Process Philosophy

Classical theism describes God as complete, unchanging and unaffected by the world God made, perfect in a way that leaves no room for growth, since anything capable of change was assumed capable of change for the worse. Alfred North Whitehead, a mathematician who turned to philosophy in his sixties, rejected the picture of reality on which that description rests. Reality, Whitehead argued in Process and Reality, is not made of fixed substances that occasionally undergo change but of momentary events of experience, each one arising out of the events before it and passing its own achieved value on to the events that follow, so that becoming, not static being, is what is actually fundamental.

Applied to God, that picture produces something close to a reversal of the classical account. Whitehead's God has two aspects: a primordial aspect that holds every possibility open as a lure toward value, and a consequent aspect that takes the actual, achieved experience of the world back into itself and is genuinely changed by it, feeling what the world has actually become rather than surveying it from an untouched distance. Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead's student, spent his career drawing out what this meant for theology, arguing that a God capable of being moved by the world's joy and its suffering is a more perfect God, not a less perfect one, than an unmoved absolute could ever be. That argument became process theology, the school's most consequential export into twentieth and twenty first century Christian and Jewish thought.

Classical theism's account of evil has always had to explain how an all powerful, all good God permits genuine suffering, and every standard answer, greater goods, free will, mystery beyond human comprehension, has to reconcile suffering with a God who could, by simple decree, have prevented it and chose the world that includes it anyway. Process theology, built on Whitehead's metaphysics, answers differently by changing what kind of power God is said to have in the first place. On this account God does not coerce outcomes into being by unilateral decree; God acts by persuasion, offering each momentary event of experience, human, animal or otherwise, a lure toward the richest and most valuable possibility available to it, a possibility the event is genuinely free to actualize or refuse. Suffering, on this account, is not something God permits from a position of untouched power but something that happens within a world God cannot simply overrule, because coercive, unilateral power of that kind is not among the kinds of power process metaphysics allows anything, God included, to have. What God offers instead, in Whitehead's phrase, is the consequent nature that takes every actual event, the achieved joy and the achieved suffering alike, back into the divine experience, so nothing that happens is lost or unfelt even where it could not be prevented. Critics argue this solves the problem of evil only by giving up the strong claim to omnipotence classical theism was built to defend; process theologians answer that the claim was never coherent to begin with.