Donald Viney

Process theism draws principally from the works of Alfred N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, although many writers, some dating from antiquity, contributed to its development. Process thinkers are not in the habit of addressing the topic of divine omnipresence specifically. However, their categories provide for novel ideas concerning God’s presence in the universe. In this chapter, we outline the key elements of a process account of omnipresence, including that God is essentially in give-and-take relationships with the creatures, that divine–creaturely interactions require a principled distinction between abstract and concrete aspects of deity (dipolarity), that God’s awareness of the world is not merely notional or intellectual, but affective (what Hartshorne called ‘feeling of feeling’), and that God’s relation to the world is best characterized as panentheistic, using as a model a carefully refined analogy of the relation that a person has to the cells of his or her body.

The playwright and Nobel Prize winner George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) often wrote on subjects touching on philosophy and religion, but one would not ordinarily associate his name with process theology. However, his allegory, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), and his reflections on the meaning of the story, contain so many themes friendly to process thought that they should be considered as vital resources and as a literary introduction for some of the concerns of process theologians, or at least as a springboard for thinking of religious ideas in processive ways. Adventures elicited many responses in the forms of parody and imitation, but discussions of its theological themes are surprisingly sparse in the critical literature. Falling far short of a fully articulated dipolar theism, Shaw's work is nevertheless a beginning along the path to process thought, an indication of a certain direction that is valuable, not least because it is presented in such a delightful, imaginative, and sometimes contrarian tale.

This paper presents, explains, and addresses the pedagogical utility of the “Wachter crystal,” a three-dimensional representation of basic principles of logic designed and created by Thomas Wachter in 1992. The author first discusses a way of understanding relations of logical inference which groups propositions possessing identical truth tables into the same class (that is, a way of conceptualizing rules for replacement). Next, the author presents and explains a 16 x 16 matrix, the most basic figure for representing the inferential relations between the classes of propositional logic. Such a matrix easily maps reflexivity, asymmetry, and transitivity in relations of implication. Moreover, since the relations and properties it illustrates can also be illustrated by a lattice, one can construct a three-dimensional model to represent them. The Wachter crystal, which resembles chemists’ models of molecules, illustrates the same principles as the matrix while foregrounding the commonly-neglected difference between Philonian conditionals (which belong to the object language of propositional logic) and implication (which belong to the metalanguage). In addition to being a perspicuous and aesthetically engaging way to represent basic principles of propositional logic, the Wachter crystal is a bridge to more advanced logical concepts such as modal logic, sentence connectives, and predicates of sentences.

The first issue of the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion appeared in the Spring, 1970. This collection of essays is presented in cele bration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal. Contributors to the volume are to be counted among today's leading philosophers of religion. They represent different approaches to the philosophical consideration of religion and their published work is helping shape discussions of the philos ophy of religion as we approach the beginning of the twenty-first century. Considered by some to be terminal at mid-century, the philosophy of reli gion has undergone a renaissance during the second half of the century. And the journal may be said to provide some of the explanation for this develop ment. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Edgar Henderson, Robert Leet Patterson and Henry Sprinkle, founders of the journal. Without their vision and determination it would not have come into existence.

The influence of Jules Lequyer [or Lequier] in philosophy, especially American philosophy, is disproportionate to the widespread ignorance of his name and to the fragmentary state of his literary remains. On the subject of free will, Lequyer’s influence on William James was profound, although James did not acknowledge his debt to the Frenchman, nor has it been recognized by most James scholars. It is true that James considered Lequyer “a French philosopher of genius,”1 but inexplicably, he never mentioned Lequyer by name in his published work. Lack of knowledge of Lequyer among Anglophones is perhaps not surprising since, in addition to James’s curious silence, it took more than a hundred..

Behind the playful title of this book there is a serious theory about the origin of religions, as well as an argument concerning their usefulness and the truth claims they make. Anyone familiar with Shults's work will recognize this book as a companion to his Theology after the Birth of God—and, to a lesser extent, Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism—repeating the basic argument but adding an avalanche of more recent research, engaging some different interlocutors, and outlining the virtues of computer modeling as an avenue of inquiry.1 The first and last chapters detail the core of Shults's theory and the evidence for it; the inner ten...

Griffin’s book contributes to the literature of cumulative arguments for God’s existence, revealing the deficiencies of the “God Almighty” of traditional theism (i.e., Gawd) and the strengths of a Whiteheadian process theism (i.e., God). Since the concept of omnipotence is central, it is imperative to note that there are three ideas of divine power in traditional theism, not always carefully parsed by Griffin. Evolutionary theory requires rethinking theism, but, contrary to Griffin, many of the problems posed by the theory are less for belief in Gawd than for fundamentalism. Nevertheless, an interactive dipolar deity fits most naturally with evolutionary thinking to provide a concept of God All-Loving. Griffin is at his best discussing the ground of abstract truths. He does not, however, avail himself of some of the best arguments against traditional theism found in Hartshorne’s work; there is also the question whether Griffin would accept Hartshorne’s idea of the modal coincidence of God’s existence and all possibility and how this would affect his cumulative case.

In this essay I argue that Malone-France’s anti-realistic interpretation of the Hartshorne-Peirce theory of possibles can be challenged in a number of ways. While his interpretation does suggest that there are in fact two distinct accounts of possibility in Hartshorne’s philosophy, one that is vulnerable to an antirealistic interpretation and one that is not, Hartshorne does have a consistent and defensible doctrine of possibles. I argue that Whitehead’s contrasting “nonprotean” theory of possibles or “eternal objects” has its own set of conundrums to face, including problems with the coherence of the notion of the completeness of eternal objects and problems with infinite regresses. Whether Whitehead’s or Hartshorne’s account of possibles is correct, I concur with Malone-France that the Molinist doctrine of divine knowledge of future contingents is flawed.

William James described his system as “too much like an arch built only on one side.” Donald Crosby’s project is to chart the dimensions of the arch, repair it in certain places, and continue its construction. He endorses a Jamesian empiricism according to which “pure experience” is the ultimate context within which we come to judgments about reality, but he resists James’s allusions to pure experience as the stuff from which the world is made. The metaphysical question is answered by “radical materialism,” Crosby’s label for his revision of James’s pluralism.James insisted that experience is prior to the discriminations that we find within in it. Most people, for example, must be taught to listen for...