That's awfully broad, although dropping a deuce can be surprisingly transcendent.
The trouble I'm having is if God doesn't coerce or reward, and if we (that is, everyone) don't have a relationship with him or any hope of an afterlife, then wouldn't the answers to these "big, important questions" be "it's meaningless" and "for no reason at all"? It seems as though this focus on God just serves as a distraction. Life is a precious, rare thing. A human life, more so. A comfy Western life...you get the point. What more reason than to prolong and extend this gift for as long as possible should one need to live well? What the **** is God for?
Well, I agree that God doesn't coerce or reward, and that there is no afterlife. But I wouldn't agree that we don't have a relationship with God.
I said before that process philosophy stresses relatedness. Charles Hartshorne coined the term "surrelative" or "supremely relative" for God, to mean that God is supremely related to everything that is, both in the sense of affecting, and being affected by. As for exactly how God affects and is affected by us, the simplest way to put it is that God affects us by giving us our "initial aim," or initial purpose; God is affected
by us because he perfectly knows and understands all our thoughts and actions, and is subsequently changed by how we live our lives. Our objective immortality is achieved by being remembered by God eternally, and affecting the world through God by our effect on him.
I realize that probably sounds odd. Or arbitrary. Or just wrong.
Tell you what. This might be taking a sledgehammer to a thumb tack, but I'm going to try to give you a really detailed answer of how this works for process philosophy. I'm going to parse the final section of the final chapter of Whitehead's
Process and Reality, which is process philosophy's seminal work. I'm sorry if this seems overly complex or just overdone for what you've asked; one of Whitehead's favorite phrases is: "seek simplicity, then mistrust it." At some point the **** is just complicated, and needs a complex explanation. Anything less probably won't explain it very well.
The final part of this five-part work can be found
here. Quotes I'm using are from the very last two pages, 350 and 351, in the last section, Section VII.
The consequent nature of God is composed of a multiplicity of elements with individual self-realization. It is just as much a multiplicity as it is a unity; it is just as much one immediate fact as it is an unresting advance beyond itself. Thus the actuality of God must also be understood as a multiplicity of actual components in process of creation. This is God in his function of the kingdom of heaven.
When Whitehead says "consequent nature of God," he's referring to one of God's two natures: there's the consequent nature and the primordial nature. The primordial nature is basically a conceptualization of possibilities. It's all the things that God conceives as possible for the world. I myself have some issues with how Whitehead characterizes the primordial nature -- it sounds a bit too much like a realm of Platonic forms. But that's another discussion.
The consequent nature is the nature that's affected by what happens in the world. It's consequent to
our action. As Whitehead says above, it is both a multiplicity (in the sense of being composed of experiences from a countless number of beings) and a unity (in the sense that God takes it all within himself, understands it all... and the multiplicity becomes the one consequent nature of God). It is an "unresting advance beyond itself" because the universe is constantly changing and evolving. God is "in process of creation"... we create God, and God unifies and "saves" (remembers, preserves) us in himself.
Two more notes here. First, I'll note again that God doesn't "save" our
conscious selves. But he does remember our past in the same way we think back to what was in our own heads a few seconds ago, but with perfect clarity. Second, this splitting up of God into two natures is basically a conceptual convenience. For Whitehead, the two natures are unified. It's just easier for him to talk about it this way.
Each actuality in the temporal world has its reception into God’s nature. The corresponding element in God’s nature is not temporal actuality, but is the transmutation of that temporal actuality into a living, ever-present fact.
I.e., basically what I've said already: each little second of who I am becomes a "living, ever-present fact" because God remembers and is affected by it.
An enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors. The correlate fact in God’s nature is an even more complete unity of life in a chain of elements for which succession does not mean loss of immediate unison. This element in God’s nature inherits from the temporal counterpart according to the same principle as in the temporal world the future inherits from the past. Thus in the sense in which the present occasion is the person now, and yet with his own past, so the counterpart in God is that person in God.
In the first sentence here he's talking about what a person is: a "route of occasions." This is where the "process" part comes in. For Whitehead, what we normally think of as a person is actually a series of very short instances, which he calls "actual occasions" or "actual entities." Each one "sums up its predecessors" -- meaning that each second we're conscious, say, we remember all the rest of the moments we've been alive (clearly with a large degree of loss).
What the subsequent sentences are saying is that this unison which we feel in ourselves is of a more perfect kind in God's consequent nature -- it suffers no loss. It would be like if we remembered each moment of our existence with perfect clarity. In that way, God both preserves us -- in the
objective sense -- and understands us better than we understand ourselves.
But the principle of universal relativity is not to be stopped at the consequent nature of God. This nature itself passes into the temporal world according to its gradation of relevance to the various concrescent occasions. There are thus four creative phases in which the universe accomplishes its actuality.
The second sentence here is saying that God's consequent nature -- the unified whole of the thoughts and actions of all things in the universe -- passes back into the world and affects how we act now. He now wants to break down the interaction between God and the world into four phases.
There is first the phase of conceptual origination, deficient in actuality, but infinite in its adjustment of valuation.
I.e., God imagines the possibilities for every actual occasion in the universe, sees all the ways that each can go, and presents each with an initial aim, which each actual occasion may actualize more or less fully. The actual occasions are affected by the initial aim, but may always reject or modify it.
Secondly, there is the temporal phase of physical origination, with its multiplicity of actualities. In this phase full actuality is attained; but there is deficiency in the solidarity of individuals with each other.
I.e. Stuff happens. The universe happens. Some possibilities are actualized, others are rejected, and the world marches on. However, there is "deficiency in the solidarity of individuals with each other"... we remain separated by the chasm between "self" and "other."
Thirdly, there is the phase of perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of individual identity or of completeness of unity. In everlastingness, immediacy is reconciled with objective immortality.
The problem with being eternal (as God is) is that to be eternal is to be dead. With unlimited time, actions have no meaning, because all will be done, or has been done. It is the despair of no future and no meaning to anything.
The problem with being finite (as all other entities are) is that we perish into nothingness. What's the point of making choices if we just disappear?
This third phase describes the way in which God and the world fulfill one another. The world achieves eternity in God, an eternity that saves it from nothingness, and hence meaninglessness. For God, the world is change, and life -- decisions of free beings who have chosen certain actions over others, who have lived a certain way rather than another because they had only a finite amount of time. God is enlarged by the world, made real by the world.
In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.
Second sentence: the unity that is God passes back and "qualifies the world" -- i.e. "speaks" to it. As Whitehead says, this is God's love for the world. God takes in and understands each being in the universe in the most intimate way, comes to a unified understanding of it all, and returns to the world: "It is good... I love you... I understand." I.e. Whitehead's last line here: "God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands."
And that is "what God is for." But a few more notes.
This final section didn't much get into the mechanics of actual occasions and the role of an initial aim. But as I hope I've stressed, each actual occasion has some degree of freedom for self-determination. The initial aim which God provides is just that: an
initial aim, a starting point. It's like God saying, "I think it would be good if you did this." We needn't, though. God's a little like a parent who wants us to become President... but we might go off and be an astronaut instead. That's okay. The point is that God guides us, but after all, we are free and self-determined beings, and our value is precisely in the fact that the eternal being is not determining us. Our value is our freedom and creativity in the way we live our lives.
Which brings me to the telos of the universe, which may have been implied but was not explicit in this final section: for Whitehead, the telos of the universe is the creative advance into novelty. There is no end -- which for a lot of people isn't very satisfying. But for Whitehead the universe is all about a constant process of growth, change, and creativity which has no end goal, other than the doing of it.
For myself, I like to pair this purpose with an intuition of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's: that the universe is moving ever further toward unity, and that "union differentiates." Just as the different cells of a complex organism are differentiated into heart cells, liver cells, etc., the parts of any organized whole perfect themselves and fulfill themselves through union in difference. As we unify, we specialize -- and we become more who we are by all doing what we do best, rather than be burdened by doing all the things we'd need to do if we were to live on our own without anyone else. We each become even more different by coming together, and more able as a unified whole to better the world. And God, with his initial aim, and his effect on every part of the universe,
is that unifying force which makes us more ourselves.
That's about the best I can do for now. Hopefully it makes sense. But if you manage to read all that and are still interested, feel free to shoot me down or ask me questions.
