551 - Existence and Actuality: Conversations with Charles Hartshorne & Charles Hartshorne and the Existence of God

Existence and Actuality:
Conversations with Charles Hartshorne
Edited by John B. Cobb, Jr., and Franklin I. Gamwell
Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press. 1984. 196 pp. $9.95.

Charles Hartshorne and the Existence of God
By Donald Wayne Viney
Albany, State University of New York Press, 1985. 163 pp. $32.50 ($10.95 paper).

Charles Hartshorne just may be America's greatest living philosopher. Certainly he is our greatest living philosopher of religion and "natural" theologian. More than a dozen of his books are still in print, not to mention more than a hundred scholarly articles that have spawned hundreds of scholarly responses. While in the first half of this century neo-orthodoxy was calling "natural theology" impossible and appealing to the "mighty acts of God," Hartshorne was reasoning his way to a new vision of God consistent with Christian faith and scientific knowledge and making clear what an act of God might conceivably mean. His doctoral dissertation at Harvard was on "The Unity of Being" (1923). It was a few years later, while a teaching assistant at Harvard, that he met Alfred North Whitehead, the acknowledged founder of process philosophy. But if Whitehead is the patriarch who fathered a new philosophical people, then Hartshorne is the Moses who codified the laws. Ahh! But they are logical laws.

I approached this review with the conviction that process theologians

552 - Existence and Actuality: Conversations with Charles Hartshorne & Charles Hartshorne and the Existence of God

(whose scientific knowledge and logical rigor I have always admired) have too many answers, leaving insufficient room for mystery. I finished the study (which forced me to research far more than these two books) convinced that Hartshorne is probably right, and that I may have used mystery to disguise my own intellectual anemia. Very simply, process theologians (today, that largely means former students of Hartshorne) are more intellectually energetic than other theologians. Conceived at Harvard (Whitehead), born at the University of Chicago (Hartshorne), process theology has spawned a west coast center at Claremont (Cobb and Griffin), a center in the south at Southern Methodist University (Ogden), and an east coast center in the State University of New York Press (Viney). Process theology is not a fad, like "death of God" theology or "secular" theology. It is an enduring and expanding conviction among intellectuals in the church. (There are European thinkers who have come to similar though independent conclusions, especially the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.)

Existence and Actuality was edited by John Cobb (Claremont) and Franklin Gamwell (University of Chicago). It is certainly not what the title may suggest to students of process thoughts--a series of interviews in the tradition of Lucian Price's Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. It is more of a Festschrift, with nine choice scholars presenting provocative and worthy critical essays, and Hartshorne responding. Topics range through methodology, experience of God, religious language, Aquinas; Anselm, nature, C. S. Peirce, reductionism, and the brain. Hartshorne does not answer each essay with equal interest. Indeed, he sometimes ignores the major ideas presented, giving most attention to those who least appreciate his work. But for those interested in the thought of a philosopher whose scholarly competence ranges from medieval scholasticism (Anselm's Discovery), to a scientific world view (Whitehead's View of Reality), to the beauty and significance of bird songs (Born to Sing), it is a pleasant and rewarding book. The title, incidentally, refers to a distinction Hartshorne makes concerning the logical status of "existence" and "actuality," and about which he has said, "I rather hope to be remembered."

Donald Wayne Viney's book, Charles Hartshorne and the Existence of God, is quite different. Begun as a Ph.D. dissertation, it presents a comprehensive, accurate, and highly readable summary of Hartshorne's use of the classical arguments for the existence of God (ontological, cosmological, design, epistemic, moral, aesthetic). The thrust of the analysis may be summarized in two points, one explicit and the other implicit. Explicitly, the book clearly presents Hartshorne's position that while any individual classical argument is inconclusive, considered together they constitute a convincing cumulative case for the existence of God. Implicitly, it demonstrates Hartshorne's conviction that if you do not like the conclusions he draws, you are obligated to fault either his logic or his premises. Good luck! Viney's book is a good, short introduction to Hartshorne's thought in general and an excellent summary of his

553 - Existence and Actuality: Conversations with Charles Hartshorne & Charles Hartshorne and the Existence of God

arguments for the existence of God. It sparkles with choice quotations and has a magnificent set of end notes.

It is important for anyone not familiar with process theology to understand that the vision of God which Hartshorne seeks to prove is (as Hartshorne names it) "neoclassical"--"classical" because it is concerned with the Divine Person worshipped in Western religions, but "neo" because it understands that Divine Person differently from much of the inherited tradition. Hartshorne's God rules by persuasion not coercion, over subjects that are truly free not predetermined, with knowledge of what those subjects may do but not of what they will do, suffering from their lesser choices and blessed by their better ones, loving the world as humans care for their own bodies.

But why this antiseptic, anesthetic, abstract word "process"? Whitehead preferred the term "philosophy of organism," and Hartshorne prefers "neoclassical." But "process" has become the official label, because both thinkers understand reality to be a process of interactions between past and future, between God and the world--a process of evolution for the world and God, in which God woos the world through ideals to ever higher value and the world, through its actions, contributes to the sorrow and/or joy of God,

No one should purchase or attempt to read either of these books who is not prepared for two impressions. First, they are intellectually demanding. This is not "pop" theology. It will not provide an abundance of sermon illustrations. But there is hardly a preacher or a pastor whose job will not be done better and with more confidence after having read and studied Viney's book. Second, process theologians write with an unusual certainty that they are right. This is not arrogance (the point is important). They have simply been persuaded by Whitehead and Hartshorne, in the tradition of classical Thomistic confidence, that the reality we call God can be known by those who make the effort, and quite without traditional demands for belief in unlikely propositions.

J. Edward Barrett
Muskingum College
New Concord, Ohio