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3. God responds to the world with infinite passion.
Thus God is pictured, not as a static being, but as in the process of becoming. By contrast, the classical view pictures God as being loving, yet without emotion, feeling, or sensitivity to the feelings of others. Aristotle stated, "God is the mover of all things, unmoved by any." Aristotle's God is unaffected by what happens in the world--so also is the god of Saint Anselm and Thomas Aquinas.
The median view is that God is loving in the sense of feeling the feelings of all others, taking into himself the immediacy of all other currents of feeling, moment by moment. Hartshorne says:
'God alone not only knows but feels, and finds his own joy in sharing our lives, lived according to our own free will decisions, not fully anticipated by any detailed plan of God's own.'
Whatever we do makes a difference to God. Only such a view is a coherent, intelligible way of conceiving God. A love that leaves the lover unmoved by the joys and sufferings of the one who is loved is not worthy of being called love at all.
It is really quite extraordinary how rarely God is conceived both to suffer with and to rejoice with the creation. God is represented as judging, punishing, sometimes sentencing his earthly children to torment. Real love is neither judgmental nor condemnatory. Instead it comes alongside and experiences the suffering and the joy of the one who is loved. Many of us can believe in a God like that.
God's creative activity inspires the individual entities of creation to themselves be creative. Their experiences are saved in the experience of God. In Whitehead's language: 'What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven--and the reality in heaven passes back into the world.'
This is an interesting speculation in that the world not only makes a difference to God but that the difference made to God floods back into the world as new possibilities. In this way a flow of feeling is established between God and his creatures, a flow that enriches both.
In this vision of a deity who is not a supreme autocrat, but a universal agent of persuasion and responsiveness whose power is the worship he inspires, and who feels all the feelings of the world, some of us find not only a new way of understanding the world but a new way of facing the tasks of today.
Conclusion
The universal existence of subjectivity in the individual entities of creation requires--demands--the existence of cosmic mind at the heart of the universe. Cosmic mind--God--is not conceived of as an omnipotent, supernatural, legalistic ruler of the universe. Cosmic mind is not supernatural but natural.
God acts in the world by compassionate persuasive love, never by coercion.
Individual entities from protons to people experience God through their natural internal relations. This is the nature of the 'within of things.' God acts by being 'felt' by the individual entities of the creation as they take account of their environment internally. For us humans this is felt as values and purposes.
God is not the sole cause of happenings. God's causality is always exercised in relation to individual entities that have their own measure of self-determination. So 'divine purpose' is a better description than 'divine design' which gives the impression of a preordained blueprint-- whereas the future is open-ended.
The only adequate human response to God's persuasive love is infinite passion.
The proposition is that all actual entities experience the divine persuasion and the only appropriate response on our part is with infinite passion. It is the response to divine persuasion that gives order to the societies of individual entities from protons to people. All this ordering leads to novelty in the creative process.
God responds to the world with infinite passion.
God is both cause (in creating the world) and effect (in experiencing the world).
Whereas the God of Aristotle and of classical theism is totally unaffected by what happens in the world, the God of process thought feels with unique adequacy the feelings of all others. Responsiveness and not immutability is the nature of perfection.
'A love that gives but does not respond to the joys and sufferings of the world is not worthy of being called love at all.'
References
1. Whitehead, A.N. "Process and Reality."
2. Davies, Paul, "The Mind of God."
3. Hartshorne was an associate of Whitehead.
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