.
Concrescence
It was Whitehead who was the first to show
How all actualities come and go
In bursts first of presence, then of absence,
In fast fleeting moments of concrescence.
A Sublime Irony
It is a wonder to contemplate, a sublime irony,
That God’s unique distinction is always to be
The oldest in all creation; yet this also is true:
The youngest, novissimus, newest of the new.
God or Gawd?
David Griffin distinguishes God and Gawd.
One is a Holy Reality, the other — a fraud.
One is worthy of worship and deep devotion,
The other no more than a nonsensical notion.
If this idea seems to you to be deeply flawed,
Then peruse his book and you may applaud,
To learn that God Exists but Gawd Does Not,
Or another book that unsnarls the world knot.
They are books with bold spices of audacity,
Leavened with the yeast of process sagacity.
Hartshorne’s Matrix or,
How to think about God
Any process discussion of God cannot fail to mention
Hartshorne’s Matrix, his greatest metaphysical invention.
The Matrix is a square, sixteen fold, or four by four,
Sixteen squares filled with letters, cunning to the core,
It presents formal options for speaking about God
With a precision, beauty, and a rigor unflawed.
It does all this with permutations of contrasting pairs
Such as necessity and contingency, with concise care.
N is necessity, C, contingency, O, no modal status.
Divine is by capital letters named, worldly, lower cases.
Take, for example, N.c—God is wholly necessary,
The world, wholly contingent, insofar as they vary.
The matrix reveals both elegance, subtlety, and a clue:
Column III includes what is positive in columns 1 and 2,
And Row 3 includes what, in rows 1 and 2, is positive, too.
The diagonals reveal a symmetry where variables accrue.
If, of the sixteen options, only one can be true, we agree,
Then the other fifteen are false, as logically they should be.
On the matrix let us imagine and superimpose three lines,
One straight down through Column III, this will do fine,
And one straight across through the third row,
And one through the diagonal from N.n to O.o.
Where these three lines intersect, at the NC.cn position,
Is the most complex, the most positive, of the 16 options.
This is Hartshorne’s position, the dipolar or social view
That he calls “neoclassical theism” and is radically new.
Furthermore, NC.cn also concisely represents
His doctrine that he calls dual transcendence.
Moreover, the matrix reveals more than 16 formal options;
As Donald Wayne Viney observes, the table invites adoption
Of similar tables that can be made for any contrasting pair,
Such as the infinite and finite, and many others to compare.
For any pair of metaphysical contrasts, there is a 4 x 4 table,
And, therefore, for any two pair in conjunction, one is able
To show that the formal alternatives number 16 x 16 or 256,
And, if n equals the number of pairs included in the Matrix,
The number of formal options are no fewer than . . . 16n.
At this one can only marvel, and say with zest, Amen!
Of all his metaphysical discoveries, Hartshorne felt that this
Was the most original, the most important, the one not to miss.
When its beauty is beheld, and all is done and said,
Hartshorne’s Matrix is leaps and bounds, light-years ahead.
Whose Datum Is the Universe
If asked, “Is God relative?”—we must agree,
Yes, this is true, and then reply, “Absolutely!”
For other dipolar terms this is also a fact:
Such as finite-infinite, concrete-abstract.
To characterize God, both terms are required,
But used in a manner unique and inspired.
This is Hartshorne’s idea of dual transcendence
That flashed in his mind in logical resplendence.
In all this, as in being both the first and the last,
God enjoys a metaphysical status unsurpassed.
So relational is God, that all others she allures,
Is immanent in all actualities as they are in her,
In a never-ending flow of an interweaving stream
Wherein mutual influence is the universal theme.
Even in the farthest reaches of interstellar space
A process guided by providence and grace
Begins with an initial aim, or the lure of a dance,
That guides all actualities in the creative advance.
And not only in the wide universe that we now see
But in any cosmic epoch that has been or will ever be.
Throughout the universe, from here to infinity,
God must first take account of each actual entity
Ascertain fully its internal and existential milieu
So as with the best aim for the future to imbue.
Consider the unimaginable complexity of this:
The ubiquity of subjects, infinitude of the abyss,
And yet—to each and every one, in perfect play,
God provides a providential aim to point the way.
From particle to atom and from molecule to cell,
From gnats to humans, and to all creatures as well,
God is always there, in the beginning, to portend,
That each creature may choose a best way to wend.
To state this at once most amply and most terse,
It is God only whose Datum is—all the universe.
(So say Hartshorne, Whitehead, and C.S. Peirce)
God’s Masterpiece, Subtle and Sublime
An Actual Entity is Whitehead’s term, short and terse,
For what he conceives as the basic unit of the universe.
An actual entity is an “atom” of process, a pulsation,
A throb of actuality that only for a split-second endures.
And so, at the very heart of reality, we find oscillation,
A unit of process that arises, and in a flash, matures,
And then vanishes, only to begin reiterations anew,
Wherein possibilities will arise that may become true.
It is the crucible of creative advance
Enshrined in the ultimate three:
God, the creatures, and creativity.
It is the face of the waters,
The word moist in the mouth,
The locus of “Let there be . . .”
Whitehead says that an actual entity
Owes its spatial and temporal immensity
To the fact that the whole universe conspires
To create an actual entity, as his logic requires.
An actual entity is, therefore, a hologram,
As in the paradigm of Bohm and Pribram,
But foresaw by Whitehead many years before,
As early as, or earlier, than nineteen twenty-four.
As philosopher Jorge Nobo said, and I now put into verse,
The metaphysical chronology and topology of the universe,
Are, in its actual occasions, forever captured and enshrined.
And, in this way, an actual entity is, as a hologram, defined.
And so each momentary throb of actuality is a constellation
In marvelous miniature, of the whole universe, a replication,
Showing how all things are interdependent, woven together,
In a wonderful pattern of connectedness, as fin is to feather.
With prehensive roots reaching back to the beginning of time
And stretching forward in branches that convolute and climb.
If this is true of an Actual Entity, then it must also be true
Of our own momentary occasions — that is, of me and you.
And so, the entire universe, as a metaphysical hologram—lo!
Into our minds will come and go, each second, 12 times or so.
An actual entity is, therefore,
A holographic entity, and more,
Whose prehension is the universe
In every time and in every place
Stretching, and this we can only trace,
To the farthest reaches of intergalactic space.
As the crucible of creativity,
An actual entity is God’s masterpiece
Where what might be can come to be.
But the wonders do not there cease.
An actual entity, if you will,
Is not only a wonder of the world
But also how the world comes to wonder,
And should cause us to thrill
Like lightning and thunder
It is the crucible, the crux,
Of concrescence and transition,
The permanence and the flux,
Where, from the past, something is achieved
By lure and intention
And then passed on and interweaved
For once and future fruition.
A HyC Dieu d’Esprit