The Viability of Whitehead’s God
for Christian Theology
Lewis S. Ford
From the standpoint of Christian concerns, Whitehead’s
metaphysics is most distinctive in being a philosophy of creation which
does not identify creative power exclusively with God. Christian
thinkers, interpreting the Biblical story of creation ontologically,
rejected the Greek understanding of being as self-sufficient: all being,
with the notable exception of God, is seen as contingent upon the act of
creation. Before there can be being, there must be the creative act of
coming-into-being. Whitehead agrees insofar as the ‘being’ of every
actuality “is constituted by its ‘becoming,’” for “how an
actuality becomes constitutes what that actual entity
is.”1
Traditional theism, however, considers such ‘becoming’ to
be the act of a transcendent creator, himself uncreated, while Whitehead
regards every actuality, including God, to be at least partially
self-created. Being (ens) depends upon a creative act: for
Aquinas, this is the act of being; for Tillich, the power of being;2
for Whitehead, the inherent exercise of creativity. But for Aquinas and
for Tillich, this power of creation is ultimately lodged in God, who is
being-itself, while Whitehead’s God is an instance of creativity, like
all other actualities, and cannot be identified with
“creativity-itself.” For traditional theism, creativity is unified and
transcendent; for process theism, it is pluralized and wholly immanent.
While some theories (e.g. emanationism) have been proposed
for creation as the act of a transcendent creator, this act is usually
placed beyond the scope of philosophical scrutiny. In its concrete
detail immanent creativity shares this mystery of pure freedom, but the
general nature of the process of becoming which renders such free
creation possible can be described.
If being is unity, Whitehead reasons, becoming must be
unification, and unification presupposes an antecedent multiplicity to
be unified. Thus creativity embodies the rhythm of the one and the
many, whereby “the many become one, and are increased by one.”3
In the world the many occasions in the past of a given actual occasion
are objectified for that occasion as the many efficient causal
influences it unifies in its own actuality, whereby it becomes one more
actuality in the world for future occasions. In God the many occasions
are unified by “the overpowering rationality of his conceptual
harmonization,”4 but this
ideal unity becomes one more lure for physical realization in the actual
world as the initial subjective aim of a newly emerging occasion. In
the exercise of creativity the many become one, physically in the world,
conceptually in God, but in both cases the new unity contributes to a
new multiplicity, and so on, ad infinitum. Thus creativity is
everlasting, without beginning or end, with the world contributing to
God, and God to the world.
For classical theism, the most striking feature of process
theism has been its insistence that God’s experience grows as it is
enriched by the temporal achievements of the actual world. This feature
follows necessarily from Whitehead’s “principle of relativity,”5
the metaphysical generalization that every actuality causally influences
every other actuality. Yet it also meets the religious need that no
actualized value be excluded from the life of God. Were creativity and
God identified, God would already include all actual values as the
source of their being, and not be dependent upon their actualization by
others. God’s involvement with temporality may be the most striking
feature of process theism, but it is a derivative feature following from
God’s dependence upon the non-divine creativity inherent in the world.
It should be noted that this dependence is not vicious; it
threatens neither God’s necessary existence nor his well-being, for no
matter what happens God has the conceptual resources to achieve a final
beauty in his experience. He already possesses all abstract
perfections, and depends upon the world solely for the enrichment of his
experience in concrete content. God is infinite in possibility and in
the conceptual actualization of possibility: his physical actuality,
however, is derivative from the world because all physical actualization
is finite, selective, intolerant of alternatives, and ultimately
somewhat arbitrary.
The non-identification of God with creativity or
being-itself has many distinct advantages for Christian theism, some of
which we may briefly enumerate:
1.
In creating itself, each creature is exercising a real freedom distinct
from God’s. Its freedom is not compromised by being also somehow God’s
action, or by being already known as determinate in God’s
foreknowledge. Now a substance philosophy can argue that God only
creates subjects which are then free to experience and act on their own,
but this requires a necessary distinction between God’s creative and
sustaining roles, and in any case cannot apply to a process view which
envisages subjects as coming into existence through their own
experiences and decision. If the ultimate actualities of the world are
events and not substances, these events must be either created by God or
be self-created, and only the latter alternative fully preserves their
freedom.
2.
On this process view every actuality has ultimate significance as
contributing to the experience of God. Human striving is ultimately
meaningful because it enriches that cosmic, everlasting, conscious
appreciation. Its striving has not been in vain, despite the ravages of
time, for otherwise God’s experience would lack something it now
possesses. If God’s experience were complete and unchanging for all
time, there seems no way in which our action could either add or detract
from it and hence no way in which concrete meaning can be given to
service for the sake of God’s glory. Does this not merely mean that our
service only affects God’s reputation among creatures, and not God
himself?
3.
A plurality of self-creative acts introduces a measure of potential
conflict and incompatibility, which is the mark of evil. God is
responsible for the ideals whereby the actions of the world might be co-ordinated,
but the world is responsible for all physical actualization, for its
good and for its evil. Evil is not the result of the recalcitrance of
some blind force of creativity, for Whitehead’s creativity is actual
only in its instantiations as the self-creative acts of individual
creatures deciding their own destinies. Evil is not willed by God,
actively or passively, for he is not merely allowing evil for the sake
of fostering human freedom. Rather, God can only create by persuading
the creature to create himself. Creaturely freedom is not a gift
bestowed in exceptional circumstances but the precondition for creation,
and that pre-condition necessarily entails the risk of freedom. Above
all, the non-identification of God with creativity exempts God from the
responsibility for evil.
4.
If both God and the world share in a common creativity, there is a
mutual solidarity between them whereby God’s agency can be discerned in
the activity of the world. The doctrine of a transcendent creator can
easily be put to one side by a scientific pre-occupation with worldly
activity, to be treated first as a deistic hypothesis which becomes
dispensable with the emergence of plausible mechanisms for evolution.
If the world is evolving, it was not created perfect in the first place,
and God as the source of its being seems to be supporting indifferently
both its advance and its degradation. Process theism, however, can
interpret the Biblical creation story cosmologically, for God’s “speech”
is his self-expression in terms of lures for his creatures to
actualize. (Note that in Genesis 1: 11 it is the earth that is
enjoined to bring forth vegetation. God proposes, the world disposes.)
The ever-emergent growth of complexity and order in the world testifies
to God’s infinite patience and resourcefulness in supplying the world
with relevant possibilities for actualization, while the deadends,
wastage, and accompanying degradation indicate creaturely willfulness
and resistance. The Biblical account of creation illuminates the
process of evolution once it is understood as the gradual emergence of
order out of chaos through divine guidance rather than as the
ontological production of being out of non-being.
5.
If God and finite actualities are all alike instances of creativity
such that God is also a being and not being-itself, then our knowledge
of God can be metaphysically intelligible without recourse to the more
desperate strategies of indirect predication. God becomes no longer an
exception to the metaphysical principles but their chief
exemplification.6
God’s mystery is not thereby affronted, but discovered in its proper
place, not so much at the limits of human intelligibility as in the
depths of self-creative freedom.
6.
If as a result of non-divine creativity God’s experience is contingent
upon worldly actualization, then this responsive action toward the world
is also contingent. God’s action necessarily exemplifies the
metaphysical principles of his nature, but it is neither reducible to
those principles nor deducible from them, for it is a free, creative
response to the contingencies of each situation as it arises. As long
as all of God’s attributes and actions were regarded as necessary,
nothing could be left to revelation which was not already in principle
accessible to metaphysical reason, so reason had to be somehow
artificially restricted to make room for revelation. Process theism no
longer places that Christian thinker under this constraint. Reason
ascertains all it can about God, but in recognizing that there must be
contingent aspects in God, it knows that it cannot determine what these
are in concrete fact. Here we must appeal to the particularities of
God’s action in history, to the records of the evolutionary process for
God’s dealing with nature, and to the records of man’s encounter with
God for his dealings with man in sacred scripture. Philosophical
inquiry and religious tradition complement each other in ascertaining
the necessary and contingent dimensions of God, respectively.
These six points
deserve further elaboration and supplementation, but that is not our
task here.7 Before these
advantages can be realized, Whitehead’s concept of God must prove to be
“viable.” We must show how it can meet and surmount those objections
which proponents of the identification of God with creativity (or
being-itself) consider “fatal” to the theory of their
non-identification. This is the task to which we wish to address
ourselves, taking up the main objections seriatim.
1. Such a God is
not omnipotent. If the world is constituted by a plurality of
self-creative acts, God does not control its destiny. This does not
mean, however, that he is limited in the exercise of the power
appropriate to his nature, namely, divine persuasion. We must
distinguish between two kinds of power, coercive and persuasive.
Coercive influences are those we must take into account in
actualization. In practical affairs we regard any measure as coercive if
non-compliance threatens our lives, our well-being, our careers, our
liberty or our families, yet theoretically we are still free to
disregard them if we are prepared to pay the price. Strictly speaking,
then, only efficient causation is completely coercive, for no
actualization can occur which does not embody its efficient causes. The
coercive power of efficient causation results from the physical
actualization of finite events, which create stubborn realities with
which the future must cope. The causal past is coercive precisely
because it is finite; it is only a limited selection of what might have
been, and that limitation restricts the present in what it can become.
Divine actualization, on the other hand, is conceptual rather than
physical, resulting in the presentation of lures for future realization.
Instead of making himself into a finite, stubborn actuality, coercively
impinging upon the world, God unifies the various finite actualities of
the world into a conceptual whole by means of his infinite supply of
ideal possibilities. While God thus provides each occasion in the
process of coming-to-be the best possibility for the unification of its
efficient causal influences, that ideal is persuasive rather than
coercive since one possibility does not exclude relevant alternative
possibilities. Others are equally capable of realization and give
measure to the occasion’s freedom.
2. Such a God is
finite. Whitehead is emphatic “that all actualization is finite”8
for “every occasion of actuality is in its own nature finite. There is
no totality which is the harmony of all perfections. Whatever is
realized in any one occasion of experience necessarily excludes the
unbounded welter of contrary possibilities. There are always ‘others,’
which might have been and are not.”9
Since every actuality excludes others, there is an intrinsic
incompatibility among possibilities with respect to their realization,
but “this notion of incompatibility has never been applied to ideals in
the Divine realization. We must conceive the Divine Eros as the active
entertainment of all ideals, with the urge to their finite realizations,
each in its due season. Thus a process must be inherent in God’s nature
whereby his infinity is acquiring realization.”10
Whitehead here denies
that God is actually infinite in the sense of being the complete
actualization of all possible ideals, for such actualizations are
incompatible with one another. Rather, such finite physical
actualization belongs to the occasions of the world, from which God
acquires his measure of finite concreteness. Yet “the conceptual
entertainment of incompatibilities is possible, and so is their
conceptual comparison.”11
Thus the infinitude of all possible ideals may be present within God’s
conceptual entertainment, seeking their finite actualization in the
world. In this way the world receives a task it can perform for God
without merely reduplicating what is already present within God.
Whitehead specifies that the actualization of each possibility should be
in its due season, for every individual possibility is good in itself,12
though its incompatibilities with other actualities may produce evil.
“Insistence on birth at the wrong season is the trick of evil.”13
If only actualized with its proper fellows, every possibility would
produce good and not evil, and God’s unlimited appetition for the
physical realization of all possibilities does not mean that he seeks
indifferently the evil with the good.
While physical
actualization is finite and such finitude is being temporally absorbed
into God, this does not mean that God should be conceived as finite. “It
belongs to the nature of physical experience that it is finite,” but
“conceptual experience can be infinite.”14
To be sure, his consequent nature is finite and
ever-growing as God receives into his experience the finite
achievements of the world. But God’s actuality is fundamentally a
conceptual one, infinite, yet complete, capable of absorbing into itself
an everlasting succession of physical feelings without disturbing its
essentially non-temporal unity. Whitehead’s God is finite only if we
apply the inappropriate standard of physical actualization, ignoring
God’s conceptual actualization creating the structure of possibility
capable of embracing all actuality. Such “unfettered conceptual
valuation, ‘infinite’ in Spinoza’s sense of that term, is only possible
once in the universe,”15
but that is sufficient. Whitehead always affirms God’s infinity, but
wisely recognizes that this applies to conceptual possibility rather
than to physical actuality.
Our argument is
handicapped by the fact that Whitehead characteristically uses
“actuality” and “actualization” as restricted only to finite, physical
realization, as in the quotations above.16
Thus the primordial nature, taken in abstraction from the full actuality
of God is “actually deficient”17
inasmuch as it lacks concreteness of physical prehension. On the other
hand, God as primordial is “the presupposed actuality of conceptual
operation, in unison of becoming with every other creative act.”18
The question at hand is whether we can appropriately speak of both
temporal and non-temporal actuality, and this depends on how we
understand actuality. For Whitehead, ‘decision’ “constitutes the very
meaning of actuality . . . . ‘Actuality’ is the decision amid
‘potentiality.’ It represents stubborn fact which cannot be evaded.”19
Now the primordial envisagement of all possibility is a “created fact,”20
conditioning all actual occasions, the outcome of a divine non-temporal
decision ordering the eternal objects in terms of their relevance for
actualization in the world. Apart from that decision, the eternal
objects are wholly ineffective, not properly either possible or
impossible. The act whereby they are rendered possible also determines
what is metaphysically impossible, and by the ontological principle the
reason for this determination must be found in some actuality. This
actuality must necessarily be non-temporal, since the structure of
possibility and impossibility conditions the world at all times. As the
determination of what is metaphysically impossible, God’s primordial
envisagement is “an actual efficient fact” constraining the character of
physical actualization in the world,21
but the limits of impossibility also afford the creature with the
freedom of possibility; the two go hand in hand. Since God thus
non-temporally decides, it is appropriate to speak of God’s infinite
conceptual actualization in contrast to finite physical actualizations.
From a temporal point of view, this “non-temporal act of all-inclusive
valuations is … always in concrescence and never in the past,”22
continually being rendered concrete through the inclusion of finite
achievement.
3. Such a God is
subordinate to the metaphysical principles. Paul Tillich writes:
“The being of God cannot be understood as the existence of a being
alongside others or above others. If God is a being, he is
subject to the categories of finitude.”23
Langdon Gilkey adds: “Thus a philosophical use of the symbol “God” makes
sense only if that symbol thematizes or has reference to the
ground of ultimate coherence which the philosophy itself presupposes, if
God is explicated as the source of that coherence rather than merely as
a finite exemplification of it.” He applies this objection explicitly to
Whitehead, “whose god is subordinate to the larger process and so to the
metaphysical categories explicative of that process.”24
Yet is it true that God must be conceived either as “the ground
of ultimate coherence” or as the “chief exemplification of
rational principles”? What Gilkey’s argument overlooks is that God was
initially introduced into Whitehead’s philosophy as “the ground of
rationality,”25 and this
role is never abandoned.
God is metaphysically
intelligible because he exemplifies the metaphysical principles, yet he
also creates them. As we have already seen, God’s non-temporal
envisagement orders all eternal objects in terms of possibility and
impossibility. Now the boundary between possibility and impossibility is
determined by what is metaphysically necessary; every possibility must
exemplify these metaphysical principles to be possible, while every
impossibility is impossible because it cannot exemplify those
principles. Thus “the ideal realization of potentialities in a
primordial actual entity constitutes the metaphysical stability whereby
the actual process exemplifies general principles of metaphysics.”26
The ontological principle enjoins us to look to “the nature of God for
reasons of the highest absoluteness,”27
for his own self-actualization is the source for ultimate rationality.
We tend to think of the primordial nature of God as uncreated, yet God
as exemplifying creativity must be conceived as self-created. The
primordial envisagement of God is his act of self-creation, which
creates the metaphysical principles which both he and the world
exemplify. “His conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and establishes
the categoreal conditions.”28
4. Such a God is
not free either to create or not to create. The very nature of
creativity requires that God at least create himself, for otherwise he
could not exist. Yet what usually is intended by this objection concerns
the necessary existence of the world. On Whitehead’s principles, there
can be no temporal origin to the world, for every actual occasion
depends upon the efficient causality of antecedent actual occasions.
Moreover, the metaphysical principles God exemplifies necessarily
require the concommitant existence of the world. For without the world,
God would be deficient in physical actuality.
Consider the
alternative. Were our metaphysical principles such that God’s experience
would be equally fulfilled whether or not the world existed, then the
existence of the world would be wholly gratuitous, devoid of any
ultimate significance from the divine perspective. Unless the world
positively enriches the divine experience which otherwise would be
impoverished, the world might just as well not have been for all the
ultimate difference it makes. God’s freedom within any set of
metaphysical principles destroys whatever significance the world might
have for God.
God’s ultimate
freedom, however, resides in that self-creative act whereby the
metaphysical principles are established. Given the metaphysical
principles which do exist, the world is necessary, but these principles
could have been otherwise had God so created them. God’s primordial
envisagement could have so determined possibility and impossibility that
his own act of concrescence would completely exhaust all creativity,
permitting him to exist in solitary splendour. In that sense God could
have existed without the world, for God is free to create the conditions
rendering the world either necessary or impossible, though not
contingent. For what God cannot do, by the nature of creativity, is
create a world distinct from himself which lacks the power of
self-creation. For insofar as God creates, he creates himself, and for
there to be an actuality distinct from God, it must be able to create
itself.
5. Such a God is
subordinate to creativity. Creativity, together with ‘many’ and
‘one’ are the “ultimate notions” completing the Category of the
Ultimate,29 while God is
introduced under the heading, “Some Derivative Notions.”30
“‘Creativity’ is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate
matter of fact.”31 “It is
that ultimate notion of highest generality at the base of actuality.”32
God is “a creature of creativity,”33
“its primordial, non-temporal accident.”34
Such statements seem to suggest that God is subject to a power greater
than himself. Both God and the World “are in the grip of the ultimate
metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty.”35
More generally, Carl
G. Vaught has recently summarized four objections drawn largely from
Tillich against conceiving God as a being rather than as being-itself or
creativity: (a) “The concept of a being is incompatible with the
concepts of ultimacy and absoluteness, and hence incompatible with the
concept of perfection itself…. If God were defined as a being, he would
be distinguishable from the being he might possess. As a being, he would
presuppose the being which he had. Being would then become the basic
notion rather than God as the being who possessed it.” (b) God must be
regarded as self-caused, presupposing nothing other than himself. (c)
“Worship requires that its ‘object’ be infinite. But if God is to be
assigned a place within the framework of beings, he is limited by
contrast with them, and hence a finite being in a larger whole.” (d) “An
individual entity, as individualized, is deficient in the manner in
which it participates in the reality of beings other than itself.” The
concept of a perfect being “mistakenly presupposes that an individual
entity, really distinct from other beings, can participate with perfect
adequacy in the reality of beings other than itself.”36
Creativity is clearly
metaphysically ultimate for Whitehead, but that does not make it
religiously ultimate. It is metaphysically ultimate in the sense that
all actuality must exemplify it, but it is nothing apart from those
exemplifications. “Creativity is without a character of its own,”37
indifferent alike to its exemplifications, whether great or small, good
or evil. It is too indeterminate to be worshipped, while its
exemplifications are too diverse to warrant indiscriminate devotion.
Only its supreme exemplification, God, deserves worship. That which is
religiously ultimate must be actual, yet creativity is actual only
insofar as it is actualized in its exemplifications. Again, God must be
unified to be God, an instance of creative unification, while creativity
in itself is wholly indeterminate, neither one nor many. Whitehead’s
principles will not permit the ascription of existence, unity, or
actuality to creativity as such which would be necessary in order to
make the religious ultimacy of creativity plausible. In their absence,
nothing could be more religiously ultimate than God as the supreme
instance of creativity.
God is a “creature of creativity,” but this means precisely
that he is self-created, not receiving his being from another.
God presupposes creativity, because it signifies just that inherent,
intrinsic act of becoming whereby each actuality, including God,
constitutes itself. Much of the objection to creativity as a notion
distinct from God loses its force once it is appreciated that creativity
cannot be extrinsic to any actuality. Each actuality has its own
creativity because it is self-created. This plurality of self-creation,
moreover, means that there cannot be one, single, all-inclusive act of
creativity. Creativity is an analogical notion, inherently diverse in
all its instantiations, even though each is an act of self-unification.
God is “its primordial, non-temporal accident” because he is the one,
infinite act of non-temporal conceptual self-unification, the accident
of creativity because its character does not derive from the inherent
character of creativity but from the freedom of the divine decision.
That God is “in the grip of” the creative advance simply means that God
is always in the act of self-creation, unifying that which he receives
of the world’s novelty, always in becoming, never being limited simply
to his being.
God’s act of creative self-unification is distinct from all
finite acts of self-unification, but does this mean he is limited by
contrast to them? As we have seen, that divine act, as conceptual and
non-temporal, is infinite and capable of including within itself the
achievements of all the finite acts. Unlike physical actualization,
which maintains its individuality by only partially absorbing its world
into itself through deficient participation, conceptual actualization
achieves its own individuality through complete participation, because
the conceptual supplementation of patterned contrast permits every
element to retain its own distinct individuality in the divine
unification. In the world, the many become one, losing their manyness,
but God prehends every actuality “into the harmony of the universal
feeling, which is always immediate, always many, always one.”38
“Thus 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.”39
For the multiplicity of finite self-decisions are included within the
unity of the divine self-decision, without disturbing that unity. As
achievement, all is included in God. As activity, creaturely activity is
distinct from divine activity, for an all-inclusive divine activity
would exclude all other activity. Either God does everything, or he is
enriched by the activities of others. Whitehead adopts the second
alternative as making more sense of our world.
6. Such a God cannot penetrate to the innermost being of
man. For God’s creative action cannot be identified with man’s
exercise of creativity, which is his innermost being. Man’s decisions
contribute to the life of God, but they involve acts of self-creation
distinct from God’s activity, which God prehends as already achieved.
God cannot do the creature’s decision-making for it without it losing
its own freedom.
This assumption that God can only penetrate to the
innermost being of man by becoming identified with his creativity is too
restrictive, for there are other meanings to interpenetration. In
particular, there are specially intimate ways in which God and creature
may share in each other’s lives in Whitehead’s view. God “shares with
every new creation its actual world,”40
which means he shares the same initial spatiotemporal standpoint with
which the creature initiates its becoming. God is not prehended as “out
there,” as simply one more item in its experience, but as “in here,” as
the ideal unity of all that which the occasion is seeking to unify. The
initial subjective aim, which is really God present to the creature’s
physical actualization, is the central core of the creature prompting
its own concrescence, and all that the occasion does is immediately
taken up into the divine life. Such interpenetration permits all the
intimacy between God and man that could possibly be desired by a
mysticism of union. At the same time, Whitehead’s conceptuality keeps
clear the respective roles of God and man, providing an adequate
safeguard against any mysticism of identity, in accordance with the
Christian tradition generally. A mysticism of identity erodes the I/Thou
encounter between God and man which this tradition, particularly in its
Biblical form, has sought to affirm. Unless God and creativity are
sharply distinguished, there will be a constant temptation for Christian
thinkers to drift toward a mysticism of identity, thereby betraying the
original genius of the tradition.
Notes
1 Alfred N.
Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p.
34f. Hereafter cited as PR.
2 On the
relation between esse and the power of being, cf. Lewis S. Ford,
“Tillich and Thomas: The Analogy of Being,” Journal of Religion,
XLVI (1966), 229–245.
3 PR 32.
4 PR
256.
5 PR 33.
6 PR
521.
7 Some of these
themes are developed in my essay, “Divine Persuasion and the Triumph of
Good,” The Christian Scholar, L (1967), 235–250. See also Charles
Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1948) and John B. Cobb, Jr., God and the World
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969).
8. Whitehead,
Adventures in Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 333.
Hereafter cited as AI.
9 AI
356.
10 AI
357.
11 AI
357.
12 Whitehead,
Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. 95.
13 PR
341.
14 PR
524.
15 PR
378.
16 AI
333, 356.
17 PR
524.
18 PR
523. See also PR 64: The primordial nature “combines the
actuality of what is temporal with the timelessness of what is
potential.”
19 PR
68.
20 PR
46.
21 PR
48.
22 PR
47.
23
Systematic Theology, Volume I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1951), p. 235.
24 Naming
the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God Language (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1969), pp. 442, 443.
25 Whitehead,
Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. 257.
26
PR 64.
27
PR 28.
28
PR 522.
29
PR 31.
30
PR 46–50.
31
PR 31.
32
PR 47.
33
PR 47.
34
PR 11.
35
PR 529.
36
“Being and God,” Essays in Metaphysics, edited by Carl G. Vaught,
(University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press), pp. 216f.
37
PR 47.
38
PR 525.
39
PR 531.
40
PR 523.
Posted April 15,
2007
Ford Page