AtheistPreacher
Well-Known Member
Most of you probably know that I'm a graduate student in philosophy of religion. I've just finished my MA at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and I'm starting PhD work at Claremont School of Theology (in southern California) in late August.
With all the religion and religion-related topics that come up on this board, I thought it was time I posted something about my views on God and religion. After all, if I don't pontificate once in a while, then why did I bother accruing over $30,000 in student loans (so far)? This is going to be long, and I expect that few will bother to read it all, but if nothing else it gives me something to point to when people ask me about this stuff. Much of it is adpated from various papers I've written here at UChicago, but I've kept technical stuff to a minimum, and I've tried to be as engaging as possible. If you don't fall asleep halfway through, I think I've succeeded.
To be right upfront about my leanings, I'm an ex-Catholic (my mother's religion) who attended 13 years of Jesuit schooling. I believe in God, but it's a somewhat different God than the traditional Christian conception. My primary influence is process theologian Charles Hartshorne, who stressed rationalism above all else; my favorite quote of his is: "A theological paradox, it appears, is what a contradiction becomes when it is about God rather than something else, or indulged in by a theologian or a church rather than an unbeliever or a heretic." Lastly, in religious matters I am driven primarily by teleological concerns -- that is, questions of meaning to life.
In any case, here I go. Thoughts on anything below are, of course, welcome.
Introduction
It would be fairly safe to assert that science and the fruits of the scientific method dominate the modern world. We have better technology, and a better knowledge of how the world works, than at any other time in human history. The internet and other communication technologies have also brought humanity in closer conversation than ever before, allowing different cultures to exchange ideas and beliefs in a search for truth and human progress. Given this picture, an extremely naive atheist might have cause to wonder why provincial and supernaturalistic religious beliefs continue to persist as strongly as they do.
I would argue that the primary reason that religion continues to exert such an influence on the human heart is that it has traditionally served -- and largely continues to serve -- as the guardian of human meaning. Great as the powers of science may be, it can only tell us about empirical facts; it cannot tell us their meaning. So while science can tell us a great deal of things about anything in particular, it cannot tell us why anything in particular matters. It is the task of religion to orient human beings within a culture, to give conceptual justifications to emotional experiences, and to "translate general ideas into particular thoughts, particular emotions, and particular purposes; it is directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating particularity." And it is ultimately this search for meaning which makes us human.
To summarize the sections that follow: (1) humanity is defined by a rational self-consciousness which craves an ultimate and eternal meaning to its existence; (2) the traditional supernaturalistic conception of God as an all-powerful and immutable being has greatly hindered this quest for meaning; (3) that freedom is the absolute principle revealing the social nature of existence; (4) God, if we are to serve It, must be construed as a being which grows and changes; (5) that the only way humanity can achieve eternal significance is through God; (6) that human creativity fundamentally emerges through a dialectic between self and culture; (7) that real change and real human progress requires a particular tenacity of faith and hope. The concluding section will tie all these ideas together through an examination of the notion of human "progress," and whether such an idea is both intelligible and feasible.
Humanity's need for ultimate purpose
Humans possess what may be called an original confidence in the meaning and worth of life. Without such confidence, humans have no good reason not to curl up on the floor and die. Whether or not we can specify any general reason or purpose, every person has what Paul Tillich would call an "ultimate concern," a purpose for which they live their lives. And in the absence of a clearly defined ultimate concern, a person's activities tend to center on finding such an ultimate concern -- what Viktor Frankl would call "the will to meaning."
But there is a big problem which humans tend to run up against in their search for meaning -- the inevitability of death. Faced with the prospect of death, human beings cannot fail to ask themselves how their lives can matter if everything ends in the same way. To live for the betterment of family, country, or humanity itself is only a very partial solution; there is no guarantee that human life will persist forever. And even if it did, we have only to look around to discover that the vast majority of humanity is not remembered at all -- some leave gravestones weathered smooth, and others leave pieces in museums or books on shelves, but for most people death brings almost total obliteration in a very few generations. Faced with such facts, where are we to look for meaning? One has only to read a play like Waiting for Godot to see the kind of existential angst that often characterizes modernity; Vladimir and Estragon wait earnestly for a man who will never come, a person who they hope will give them a purpose which they do not have and cannot find.
The restlessness of Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett's play illustrates the human conviction that there is something more to life than simply being born, living for a number of years, and dying. Postmodernism as a whole has insisted that there is no basis for such a hope, that we ultimately must invent our own meanings, or somehow be content with the notion that there is no meaning to anything. Human beings refuse to conceive of themselves as only transiently useful, whether they admit to such a conviction or not. We all hold to the conviction that we are building or contributing to something definitive, something which will persist even when we are dead and gone. And it is this final ineradicable confidence in the worth of our existence which we call "God." In whatever religion we may choose, God (or gods, or the absolute principle, or whatever) is the beginning and end of human meaning. God (or a prophet or priest speaking for God) tells us what we should be doing, and why we should do it. And whether or not a religion promises subjective immortality for the believer, the eternal nature of God Itself provides the eternal significance of life which human beings inevitably seek. Our lives are meaningful because we serve God, and God, in turn, will live forever, lending our finite lives a meaning they could not otherwise have.
The problem of an immutable God
Following from the above, the next question naturally becomes: how exactly do we go about serving God? And it is at this point at which we discover -- at least with the traditional Christian conception of God -- that that there is a rather serious problem: there is no way for human beings to actually serve God. Christian tradition has continued to assert God's immutability (that is, God's unchanging nature) because it is assumed that God is a being perfect in every way, both in power and in goodness, and that any change which God might undergo could, therefore, only diminish Him. Unfortunately, the logical conclusion to be drawn from such a conception is that God is as little affected by our best actions as by our worst. If God is indeed a statically complete perfection, then we can do nothing either to increase or diminish Him, and so all our actions must in fact be wholly indifferent to Him. Such a God can provide no consolation or peace of mind in our existential distress, but merely stands with His back eternally turned to the world.
How did this conception arise in the first place? One can only speculate as to the very early origins, but one clue is the idea of God as King, a metaphor which persists in Christianity today. Just as a king wields power over his subjects, God, as one who is perfect in power, wields omnipotent power over all creation. But, as Charles Hartshorne is at pains to point out, the notion of omnipotence as the power to prevent anything undesirable from happening is a logical absurdity. Power is a relational concept; it is not exerted in a vacuum, but always by some entity A over some other entity B. To assert that God can do absolutely anything without fail is to assert that God ultimately has all the decision-making power in the universe, that any decision by another agent is not really the agent's decision at all, because it is God who ultimately allows it -- in this conception, no agent can make a decision which God cannot overrule.
In order for a being to have the sort of power that traditional theism has asserted God possesses, the entity over which power is exerted must be totally determinable by some other entity. In the case of a lifeless object like a billiard ball, this is indeed the case -- when it is hit by a second billiard ball, it has no choice in whether or not it moves. But in the case of decision-making individuals, the case is quite different. Consider the following example: a child is told by his parent that he must go to bed. The child, as a self-conscious, decision-making individual, can always make the decision to not go to bed. The parent may then respond by picking up the child bodily and carrying him to his room, but nothing can force the child to alter his decision to resist the parent's directive. It is only the body of the child that can be coercively controlled by the body of the physically stronger parent; the child's free will remains intact. To control the child totally could be nothing but a form of mind control.
The omniscience of future events which often goes hand-in-hand with God's supposed omnipotence creates much the same problem. If God knows that I will do A rather than B or C, then in what sense could I be said to be responsible for doing A? The idea that I chose between genuine alternatives would be an illusion, for I could not have done anything differently.
Moreover, the attribution of omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence to God in the Christian tradition leads to the notorious (and ultimately unsolvable) riddle of the problem of evil: if God wants only the best for us, and has all the power necessary to eliminate suffering from the world, why does God not do so? The only way that Christian theologians have “solved” the problem of evil is to deny that genuine evil exists – that no matter what happens, things will ultimately, somehow, turn out for the best. But if this is the claim, it seems to go against our “hard core common sense” notions that evil is real, that some things really happen that do not ultimately make the world better, and that to deny this idea is only to deny verbally what we affirm in practice.
In the end, the idea of an omnipotent God is simply a hopeless misconception of the divine. Ordinary rulers delegate decision-making, and other authority figures, such as parents and teachers, do not wish to deprive their charges of self-determination -- to do so would ultimately lead to the non-existence of the pupil, who would essentially become an automaton. Hartshorne offers a profound insight when he notes that "it is a bad model of deity to liken it to those who wish to be heard but not to hear, to speak but not to listen. This is the benevolent despot ideal that Kant avoided in his political theory but not in his theology." It is this conception of a God who "speaks but does not listen" which modern secularism finds so repugnant; it goes against the conviction that what we do here and now in the world really matters. If God cannot in any way be affected by what we do, then to speak of serving God can be nothing but an equivocation. Love is often described as the desire to give rather to receive; if we are never permitted to give to God, than He does less for us than the poorest of humans.
In summation, in order to solve the problems which the traditional Christian formulation of God has created, two things must be done: (1) God must be re-defined as limited in power in the sense that there are other entities who really make decisions in the world, thus re-claiming freedom, and (2) God must be re-defined in such a way that it us possible for us to serve It. Only by doing these two things can the actions of human beings attain an eternal significance.
Freedom as the absolute principle
Traditional Christian theists often suggest that it seems a perfectly coherent idea that God in fact does have all the power, and either makes all the decisions while only seeming to provide freedom, or perhaps has the power to intervene but decides not to use it. Yet the idea that there are actualities totally devoid of power is pure inference, since all must admit that we seem to have such power -- freedom is one of the “hard-core common sense” notions which we may deny verbally, but not in practice. Moreover, supposing that we in fact have no power leads to the conclusion that we do not exist as real entities in any meaningful sense – our actions cannot be meritorious if they are ultimately performed by an alien hand. With freedom, of course, comes risk -- the risk of evil. Yet the risks of freedom are ultimately inseparable from freedom itself. This is not to say that evil itself is necessary, since there is always a chance that the best possible outcome will be actualized, but the bare possibility of evil is metaphysically necessary to existence. Without it, there could be both no risk and no value in the world, but only puppets dancing to divine strings.
Thus, freedom for process philosophy is the absolute principle revealing the social structure of existence, a freedom which is fundamental not just to human beings, but to the very atoms. Of course, humans have a much higher degree of freedom than other known entities, yet cells and electrons also have some degree of the same. Their decisions are certainly not conscious, at least not in any way that we would normally define the term, and yet they behave in ways not fully predictable by causal laws. We cannot predict the way any particular electron will move. An actual entity in this philosophical system is defined by its relations to other actual entities; it is a synthesis of its experiences and reactions to other actual entities surrounding it. A real thing is just that which forces the rest of the universe to in some way conform to it; that is to say, if theoretically a thing made strictly no difference to any other entity, it could not be said to really exist. Thus, while freedom is the absolute principle, it is always limited by the social structure of existence -- each actual entity must conform to the settled conditions of the world around it. An entity's uniqueness and individuality arise from its own self-determination as to just how it will take account of the world.
A process conception of God
The kind of philosophical acrobatics which many Christian theologians undertook in order to maintain the immutability of God are perhaps no better exemplified than in a passage from Anselm's Proslogion, chapter 8. In it, Anselm is trying to square the idea that God must be compassionate and merciful (because it is better to be compassionate than not) with the idea that God is impassible, cannot change, and therefore does not feel emotion. His solution is that we as creatures feel the effects of God's mercy, and yet God Himself remains totally unmoved. It is as if God loved us, but all that can really be said is that benefits flow from Him to us -- it is what Hartshorne called the "benefit-machine" view of divine love. As Hartshorne pointedly states: "the sun produces crops, as though it cared about our hunger and its appeasement; in reality it cares not. So with God. Is this satisfactory?"
What is missed in these types of strained theological rationalizations about God's nature is that change is not necessarily bad. One obvious example of a good kind of change is an increase of aesthetic enjoyment. If a person sees a new play, or a new movie, and enjoys the experience -- is somehow enlarged by it -- then we would call that an essentially good kind of change. And yet to speak of an absolute maximum of aesthetic richness is contradictory and meaningless, for there can always be another being, in another time, which provides a new and unique type of aesthetic that the universe has never seen before. This is exactly the same problem as that of talking about the largest possible number -- there can never be one, because we can always add more zeroes. Hence, it is simply impossible for God to have experienced the maximum of aesthetic value.
The solution is a "dipolar" conception of deity, one in which God has a maximum of the positive values than are logically capable of maximization (such as being maximally loving, just, kind, wise), while recognizing that there are species of perfection, such as aesthetic enjoyment, which are necessarily never-ending, as they are always capable of increase. Rather than the vague term "perfect" -- which always requires some standard of perfection, whether such a standard is stated or not -- dipolar theism asserts that God is unsurpassable by any being other than Itself. To say that God has grown by experiencing something new is not to say that It was imperfect before, as if the universe was an empty glass and God's knowledge of it was the water which had just now filled the empty space and reached the top; rather, the universe is like a glass that keeps growing and expanding, and the water is always at the top. As omniscient, God's knowledge is exactly equivalent to the factual content of the universe, and grows along with it. Or, said another way, God's knowledge of what exists is always relative to what actually exists, and since not all things have yet existed, God cannot know them. In this way, God can include quantity in Its quality without the contradictions inherent in either a quality without quantity, or a quality with unsurpassable quantity.
Far from a God which influences people but can never be influenced by them, the process conception of God is one in which God is supremely influenced by everything in the universe. This assertion is rooted in the conviction that it is "he who is most adequately influenced by all [who] may most appropriately exert influence upon all." We would never praise a ruler who was total unaffected by his constituency; why, then, would we praise this quality in God?
Such a conception of God has other advantages, not the least of which is that it makes intelligible how there can be an objective past. After all, we have no real access to the past other than imperfect memory, and if there was a thing which no one remembered, how could it be said to have really existed? But the notion of a God whose knowledge grows along with the universe allows us to assert that there is an objective past, because there will always be one being -- God -- who remembers all of the events of history with perfect clarity. It is a matter of practical necessity that we believe in the past as indestructibly real, otherwise we would have no reference for our present actions, yet it is the idea of God's knowledge that makes sense of the notion of historical truth. And it is this notion that God is supremely influenced by all, and that It perfectly retains all of our experiences, that leads to the telos of humanity.
With all the religion and religion-related topics that come up on this board, I thought it was time I posted something about my views on God and religion. After all, if I don't pontificate once in a while, then why did I bother accruing over $30,000 in student loans (so far)? This is going to be long, and I expect that few will bother to read it all, but if nothing else it gives me something to point to when people ask me about this stuff. Much of it is adpated from various papers I've written here at UChicago, but I've kept technical stuff to a minimum, and I've tried to be as engaging as possible. If you don't fall asleep halfway through, I think I've succeeded.
To be right upfront about my leanings, I'm an ex-Catholic (my mother's religion) who attended 13 years of Jesuit schooling. I believe in God, but it's a somewhat different God than the traditional Christian conception. My primary influence is process theologian Charles Hartshorne, who stressed rationalism above all else; my favorite quote of his is: "A theological paradox, it appears, is what a contradiction becomes when it is about God rather than something else, or indulged in by a theologian or a church rather than an unbeliever or a heretic." Lastly, in religious matters I am driven primarily by teleological concerns -- that is, questions of meaning to life.
In any case, here I go. Thoughts on anything below are, of course, welcome.
Introduction
It would be fairly safe to assert that science and the fruits of the scientific method dominate the modern world. We have better technology, and a better knowledge of how the world works, than at any other time in human history. The internet and other communication technologies have also brought humanity in closer conversation than ever before, allowing different cultures to exchange ideas and beliefs in a search for truth and human progress. Given this picture, an extremely naive atheist might have cause to wonder why provincial and supernaturalistic religious beliefs continue to persist as strongly as they do.
I would argue that the primary reason that religion continues to exert such an influence on the human heart is that it has traditionally served -- and largely continues to serve -- as the guardian of human meaning. Great as the powers of science may be, it can only tell us about empirical facts; it cannot tell us their meaning. So while science can tell us a great deal of things about anything in particular, it cannot tell us why anything in particular matters. It is the task of religion to orient human beings within a culture, to give conceptual justifications to emotional experiences, and to "translate general ideas into particular thoughts, particular emotions, and particular purposes; it is directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating particularity." And it is ultimately this search for meaning which makes us human.
To summarize the sections that follow: (1) humanity is defined by a rational self-consciousness which craves an ultimate and eternal meaning to its existence; (2) the traditional supernaturalistic conception of God as an all-powerful and immutable being has greatly hindered this quest for meaning; (3) that freedom is the absolute principle revealing the social nature of existence; (4) God, if we are to serve It, must be construed as a being which grows and changes; (5) that the only way humanity can achieve eternal significance is through God; (6) that human creativity fundamentally emerges through a dialectic between self and culture; (7) that real change and real human progress requires a particular tenacity of faith and hope. The concluding section will tie all these ideas together through an examination of the notion of human "progress," and whether such an idea is both intelligible and feasible.
Humanity's need for ultimate purpose
Humans possess what may be called an original confidence in the meaning and worth of life. Without such confidence, humans have no good reason not to curl up on the floor and die. Whether or not we can specify any general reason or purpose, every person has what Paul Tillich would call an "ultimate concern," a purpose for which they live their lives. And in the absence of a clearly defined ultimate concern, a person's activities tend to center on finding such an ultimate concern -- what Viktor Frankl would call "the will to meaning."
But there is a big problem which humans tend to run up against in their search for meaning -- the inevitability of death. Faced with the prospect of death, human beings cannot fail to ask themselves how their lives can matter if everything ends in the same way. To live for the betterment of family, country, or humanity itself is only a very partial solution; there is no guarantee that human life will persist forever. And even if it did, we have only to look around to discover that the vast majority of humanity is not remembered at all -- some leave gravestones weathered smooth, and others leave pieces in museums or books on shelves, but for most people death brings almost total obliteration in a very few generations. Faced with such facts, where are we to look for meaning? One has only to read a play like Waiting for Godot to see the kind of existential angst that often characterizes modernity; Vladimir and Estragon wait earnestly for a man who will never come, a person who they hope will give them a purpose which they do not have and cannot find.
The restlessness of Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett's play illustrates the human conviction that there is something more to life than simply being born, living for a number of years, and dying. Postmodernism as a whole has insisted that there is no basis for such a hope, that we ultimately must invent our own meanings, or somehow be content with the notion that there is no meaning to anything. Human beings refuse to conceive of themselves as only transiently useful, whether they admit to such a conviction or not. We all hold to the conviction that we are building or contributing to something definitive, something which will persist even when we are dead and gone. And it is this final ineradicable confidence in the worth of our existence which we call "God." In whatever religion we may choose, God (or gods, or the absolute principle, or whatever) is the beginning and end of human meaning. God (or a prophet or priest speaking for God) tells us what we should be doing, and why we should do it. And whether or not a religion promises subjective immortality for the believer, the eternal nature of God Itself provides the eternal significance of life which human beings inevitably seek. Our lives are meaningful because we serve God, and God, in turn, will live forever, lending our finite lives a meaning they could not otherwise have.
The problem of an immutable God
Following from the above, the next question naturally becomes: how exactly do we go about serving God? And it is at this point at which we discover -- at least with the traditional Christian conception of God -- that that there is a rather serious problem: there is no way for human beings to actually serve God. Christian tradition has continued to assert God's immutability (that is, God's unchanging nature) because it is assumed that God is a being perfect in every way, both in power and in goodness, and that any change which God might undergo could, therefore, only diminish Him. Unfortunately, the logical conclusion to be drawn from such a conception is that God is as little affected by our best actions as by our worst. If God is indeed a statically complete perfection, then we can do nothing either to increase or diminish Him, and so all our actions must in fact be wholly indifferent to Him. Such a God can provide no consolation or peace of mind in our existential distress, but merely stands with His back eternally turned to the world.
How did this conception arise in the first place? One can only speculate as to the very early origins, but one clue is the idea of God as King, a metaphor which persists in Christianity today. Just as a king wields power over his subjects, God, as one who is perfect in power, wields omnipotent power over all creation. But, as Charles Hartshorne is at pains to point out, the notion of omnipotence as the power to prevent anything undesirable from happening is a logical absurdity. Power is a relational concept; it is not exerted in a vacuum, but always by some entity A over some other entity B. To assert that God can do absolutely anything without fail is to assert that God ultimately has all the decision-making power in the universe, that any decision by another agent is not really the agent's decision at all, because it is God who ultimately allows it -- in this conception, no agent can make a decision which God cannot overrule.
In order for a being to have the sort of power that traditional theism has asserted God possesses, the entity over which power is exerted must be totally determinable by some other entity. In the case of a lifeless object like a billiard ball, this is indeed the case -- when it is hit by a second billiard ball, it has no choice in whether or not it moves. But in the case of decision-making individuals, the case is quite different. Consider the following example: a child is told by his parent that he must go to bed. The child, as a self-conscious, decision-making individual, can always make the decision to not go to bed. The parent may then respond by picking up the child bodily and carrying him to his room, but nothing can force the child to alter his decision to resist the parent's directive. It is only the body of the child that can be coercively controlled by the body of the physically stronger parent; the child's free will remains intact. To control the child totally could be nothing but a form of mind control.
The omniscience of future events which often goes hand-in-hand with God's supposed omnipotence creates much the same problem. If God knows that I will do A rather than B or C, then in what sense could I be said to be responsible for doing A? The idea that I chose between genuine alternatives would be an illusion, for I could not have done anything differently.
Moreover, the attribution of omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence to God in the Christian tradition leads to the notorious (and ultimately unsolvable) riddle of the problem of evil: if God wants only the best for us, and has all the power necessary to eliminate suffering from the world, why does God not do so? The only way that Christian theologians have “solved” the problem of evil is to deny that genuine evil exists – that no matter what happens, things will ultimately, somehow, turn out for the best. But if this is the claim, it seems to go against our “hard core common sense” notions that evil is real, that some things really happen that do not ultimately make the world better, and that to deny this idea is only to deny verbally what we affirm in practice.
In the end, the idea of an omnipotent God is simply a hopeless misconception of the divine. Ordinary rulers delegate decision-making, and other authority figures, such as parents and teachers, do not wish to deprive their charges of self-determination -- to do so would ultimately lead to the non-existence of the pupil, who would essentially become an automaton. Hartshorne offers a profound insight when he notes that "it is a bad model of deity to liken it to those who wish to be heard but not to hear, to speak but not to listen. This is the benevolent despot ideal that Kant avoided in his political theory but not in his theology." It is this conception of a God who "speaks but does not listen" which modern secularism finds so repugnant; it goes against the conviction that what we do here and now in the world really matters. If God cannot in any way be affected by what we do, then to speak of serving God can be nothing but an equivocation. Love is often described as the desire to give rather to receive; if we are never permitted to give to God, than He does less for us than the poorest of humans.
In summation, in order to solve the problems which the traditional Christian formulation of God has created, two things must be done: (1) God must be re-defined as limited in power in the sense that there are other entities who really make decisions in the world, thus re-claiming freedom, and (2) God must be re-defined in such a way that it us possible for us to serve It. Only by doing these two things can the actions of human beings attain an eternal significance.
Freedom as the absolute principle
Traditional Christian theists often suggest that it seems a perfectly coherent idea that God in fact does have all the power, and either makes all the decisions while only seeming to provide freedom, or perhaps has the power to intervene but decides not to use it. Yet the idea that there are actualities totally devoid of power is pure inference, since all must admit that we seem to have such power -- freedom is one of the “hard-core common sense” notions which we may deny verbally, but not in practice. Moreover, supposing that we in fact have no power leads to the conclusion that we do not exist as real entities in any meaningful sense – our actions cannot be meritorious if they are ultimately performed by an alien hand. With freedom, of course, comes risk -- the risk of evil. Yet the risks of freedom are ultimately inseparable from freedom itself. This is not to say that evil itself is necessary, since there is always a chance that the best possible outcome will be actualized, but the bare possibility of evil is metaphysically necessary to existence. Without it, there could be both no risk and no value in the world, but only puppets dancing to divine strings.
Thus, freedom for process philosophy is the absolute principle revealing the social structure of existence, a freedom which is fundamental not just to human beings, but to the very atoms. Of course, humans have a much higher degree of freedom than other known entities, yet cells and electrons also have some degree of the same. Their decisions are certainly not conscious, at least not in any way that we would normally define the term, and yet they behave in ways not fully predictable by causal laws. We cannot predict the way any particular electron will move. An actual entity in this philosophical system is defined by its relations to other actual entities; it is a synthesis of its experiences and reactions to other actual entities surrounding it. A real thing is just that which forces the rest of the universe to in some way conform to it; that is to say, if theoretically a thing made strictly no difference to any other entity, it could not be said to really exist. Thus, while freedom is the absolute principle, it is always limited by the social structure of existence -- each actual entity must conform to the settled conditions of the world around it. An entity's uniqueness and individuality arise from its own self-determination as to just how it will take account of the world.
A process conception of God
The kind of philosophical acrobatics which many Christian theologians undertook in order to maintain the immutability of God are perhaps no better exemplified than in a passage from Anselm's Proslogion, chapter 8. In it, Anselm is trying to square the idea that God must be compassionate and merciful (because it is better to be compassionate than not) with the idea that God is impassible, cannot change, and therefore does not feel emotion. His solution is that we as creatures feel the effects of God's mercy, and yet God Himself remains totally unmoved. It is as if God loved us, but all that can really be said is that benefits flow from Him to us -- it is what Hartshorne called the "benefit-machine" view of divine love. As Hartshorne pointedly states: "the sun produces crops, as though it cared about our hunger and its appeasement; in reality it cares not. So with God. Is this satisfactory?"
What is missed in these types of strained theological rationalizations about God's nature is that change is not necessarily bad. One obvious example of a good kind of change is an increase of aesthetic enjoyment. If a person sees a new play, or a new movie, and enjoys the experience -- is somehow enlarged by it -- then we would call that an essentially good kind of change. And yet to speak of an absolute maximum of aesthetic richness is contradictory and meaningless, for there can always be another being, in another time, which provides a new and unique type of aesthetic that the universe has never seen before. This is exactly the same problem as that of talking about the largest possible number -- there can never be one, because we can always add more zeroes. Hence, it is simply impossible for God to have experienced the maximum of aesthetic value.
The solution is a "dipolar" conception of deity, one in which God has a maximum of the positive values than are logically capable of maximization (such as being maximally loving, just, kind, wise), while recognizing that there are species of perfection, such as aesthetic enjoyment, which are necessarily never-ending, as they are always capable of increase. Rather than the vague term "perfect" -- which always requires some standard of perfection, whether such a standard is stated or not -- dipolar theism asserts that God is unsurpassable by any being other than Itself. To say that God has grown by experiencing something new is not to say that It was imperfect before, as if the universe was an empty glass and God's knowledge of it was the water which had just now filled the empty space and reached the top; rather, the universe is like a glass that keeps growing and expanding, and the water is always at the top. As omniscient, God's knowledge is exactly equivalent to the factual content of the universe, and grows along with it. Or, said another way, God's knowledge of what exists is always relative to what actually exists, and since not all things have yet existed, God cannot know them. In this way, God can include quantity in Its quality without the contradictions inherent in either a quality without quantity, or a quality with unsurpassable quantity.
Far from a God which influences people but can never be influenced by them, the process conception of God is one in which God is supremely influenced by everything in the universe. This assertion is rooted in the conviction that it is "he who is most adequately influenced by all [who] may most appropriately exert influence upon all." We would never praise a ruler who was total unaffected by his constituency; why, then, would we praise this quality in God?
Such a conception of God has other advantages, not the least of which is that it makes intelligible how there can be an objective past. After all, we have no real access to the past other than imperfect memory, and if there was a thing which no one remembered, how could it be said to have really existed? But the notion of a God whose knowledge grows along with the universe allows us to assert that there is an objective past, because there will always be one being -- God -- who remembers all of the events of history with perfect clarity. It is a matter of practical necessity that we believe in the past as indestructibly real, otherwise we would have no reference for our present actions, yet it is the idea of God's knowledge that makes sense of the notion of historical truth. And it is this notion that God is supremely influenced by all, and that It perfectly retains all of our experiences, that leads to the telos of humanity.
