The Most Moved Mover

We're skipping over three books in order to enter The Mind of Charles Hartshorne, but of the four, I would say that this is the most coonologically relevant and goroundbreaking.

Goroundbreaking?

Yes, in the sense that each of these books in its own way helps to lift us out of horizontal absurcularity. The first was on Gibson's theory of ecological perception, which proves beyond the shadow of a doubt and with geometric logic that we really do perceive the real world after all, and that we are not confined to our own representations of it, i.e., to Kantworld.

The second was on David Bohm's implicate order, the main point there being that the order of the cosmos and the order of our minds share the same implicate --> explicate movement, Bohm's error being to locate causation at the bottom rather than the top.

The third was an update on the divine science of Thomas' Summa Theologiae, which we are calling the Absolute Science. Being that this meta-science has been around for 700 years, it can wait another week. It escapes the funereal burygoround with its essential metacosmic structure of creation as an exit from and return to the vertical source, so nothing new there. Thus, yesterday's post ended with Gemini asking  

Would you like to elaborate on how Hartshorne's idea of God as both Absolute (Pure Act) and Relative (Infinite Potency) perfectly mirrors this necessity for two forms of causation?

Yes we would, but we're going to have to proceed in an orderly fashion through the book, rather than flipping round from subject to subject.

Hartshorne considered himself primarily a metaphysician rather than a theologian, although he believed that metaphysics not only proved the existence of God, but of a certain type of God. 

In other words, he affirms both that God cannot not be and that he cannot fail to have certain properties and attributes which sometimes contradict traditional views of God, for which reason he called his approach neoclassical metaphysics, which is similar to what we half-jokingly call neotraditonal retrofuturism. 

Thus, if his metaphysic clashed with revelation, he would always choose metaphysics. Which is what I alluded to yesterday in saying that he 

pushes logic too far, which redounds to a kind of off-putting arrogance. Logic certainly has its rights, but it does not have the right to reduce Truth to its restricted categories. Too much left brain and not enough right, for the nonlocal Truth of which we are speaking obviously transcends the limits of logic, a la Gödel.

You might say that he tries to fit all of reality into his airtight system, when we know going in that this is impossible, for again, 

And that's all there is to it. At some point the metaphysician must pass the baton to the mystic, and Hartshorne was not per se a mystic, although he did have a mystical experience while working as an orderly during World War I, while "contemplating the idea of a finite God" -- or of a God who participates in finitude and is therefore not the purely transcendent and static God of tradition.

This was also a God of limited power, and therefore not absolutely omnipotent. Later he would write a great deal on how the very concept of absolute divine omnipotence is incoherent and contradictory, an example of how for him metaphysical consistency trumps authority, tradition, revelation, or anything else. Which can again make him appear a bit arrogant and dismissive at times.

This God, being a conscious spirit, is greater than nature or necessity, but does not control them.... He came to accept that God is, in different respects, both finite and infinite. In addition, he rejected the idea that any single being does or could determine every detail of the world process.

Here again, "This is not because divine power is limited but because the very concept of an all-determining omnipotence is conceptually incoherent," for reasons we will get into as we proceed. He still maintained that God was the most powerful being, but that the world simply made no sense if this power extended to every occurrence herebelow, and in particular, if it negated our real freedom. 

Rather, one might say that the Creator creates genuine co-creators, and if our own creativity is determined by God, then it is no more creative or free than what a machine inevitably does. Perhaps ironically, he felt that this conception of God was not only mere metaphysically coherent and consistent with human experience, but was more impressive than the distant, impassive, and immutable God of tradition. 

In fact, this is an example of the God in whom everyone already believes, in the sense that the efficacy of prayer implicitly assumes that God hears and responds, and to the extent that he does, this implies a change in God. I know there are theologians who twist themselves into pretzels to deny change in God, but why all the hate directed at change? (We will have much more to say about this later on, but it essentially comes down to our own creation of abstract dualistic properties, and naming one of them bad and the other good.) 

We certainly wouldn't consider it a virtue if a human person were an isolated monad absolutely resistant to change. Rather, it's a matter of what kind of change. The bottom line is that Hartshorne concluded that God is both the most Absolute conceivable but also the most Relative, in that he relates to everything and everyone. In this sense, he is at once the unmoved mover and the most moved mover. Which sounds like a violation of the principle of non-contradiction, but it's really a complementary dynamism.

The one thing that surprises me is that Hartshorne rarely mentions the Trinity, nor does he ever draw out its metaphysical implications. But we have written at length of how the Trinitarian Godhead must be irreducible substance-in-relation, meaning that relativity and relation are baked into the metaphysical cake. Thus, it should come as no surprise that God creates a cosmos that is deeply interconnected, such that not so much as a single atom isn't woven into a web of relations. 

And for me, of course, this is the very principle that accounts for our own intersubjectivity, such that we are "members of one another," this being the horizontal expression of God's own intersubjectivity, because I suppose that the Son is quite responsive to the Father, and vice versa, and how can one be changeless and responsive? It's an oxymoron. 

Unless we regard change and changelessness under different aspects. Yes, God never changes insofar as his nature is concerned. But this nature includes responsiveness -- a "being with," not just a being apart from everything else.  

I find this God to be very appealing fellow, for what it's worth. Much more approachable, and why not? Jesus himself is said to be Immanuel, which literally means "God with us." Now, is he really withus or not? Because if he is, that means he is with us in all our contingency and finitude, so not the distant and unchanging stuffed shirt of tradition.

In summary, the Bible presents Jesus as Immanuel to teach that in him, God personally intervened and resided with humanity, bridging the gap created by sin and making a permanent, intimate relationship possible (Gemini's two cents).

And a relationship isn't even a relationship, let alone an intimate one, if one of the parties isn't really involved in it. You know the type.

This also makes sense of Jesus' statement about how I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you, which establishes a three-way, reciprocal relationship: the Father is in Jesus, and believers are integrated into that divine unity, with Jesus dwelling in them. How is any of this reconcilable with changelessness?

Well, we haven't even scratched the surface, but we're out of time. Bottom line it for us, Gemini, and I mean concisely:

Your key insight is that this dynamic God, who is responsive without being contingent, is the only one who can logically sustain a real relationship with creation and account for the vertical causation that lifts us out of horizontal absurcularity.