Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T16:59:03.407Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Some Problems in Process Theodicy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Nancy Frankenberry
Nancy Frankenberry
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Religion, Dartmouth College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

What good is divinity if it can come only in dreams and shadows…? (Wallace Stevens)

It is a well-known and rarely challenged assumption that one of the chief merits of Whitehead's cosmology is that it enables religious thinkers to come at the problem of God in relation to the presence of evil in an entirely new way. Among the virtues most commonly appealed to in praise of the Whiteheadian theodicy are its emphasis on God's persuasive, rather than controlling power; its defence of the moral goodness of the God whose nature is reconceived in the light of the problem of evil; and its provision for a realistic hope in the redemptive processes operative in divine and human history. However, none of these aspects of process theodicy is without serious problems. In what follows I will present certain reasons why I do not believe process theism has made good its claim to have solved, with the help of Whitehead's philosophy, the problem of evil. Rather, I will suggest that like the story of what happened to the donkey laden with salt, who took to the water, process theology's ‘solution’ to the problem of evil dissolves in the dialectic river of life, until nothing is left but the verbal sack in which it is contained. Much of the force of this critique will hinge on recognizing the systematic implications of the role of ambiguity in a processive-relational universe, a position I will summarize in conclusion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1981 , pp. 179 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 179 note 1 Whitehead, Alfred North, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 213.Google Scholar

page 179 note 2 Ford, Lewis S., The Lure of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), p. 17.Google Scholar

page 181 note 1 Tracy, David, Blessed Rage for Order (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 190–1.Google Scholar

page 181 note 2 Gilkey, Langdon, Naming the Whirlwind (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 385 n. 11.Google Scholar Cf. Gilkey's, Reaping the Whirlwind (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), pp. 368 n. 100, 416 n. 44.Google Scholar

page 181 note 3 Neville, Robert C., Creativity and God, A Challenge to Process Theology (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), p. 69.Google Scholar Several other commentators have charged that Whitehead's own system is excessively optimistic, or rationalistic, or clean. Hans Jonas, for example, has complained that: ‘the deep anxiety of biological existence has no place in the magnificent scheme. Whitehead…has written in his metaphysics a story of intrinsically secured success: all becoming is self-realization, each event is in itself complete (or it would not be actual), each perishing is a seal on the fact of completion achieved. “Death, where is thy sting?”’ ( The Phenomenon of Life, New York: Harper and Row, 1966, p. 97Google Scholar).

page 182 note 1 Bernard E. Meland's writings have been a notable exception to this pattern; it has been his voice over several decades which has continually called attention to the pathological and absurd side of existence, where only a ‘margin of intelligibility’ can be wrested out of the flux of experience. In his most recent work Meland has speculated that there may be a strain of absurdity itself accompanying creativity. See his Fallible Forms and Symbols: Discourses of Method in a Theology of Culture (Philadelphia, Fortress, 1976), p. 46.Google Scholar

page 183 note 1 This is the dilemma as Lewis Ford has posed it in his ‘Can Freedom Be Created?’, Horizons iv, 2 (1977), 183–8.Google Scholar

page 184 note 1 I have tried to develop this claim and to trace several of its implications in my essay ‘The Empirical Dimension of Religious Experience’, Process Studies viii, 4 (1978), 259–76.Google Scholar

page 184 note 2 In brief, this position holds that the provision of initial aims for specific actual occasions also involves God's consequent experience, because the gradation of possibilities open to a nascent occasion originates not from a pure conceptual feeling of God (the primordial nature), but from an impure propositional feeling having the actual occasions of its past actual world as its indicated logical subjects and the gradation of its alternatives as its predicative pattern. It is prehended in a hybrid physical feeling of God as the source of an initial aim.

page 185 note 1 The detailed defence of such a constructive alternative and the technical emendations this would entail in Whitehead's metaphysics call for a much more thorough argument, which I hope to present elsewhere.

page 185 note 2 Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, edd. Griffin, D. R. and Sherburne, D. W. (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 31Google Scholar (hereafter PR).

page 186 note 1 One of the best replies to Ely's The Religious Availability of Whitehead's God: A Critical Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1942)Google Scholar is Loomer's, Bernard M. discussion in ‘Ely on Whitehead's God’, The Journal of Religion xxiv, 3 (July 1944).Google Scholar

page 186 note 2 See Hefner, Philip, ‘Is Theodicy a Question of Power?’, The Journal of Religion lix, 1 (January 1979), 87–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Unlike Hefner, however, I do not regard this as reason for returning to more traditional theodicies and certainly not for reactivating the doctrine of creation ex nihilo which he favours.

page 186 note 3 Griffin, David Ray, God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), pp. 300, 308.Google Scholar

page 187 note 1 Ibid. p. 309.

page 187 note 2 Ibid. p. 310.

page 188 note 1 Ibid. p. 309.

page 188 note 2 PR, p. 244.Google Scholar

page 190 note 1 Op. cit. pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

page 190 note 2 PR, p. 340.Google Scholar

page 190 note 3 Ibid.

page 191 note 1 Stevens, Wallace, ‘Sunday Morning’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), pp. 68, 69.Google Scholar

page 191 note 2 Kraus, Elizabeth M., The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead's Process and Reality (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979), p. 162.Google Scholar

page 192 note 1 PR, p. 153.Google Scholar

page 193 note 1 Ibid. pp. 346, 350.

page 195 note 1 Ibid. p. 346.

page 195 note 2 Eliot, T. S., The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), p. 106.Google Scholar

page 196 note 1 Whitehead, Alfred North, ‘Immortality’, in Science and Philosophy (Paterson: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1964 edition), p. 91.Google Scholar In this essay, Whitehead makes clear that the World of Action and the World of Value are ‘Abstractions from the Universe; and every abstraction involves reference to the totality of existence’ (p. 88).

page 196 note 2 PR, p. 348. My emphasis.Google Scholar

page 196 note 3 Ibid. p. 343.

page 197 note 1 Ibid. p. 7.

page 197 note 2 Whitehead, Alfred North, Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. 77.Google Scholar