Process Theodicy

Process Theodicy

Process theodicy is the one response to evil that the AQA 7062 specification names alongside Hick's soul-making theodicy and the free will defence, and it is the most radical of the three. The specification lists it precisely as "process theodicy as presented by Griffin", so David Ray Griffin (1939-2022) is the figure to deploy, working from the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and the dipolar theism of Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000). What makes the approach radical is that it does not try to reconcile evil with the classical God; it re-describes God. Where classical theism holds that God is omnipotent, omniscient and immutable, process thought holds that God's power is persuasive, not coercive: God lures and influences the world towards the good but cannot unilaterally determine what creatures do. On this view evil exists not because God wills it, nor because God permits it for a greater good, but because God genuinely cannot prevent it without overriding a freedom that belongs, by metaphysical necessity, to everything that exists. The strategic interest of the theodicy is therefore that it attacks the problem of evil at its root: it denies the very premise of omnipotence on which Mackie's and Rowe's arguments depend.

Whitehead's Process Philosophy

Whitehead was a British mathematician and philosopher who, having co-authored Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, turned in later life to metaphysics and taught at Harvard. His major work, Process and Reality (1929), sets out a system in which becoming rather than being is fundamental. Four features matter for the problem of evil.

• Reality is made of processes, not substances. The basic units of the world are not enduring things but momentary events Whitehead called "actual occasions" or "actual entities" - drops of experience that arise, integrate the influences acting on them, achieve a determinate character and then perish, handing themselves on to their successors. To exist is to be a process of becoming, not a static substance that merely has properties.
• Every actual entity has some degree of experience. Whitehead defended a form of panexperientialism (often loosely called panpsychism): from sub-atomic events up to human minds, every actual entity has some rudimentary capacity to "feel" or register its world. This does not mean an electron is conscious; it means responsiveness goes all the way down.
• Every actual entity has some degree of self-determination. No occasion is wholly fixed by its past. Each adds a measure of spontaneity, "deciding" (in a minimal sense) how to unify the data it inherits. Freedom, in a primitive form, is a universal feature of reality, not a special human endowment.
• God exemplifies the metaphysical principles rather than standing above them. This is decisive. In Whitehead's famous formulation, God is "not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse" but is "their chief exemplification". God is the supreme actual entity, but God too operates within the structures of process - including the structure by which influence is persuasive rather than coercive.

Key term: Panexperientialism is the view that every actual entity, however simple, has some minimal experience or feeling. It underpins the claim that self-determination - and so the capacity to resist God's lure - is present throughout nature, which is why God cannot simply override events.

Dipolar Theism

The single most distinctive doctrine of process theology, developed especially by Hartshorne, is dipolar theism: the claim that God has two "poles" or natures, against the classical insistence on divine simplicity and immutability.

• The primordial nature is God's eternal, abstract aspect. Here God envisages the whole realm of pure possibility - every way the world might be - and orders these possibilities by value. From this ordering God supplies each actual entity with its initial aim: a felt lure towards the best possibility genuinely open to it in its circumstances. The primordial nature is unchanging and is the ground of order and novelty in the world.
• The consequent nature is God's temporal, responsive aspect. Through it God receives into the divine life everything that actually happens, feeling the joys and sufferings of every creature. God is therefore affected by the world: enriched by its goods, wounded by its evils, genuinely changed by what creatures do. This directly contradicts the classical doctrine of impassibility, which holds that God cannot be acted upon by anything external.

Because of the consequent nature, Whitehead can describe God as "the great companion - the fellow-sufferer who understands". This is the emotional centre of the theodicy. The process God does not survey suffering from a height of untroubled omnipotence; God undergoes it alongside the sufferer and weaves what good can be salvaged from it into the divine life. For many who find the classical "greater-good" theodicies cold, this picture of a God who suffers with creation is the theory's chief attraction.

Persuasive versus Coercive Power

The hinge of the whole theodicy is its account of divine power. Classical theism takes God's power to be coercive in the sense that God can, in principle, unilaterally bring about any logically possible state of affairs. Process theism replaces this with persuasive power:

• God supplies each occasion with its initial aim - an invitation, a lure towards the optimum available good.
• But each occasion has its own self-determination and may conform to that aim, fall short of it, or reject it outright.
• God cannot override an occasion's self-determination. Crucially, this is not a limitation God graciously chooses to accept (as in some free-will theodicies where God "self-limits"); it is a metaphysical necessity. Power is irreducibly shared because self-determination is built into what it is to be an actual entity. A world of entities over which God had total control would be a world of entities with no being of their own at all.
• God's influence is therefore best modelled on a wise teacher, parent or friend who inspires, persuades and draws out the best in another, but who cannot - logically cannot, on this metaphysics - compel the outcome.

This is what lets Griffin claim that God is genuinely not responsible for evil. The classical God, able to prevent any evil at will, must answer for every evil left in place; the process God, unable in principle to coerce, faces no such charge.

Key term: Persuasive power is the capacity to influence, lure and inspire without the ability to determine the outcome unilaterally. In process thought God's power is necessarily of this kind, because every actual entity has its own self-determination that even God cannot override.

How God Acts: The Initial Aim and Objective Immortality

It is worth being precise about how, on this account, God actually does anything, since a common misreading takes the process God to be an idle spectator. God acts in two ways. First, through the initial aim: at the moment an actual occasion begins its process of becoming, it receives from God's primordial nature a felt lure towards the best possibility available to it. This aim is not a command but a value-laden invitation, the most relevant good "pressing in" on the occasion as it decides how to unify its inheritance. Every occasion in the universe is thus continually being solicited by God towards the optimum it can reach. Evil occurs when an occasion settles for a lesser good, or for positive discord, instead of the aim God offers. So God is never the author of evil, yet God is ceaselessly active in resisting it - at every instant, everywhere, urging the world towards richer harmony.

Second, through the consequent nature, God preserves what is achieved. Whitehead speaks of objective immortality: although each occasion perishes as a subject, what it has become is taken up and held everlastingly in the divine experience. Nothing of value is finally lost; the suffering and the goods of the world are gathered into God and there transmuted, so far as possible, into a wider harmony. This is the nearest process thought comes to a doctrine of redemption. It is not the classical promise that God will put right the world's wrongs by sovereign power, but the gentler claim that no joy and no agony simply vanishes - each is felt, remembered and woven into the life of God. Griffin leans on this to answer the charge that a non-omnipotent God offers no hope: the hope process theology offers is that our lives matter everlastingly to God and contribute permanently to the divine life, even though their earthly outcome is not guaranteed.

Process Theodicy and the Logical and Evidential Problems

Locating process theodicy against Mackie (Lesson 1) and Rowe (Lesson 2) shows exactly why it is so distinctive. Mackie's inconsistent triad is generated by three propositions: God is omnipotent, God is wholly good, and evil exists. Every theodicy in this course tries to keep all three by reinterpreting the connecting rules - arguing, for instance, that a good God may permit evil for a greater good. Process theodicy does something more drastic: it rejects the first proposition outright, denying classical omnipotence. Once God is not omnipotent in the coercive sense, the triad is no longer even a candidate for inconsistency, because the move "an omnipotent and good God would eliminate all evil" loses its first premise. Where the free will defence shows the triad is not provably inconsistent, process theodicy shows it was never assembled in the first place, because one of its members is false.

The same redefinition reframes the evidential problem. Rowe argues that the sheer quantity and apparent pointlessness of suffering - the fawn, Sue, the suffering of animals across deep time - make the omnipotent, wholly good God improbable. But Rowe's argument, like Mackie's, runs on the assumption that God could have prevented these evils. Strip out coercive omnipotence and the evidential force changes character entirely: the fawn's agony is no longer evidence that a God who could have helped did not, because on the process view no such God exists. What the evidence then shows is simply that the world contains self-determining processes that frequently fall short of the divine lure - which is exactly what process metaphysics predicts. This is the deepest strength of the theodicy: it does not have to explain why a God of unlimited power tolerates the residue of seemingly gratuitous evil that defeats Hick and the free will defence, because it denies there is a God of unlimited power to tolerate it. The cost, of course, is the very omnipotence whose loss the criticisms below find so grave.

Griffin's Process Theodicy

Griffin gave Whitehead's and Hartshorne's metaphysics its most systematic application to evil, above all in God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (1976; reissued 2004) and Evil Revisited (1991). His argument turns on a careful redefinition of omnipotence and runs through four connected claims.

• God is not indictable for evil. Because God's power is persuasive, not coercive, the central accusation of the problem of evil - that a God able to prevent evil and good enough to want to should have done so - simply does not apply. God always offers the best initial aim; when an occasion produces evil, the responsibility lies with the occasion's own self-determination, not with God.
• The capacity for good and the capacity for evil rise together. Griffin argues that any increase in an entity's capacity to realise value is necessarily also an increase in its capacity to realise disvalue. A trivially simple entity (an electron) can do little good and little harm; a complex, richly experiencing entity (a human being) can achieve great good and inflict great evil. God could not have created creatures capable of love, art and moral heroism while withholding from them the corresponding power to hate, destroy and betray. The risk of evil is the unavoidable shadow of the possibility of higher good.
• Natural evil flows from the self-determination of natural entities. Earthquakes, pathogens and predators are not instruments of divine will. Tectonic plates, viruses and weather systems have their own causal momentum - a low-grade self-determination - that God lures but cannot dictate. Natural evil is thus the cost of a genuinely self-creating cosmos, not a punishment or a pedagogical device.
• God creates by persuasion, not by fiat. Griffin rejects creatio ex nihilo, the doctrine that God made the world out of nothing by sheer sovereign will. On the process account God works by patiently bringing order and richness out of a chaos of lower-grade actual occasions, persuading the world towards ever-greater complexity and value over cosmic time. The world is a joint achievement of divine lure and creaturely response, never a divine artefact wholly under divine control.

Taken together these claims yield Griffin's solution: the problem of evil, as classically posed, presupposes a coercive omnipotence that does not exist. Remove that assumption and the inconsistency dissolves, because there is no longer a being who could unilaterally prevent the evils we see.

Hartshorne and the Coherence of a Suffering God

Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead's most important interpreter and the chief architect of dipolar theism, contributes a further argument that is easy to overlook but central to the theodicy's defence. Classical theism insists that God is impassible - incapable of being acted upon or of suffering - on the grounds that to be affected by another is to be dependent, and dependence is an imperfection. Hartshorne reverses this judgement. He argues that the capacity to be affected - to feel another's joy and pain, to respond, to sympathise - is not a weakness but a perfection, indeed the supreme perfection of love. A being incapable of sympathy would be not more perfect than a loving God but less: a cold absolute, related to the world's suffering only as an indifferent cause. The truly perfect being, Hartshorne contends, is the one who feels the sufferings of all creatures more fully than they feel them themselves and responds to each with unsurpassable love. This is why he speaks of God as the "most and best moved mover", inverting Aristotle's unmoved mover.