My good friend Michael Brennan (substack “Theodivergent”) and I have been meeting every few weeks online to discuss books. We were going over God Christ Church by Marjorie Suchocki. As part of our discussion, we went over her discussion about the dipolar nature of God (as originally described by Charles Hartshorne).
Hartshorne proposed that God could best be thought of as having two natures. Our natural world and thought processes often seem to be a duality — finite v. infinite, time v. timelessness, atomic v. galactic, subjective v. objective. How would such a duality work in the setting of God? In my book, “A Theology of the Microbiome“, I made this figure.
Another way to look at concept of Thomas J. Oord’s “divine essence-experience binate Deity.”
In this model, God is intertwined as two concepts.
There is the eternal, perhaps outside of time, manifestation of God. This aspect of God contains all possibility. It is not a predictive possibility but simply all that could exist or could happen. In some ways, this is a derivation of Platonic forms. Alternatively, there is the time-aware manifestation of God. This God experiences what happens in real time and in real locations.
This dipolar God does not force. This dipolar God experiences reality which matches so many of the concepts of process theology. Ideas surronding the dipolar God also matches the cousin of process philosophy, open & relational theology (ORT). ORT states that the future is “open” (God does not know but God could predict), and God is “relational” (God relates and loves at every level of reality). ORT makes the God described in process theology more personal (at least to me).
As an example, Homo sapiens evolved over time. The primordial aspect of God (left of my figure above) is full of possibility. H. sapiens could have evolved into another species early on in species history. H. sapiens could have become extinct early in its development. H. sapiens could have had a permanent stoppage of brain volume growth at an early stage leading to lack of writing, culture, science, and blogging. All of those aspects have been available in God’s primordial aspect.
The actuality aspect of God (right of my figure) is God intertwining with the past, present, and future. God experiences in real time from the quark to the galaxy. One could assume, from a religious perspective, that God “lures” for the “good.” This luring is God desiring creativity or perhaps novelty in real time. The “good” is “creativity” or “novelty.” I am saying that “the good is should” in that each entity has the ability to be creative, to advance, to improve the surrounding ecosystem, and to be good to one’s neighbor (from a human perspective). Perhaps reality should strive for creativity, but reality with complete freedom often is not creative. Bad things happen.
I am not Hindu, so my writing here is uninformed. However, when I consider aspects of Vedantic Hinduism, I do wonder if the Brahman is a theologic concept that is a corollary to the dipolar deity, especially when considering God’s primoridal nature.
The Vedantic tradition seems to consider the Brahman as “reality that grounds matter, thought, and meaning.” The reality that grounds all may be considered as a monadic structure for which all is interconnected and, in some sense, is arising from the same ground. From a process theology perspective, the monads are perhaps the intense, eternal milieu of the primordial aspect of God which, in unity with reality, builds God’s experience and interacts with nature. The monad structure of a divine primordial state outside of time perhaps is inversely shaped by events in real, finite time. These events in reality lead to God’s experience.
Perhaps Hinduism and Christianity touch here. Vedantic tradition suggests that the individual may have an ultimate goal to realize the individual’s oneness with Brahman. Likewise, the Christian aspects of process theology suggest that God is with us in the setting of panentheism and panexperientialism. Relevant Bible verses can be seen in Philippians 2:13 or John 15:4-7.
In a similar way, perhaps our species has some metaphysical goal of connecting with God. Perhaps in our evolutionary drive to live and to produce new humans, we have some inherent drive to carry on in nature as we wish to see God’s continuing actuality as our goal. Perhaps this drive can be reduced (and equally as important) to the cellular or DNA level with mechanisms of replication and the inherent entropy of DNA mutation continuing on in the processes of life. Perhaps this drive can be expanded to culture, society, and our planet.
Of course, people do bad things, and nature has horrific consequences. This is theodicy, for which there is no solution.
I have no objective answer for the bad things that happen. I never will. No one will. Perhaps, then we have to look at the schematics of faith. We all have a faith system. We believe in God. We don’t believe in God. We don’t care. All such ideas are faith systems. Faith is an interesting construct — see a great resource here. Faith requires the subjective. Religion is filled with subjective, yet important, concepts. How does subjectivity help here?
Hinduism has the dharma which has the potential for peace and nonviolence. Christianity preaches peace. Process theology from a Christian perspective believes that God wants creativity or novelty. God invites us to participate, and this participation involves peace and nonviolence.
My conclusion to this post provides 3 ideas for further exploration:
- Intersectionality between different faiths is always interesting.
- More work in theology may be needed for clearly delineating the dipolar nature of God. Is this idea possibly present in other religions? Should this idea be emphasized more in my faith stream (Christianity)?
- Peace. Non-violence. A loving environment. Loving the other. These ideas are always good in religion.
Odds and Ends:
- Nature has an open access article on ritual stone throwing by Chimpanzees. They may be building cairns. This behavior is fascinating (see https://www.nature.com/articles/srep22219).
- A great article in Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith (PCSF) recently came out titled “Models in Christianity and Chemistry: Truth or Utility.” It is not online yet, but typically PCSF articles become open access after one year (link: https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2024/PSCF12-24dyn.html). I may do a future post on this article.
image created by Gemini Advanced
Phi-The-Sci: Equilateral Musings 