Whitehead on God

Six Passages from Process and Reality
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The six passages above are from "Process and Reality." Whitehead's understanding of God evolved from "Science and the Modern World" through "Religion in the Making" to "Process and Reality." In his last book, "Adventures of Ideas," he avoided the word "God" and spoke instead of the Eros of the universe and a Harmony of Harmonies. For a history of this development and an understanding of why he believed in God in the first place, see John Cobb's "Whitehead's Doctrine of God," reprinted from his book "A Christian Natural Theology."

Moreover, process theologians, influenced by Whitehead, diverge from Whitehead. They appreciate and borrow from Whitehead's cosmology, his ideas of education and mathematics, and quantum theory, along with his emphasis on mutual becoming and creativity, but not his understanding of God. They find value in one or some combination of the twenty key ideas in the process tradition, but not his understanding of God.

Some process theologians offer alternative ways of thinking about God that are more traditional, or mystical, or sacramental, or transpersonal. For Whitehead, God is an eternal companion to the world, sharing in its sufferings. Some are not at home with such personalized images.

Additionally, some process theologians are non-theistic. They think of themselves as "naturalistic" not "theistic," seeing the evolving and interconnected universe, with its beauty and terror, as the whole in which life is nested, but they do not think of this whole as having a life of its own, akin to Whitehead's understanding of the consequent nature of God.

Equally important, many around the world borrow from other sources in thinking about ultimate matters: "The Tao te Ching," for example, or mystical writings of Meister Eckhart, or the poetry of Rumi. Process theology is not limited to Whitehead.

​Still, it is true that Whitehead offers a unique and, for some, immensely persuasive way of thinking about God, aspects of which leap forth from the six quotations above. Please feel free to use them as you wish, copying and pasting onto other sources. They were developed by Dr. Richard Livingston and me, for use in a course introducing process thought offered by the Cobb Institute and the Center for Process Studies,

- Jay McDaniel
Open Horizons