The Universe is God's Body;
God Perceives the Whole Directly;
For God There is no External Environment
Charles Hartshorne
" It is remarkable (but one can explain it) that, while classical theologians wrote about the "will" and "knowledge" of God, the word "perception" was usually avoided in this context. Whitehead is original here, too, for he attributes "physical prehensions,'' equivalent to perceptions, to deity.
But then, what need is there for divine thinking? The answer seems to be that, because the future is only potential, a matter of more or less universal "might-be's, would-be's, and must-be's" (in Peirce's terms) rather than fully concrete or particularized actualities, God must have awareness of what we call universals, and the awareness of the universal is what concepts give us. In this way God can be supposed to distinguish our fragmented awareness of the physical whole of things from His-Her unfragmented awareness. We have to treat the distant and not-perceived through concepts of what might be out there beyond our field of vision, hearing, and smelling.
We use universals or concepts in a way God would not have to. But God has to be aware of the truth involved in concepts, since that is the truth so far as the uncreated future is concerned. And so, too, God knows mathematical truths, which concern universals, abstract possibilities.
God is like the other animals, rather than like us, in the following way: for the other animals, the field of perception is almost the whole, so far as the animal has definite awareness of that whole. The animal's instincts take the real whole into account to some extent; but of this the animal is largely unconscious. It does little thinking about what is not at the moment perceived, unless it has in the very near past been perceived. So, for the animal, the animal's body and its near environment almost are the whole.
For God there is no external environment, the divine body just is the spatial whole; moreover, this body is vividly and distinctly perceived...The world consists of individuals, but the totality of individuals as a physical or spatial whole is God's body, the Soul of which is God."
— Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), pp. 93-94.
Five Ideas to Consider
- God perceives the world directly.
Classical theology often spoke of God's knowledge and will but rarely of God's perception. Hartshorne thinks this omission is significant. Following Whitehead, he argues that God literally perceives the world through "physical prehensions"—that is, through direct feeling of every actuality as it comes into being. God's knowledge is not primarily inferential or observational. It is experiential. - God thinks because the future is not yet actual.
If the entire universe were already actual, perception alone would suffice. But the future does not yet exist. It consists only of possibilities. Therefore God also requires conceptual awareness—the grasp of eternal possibilities, universals, logical relations, and mathematical truths. Perception knows what is; conceptual thought knows what can be. - Concepts compensate for our limited perception.
Human beings think because our perception is fragmentary. We cannot directly perceive distant places, microscopic realities, or future events. Concepts enable us to reach beyond immediate experience. - God's situation is fundamentally different.
God has no external environment. The universe itself is God's body. Consequently, nothing actual lies outside divine perception. God does not need concepts in order to know distant galaxies or hidden events, because they are all directly felt within the divine life. - Animals provide a better analogy than humans.
This is one of Hartshorne's more surprising observations. Animals engage in relatively little abstract thinking. Their lives are largely perceptual. Likewise, God knows the actual world primarily through direct perception rather than through conceptual reconstruction. The difference, of course, is that an animal perceives only its local environment, whereas God perceives the entire cosmos.