Process As the Unifying Principle of Physical Reality (Part 3.1)
III. God
“God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.” [521] In the philosophy of organism, God is neither the image of an imperial ruler, a personification of moral energy, nor an ultimate philosophical principle. He is not the “aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys.” [519] God is an actual occasion, subject to the fundamental truth of the creative advance into novelty, “the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.” [526]
In what is called “The Category of the Ultimate,” there are three primordial entities; “many,” “one,” and “creativity.” Creativity is the fundamental, inescapable fact that drives the process; the rule under which there can be no “many” not subordinated to a novel “one.” These three entities together are the indeterminate foundations of Process. By virtue of the primordial “creativity,” the primordial “many” is unified into a novel “one.” This novel “one” is a new entity, something which never existed before and stands in opposition to the “many.” In this way, there is a new “many” composed of the prior “many” and the novel “one.” By virtue of the creativity, this new “many” is formed into another novel “one” which is distinct from the “many” from which it just came. This is a fractal illustration of perpetual creative advance into novelty and an explication of the fundamental elements of Process.
The fundamental creative urge acquires a primordial character; this character is the primordial nature of God. The primordial nature of God is one aspect of his dual existence. As primordial, God is the exemplification of “the general metaphysical character of creative advance,” [522] “the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality.” [521] In this aspect, “he is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things,” [522] a primordial, indeterminate, conceptual foundation for the actual world. “He is not before all creation, but with all creation.” [521] Consequently, God is more a sort of “container” for eternal objects and potential existence than an all-powerful, eminently real creator.
The primordial nature of God is “so far from eminent reality that [it] is ‘deficiently actual.’” [521] God, in his primordial nature, is deficient of actuality in two ways. First, his feelings are purely conceptual and therefore do not possess any complete actuality and second, conceptual feelings alone, without “complex integration with physical feelings, are devoid of consciousness.” [521] In this way God’s primordial aspect “has neither fullness of feeling nor consciousness.” [522] Nevertheless, though God in his primordial nature is not the “omnipotent creator,” he does have a “particular relevance to each creative act.”[522] It is here that we come to discover the origins of the individual processes constituting physical occasions.
God is ‘the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire . . . the initial ‘object of desire’ establishing the initial phase of each subjective aim.” [522] In this way, God stands as the “origin” of each individual process, the “creator” of every particular actual entity. He supplies every occasion with its subjective aim which is its desire for a final and completed unity with the whole. He provides every entity with its initial drive toward it own satisfaction, “he is the principle of concretion - the principle whereby there is initiated a definite outcome from a situation otherwise riddled with ambiguity.” [523] At the same time, he is the goal toward which process progresses, the promise of completion in unity with him. In this way, God is both the initial cause (origin of motion) of an entity and its “final cause” or “end.”
Power up and Steem on!