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Theism: World
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The proceeding chapter, Theism, begins with an argument that monotheism is a more scientific version of theism than polytheism, and then sets the terms for the investigation of theism. Mill contrasts the hypothesis that there is a God who governs the world by variable acts of will, with the hypothesis that there is a God who governs the world by invariable laws; the former, he says, is radically inconsistent with the results of science, and so the latter is that which is to be investigated.
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The problem of evil is often presented primarily as an ethical concern, but there is an aesthetic dimension to the problem that is emphasized by process theism. If a perfectly good deity would have the motive to overcome discord and wickedness, it would ... have a motive to avoid triviality and boredom. This is especially the case in the universe as conceived by process theism where feeling (prehension) is a metaphysical category. The etymology of “aesthetic” is aesthesis, which means “feeling,” and process thought emphasizes that aesthetic values are fundamentally values for an experiencing subject. Moreover, the experiencing subject, in most cases, is not human. This fact is evident not only by looking at the contemporary world with its countless varieties of species, but also when one considers the nearly unfathomable stretches of time on this planet when humans did not exist.
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[One] example of this concept is process theism, based on the process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality), sometimes known as bipolar or dipolar theism. Some of the better known process theologians are Charles Hartshorne, Schubert Ogden, John Cobb, and David Griffin. According to this school, there are in God two poles: a primordial, eternal, potential pole, and a temporal, consequent, actual, pole. In addition, there are certain eternal objects that may ingress into the world to become actual entities. Such eternal objects are pure potentials, and, as such, cannot order and relate themselves as actual entities can. To order these eternal entities some nontemporal actual entity is needed, and this is God in his primordial nature. Here God is like a backstage director who lines up the forms, getting them ready to ingress onto the stage of the temporal world.
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The second stage in the development of this form of devotional theism is the wedding of the Bhagavata religion and Sankhya philosophy. In its search for a self-understanding, the monistic developments going on within the Midland were anathema to this religion. The quest for an absolute unity within the Vedic tradition was clearly incompatible with the relation between the soul and the lord which was ultimate for the Bhagavatas. Consequently an alliance was made with what may be called the proto-Sankhya philosophy then developing in the Outland (7:270). At that time this philosophy was probably no more than a dualistic world vision based on the principles of prakriti and purusha (matter and spirit). The Yoga system which complemented this basic world view elaborated a technique for the realization of the self (purusha) as independent of prakriti.
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Closely related to the problem of passionless love, for classical theism, is the question of the world's value. The denial of real relations in God, coupled with the concept that the world and its creatures have no value except as it is borrowed from God, implies that that total reality described by God-and-the-world contains no more value than that described by God-without-the-world. This view has two unhappy consequences. First, it implies that there is no value in God's creating the world — nothing is gained, or lost, in God's decision to create. Second, it implies that there is no value in God's interaction with the creatures. Process theists point out that these ideas do not square with analogies drawn from human experience.
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Ogden argued that the "new theism" of process thought, with its world-affirming emphasis, expresses the relevance of Christian faith to secular man, who needs an ultimate ground for his "ineradicable confidence" in the final worth of human existence. Cobb showed how Whiteheadian philosophy can be the basis of a new Christian natural theology, a theology which by philosophical means demonstrates that the peculiar vision of the Christian community of faith illuminates the general experience of mankind.
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