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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
God may be free either to create or not to create a world distinct from himself. But that world, to have any being over against God, must be ontologically detached from God. The beings of that world must exercise their own freedom, and that freedom must be independent of God. God may create the world out of no thing, but out of an uncreated freedom.
1 See his God the Creator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar and The Cosmology of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.
2 “A New Look at the Immutability of God,” pp. 43-72 of God Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Roth, Robert J. S.J. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1973), at p. 69Google Scholar. For a response to his argument, see my essay, “The Immutable God and Father Clarke,” The New Scholasticism 49 (Spring 1975), pp. 189–199CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 See Whitehead's analysis of the category of the ultimate in Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), pp. 31fGoogle Scholar. (Hereafter, PR.)
4 This point is extensively argued in my essay, “The Non-Temporality of Whitehead's God,” International Philosophical Quarterly 13/3 (September, 1973), pp. 347–376CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 We must look to “the nature of God for reasons of the highest absoluteness” (PR, p. 28), for “this ideal realization of potentialities in a primordial actual entity constitutes the metaphysical stability whereby the actual process exemplifies general principles of metaphysics” (PR, p. 64).
6 See the alternatives Farrer, Austin poses in “The Prior Actuality of God,” in his Reflective Faith, ed. Conti, Charles C. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 186f.Google Scholar
7 PR, p. 522: God's “conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and establishes the categoreal conditions.”
8 PR, p. 47.
9 This is a more precise way of putting the issue than in our title question. Creativity underlies all forms of spontaneity, including human freedom. Insofar as human freedom is contrasted with sub-human spontaneity, surely God contributes to its creation. Nevertheless all these acts of spontaneity necessarily depend upon instances of self-creation of the creatures, and this creativity so instantiated cannot itself be created. Human freedom depends upon both the creative possibilities (or initial aims) derived from God and this intrinsic, uncreated creativity, as well as the multiplicity of the past to be unified. All three are needed, although in a particular context we may speak of one of these factors as fostering freedom.
Thus we agree with John B. Cobb, Jr. that “the initial aim, derived from God, opens up to us the possibility of acting freely and also directs us toward an optimum action. Hence, when we act, we enact some aspect of that which is given to us as a particular possibility by God. This seems to me very close to the sense, widespread among Christians, that grace is prior to freedom, so that even for our best exercise of freedom we acknowledge our indebtedness to God. Rather than juxtaposing divine and human action such that the more God is active the less space there is for human action, I find … Whitehead to affirm that the more God is active the more space there is for free human action. Our finest and freest achievements are the optimum enactments of what God's act gives us as real possibility.” “Response to Ogden and Carpenter,” Process Studies 6/2 [Summer, 1976], p. 124Google Scholar.