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The Infinity-Finity Transform
In recent years, a strong interest has been developing in the theological offspring of a little known branch of philosophy known as process philosophy. This development owes much to Charles Hartshorne, a former student, and later associate, of Alfred North Whitehead, the real founder of modern process philosophy. Whitehead, incidentally, also earned fame as a mathematician and logician, being the author, with Bertrand Russell, of an enormous classical work, Principia Mathematica.
In some most basic proposals on what constitutes "reality," interesting and parallel lines of thought are emerging between what is described in the Urantia Papers and academic studies now gathering strength under the banner of process theology.
Some of these have received mention in earlier issues of Innerface. In this particular article, we explore parallels relative to the transformation of possibilities and potentials,static at the infinite level of reality, to that of becoming recognizably real to our mortal minds.
However, it is well to admit that any pretensions we mortals might make to an actual understanding of the infinite are simply self-deception. For any such understanding we are entirely and irrevocably dependent upon revelation.
Let it also be clear that both process theology and the Urantia Papers utterly reject hard core scientific materialism. Both postulate an experiential God, active in the finite world.
Materialist philosophies are substance philosophies that postulate a universe built upon a foundation of static and permanent building blocks--such as the atoms of the elements that constitute ordinary matter.
In contrast, modern process philosophy assumes everything is in a state of dynamic becoming. Even the particles that exist at subatomic levels are transient, they are made up of "occasions of experience" or "actual entities," that, having completed their moment of becoming, grasp or "prehend" other particles so as to influence, in turn, their moment of being.
For Whitehead, the combined influences of his "actual entities" bring about societies or groups that make up the living and non-living objects of finite reality.
Seen as a quite outlandish return to the dark ages when first proposed by Whitehead in the late 1920's, this concept has become less and less outlandish as the findings of modern physics have unearthed deeper and deeper levels of existence below that of the atom.
For example, current evidence indicates that the protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nucleus are themselves made up of even smaller particles--the quarks and gluons, but these still only account for about 50% of the angular momentum of a nucleon. The remaining momentum is assumed to be distributed over "virtual" particles that borrow energy from the vacuum to support their moment of existence. Evidence for the actual existence of these virtual particles is overwhelmingly strong.
Hence, the more scientists have delved into the "substance" of matter, the more sense Whitehead's proposals have made.
These concepts put forward by Whitehead run parallel with many statements made in the Urantia Papers. The Papers tell us that things, whether of matter, mind, spirit, events, or ideas that are destined to become part of our finite reality, actually commence their existence as "existential possibilities and potentials" that have their being in the Unqualified Absolute. At the behest of the Paradise Trinity these potentials become causally activated. Subsequently they are "transmutated" through the agencies of the Deity Ultimate on their way to becoming finite potentials in the keeping of the Supreme.
Once with the Supreme, all these potentials are available to be called into actuality by the Supreme Creators for their purposes of universe building--or beings such as ourselves during the tasks of our normal living.
Detail of this process, as described in the Urantia Papers, is presented in abbreviated diagrammatic form on pp. 8 & 9 .
When studied in fine detail, it becomes apparent that the concepts described and illustrated must have originated from an extremely unusual intelligence. To me, the Urantia Papers appear to be so far in advance in concept and quality of anything else written on this topic that it is virtually impossible to believe that they could have originated from a human mind.
A problem that has long occupied the speculations of theologians is about how God can be both immanent (present everywhere) in the finite world and yet be transcendent--beyond time and space.
Whitehead's solution was to make God dipolar but this is different from the dipolarity he ascribes to his minuscule "actual entities" that have both a mental and a physical aspect.
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