Whitehead’s Organismic Conception Of God And Its Religious Availability

Whitehead’s Organismic Conception Of God And Its Religious Availability

by Leonidas Bargeliotes

Whitehead conceives God, as the third formative element which binds to- gether the two other formative elements, namely, creativity and eternal ob- jects. It emerges, as in the case of Aristotle’s Prime Mover, from the meta- physical demand for a unique actual entity which binds together the realms of actuality and potentiality, providing for the actuality the definiteness without which no single actual occasion could exist, and for potentiality the relationship to actuality, to agency, without which the resulting violation of the ontological principle would make an incoherence of the notion of a “realm” of eternal objects.

Whitehead’s system internally requires a First Principle to relate the realms of actuality and potentiality, thereby providing a metaphysical basis for the emergence of definiteness. As he notes, “nothng, within any limited type of experience, can give intelligence to shape our ideas of any entity at the base of all actual things, unless the general character of things requires that there is such an entity” (Whitehead 1925, 174). In what follows will be shown the manner in which the “general character of things” requires that there is a God. Thus God cannot be arbitrarily introduced deus ex machina, else the system itself lapses into incoherence. Whitehead argues that the exact opposite is the case: “God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification” (Whitehead 1929, 521). This system demands that the eternal objects which constitute a Category of Existence (Whitehead1929, 32), will obtain its link with actuality.

Hence the scope of the ontological principle: Everything must be somewhere; and here ‘somewhere’ means ‘some actual entity’. Accordingly the general potentiality of the universe must be somewhere, since it retains its proximate relevance to actual entities for which is unrealized. This ‘proximate relevance’ reappears in subsequent concrescence as final causation regulative of the emergence of novelty. This ‘somewhere’ is the non-temporal actual entity. Thus ‘proximate relevance’ means ‘relevance as in the primordial mind of God’ (Whitehead 1929, 73).