My abstract for the paper I plan to read the Claremont Center for - TopicsExpress

My abstract for the paper I plan to read the Claremont Center for Process Studies in the conference next year: THE PAIN OF THE WORLD AND GODS CONSEQUENT NATURE Whiteheads section on Gods consequent nature in Process and Reality is taken to be virtually the most religious section of this rather difficult treatise. Some have asked whether or not his notion of Gods consequent nature is really integral to his metaphysics and is not, as some put it, an accommodation of traditional religious sentiment. In many ways, however, the consequent nature of God as Whitehead discusses it is far from traditional. A passible God, one who feels the pain of the world and whose actuality is constituted by it is not always easy to reconcile with more traditional notions of a transcendent God. ISIS is one of the pains of the world, but the pain of those alienated by their own religion and their religions concepts of right and wrong, the pain of victims of economies that, as they become global, also appear to be less inclusive are real pains, and how the concept of Gods consequent nature has a message for our contemporary world and its pains, how it can be a source of hope as well as a motive for those who champion change is part of what I will explore. But it is not lost to me that the concept of Gods consequent nature is tied to a rather controversial position of Whitehead: that God is himself an actual occasion. And therefore in the light of the reflections of people like Cobb, Van der Veken, Griffin, I will have the occasion to ask whether we are bound to maintain the notion of God as actual occasion, and if, as Van der Veken suggests, we take God to be on-goingness seen as, appreciated as leading to higher order, greater benevolence and ethical sensitivity, then I will also ask in what sense we can still speak of God as a person -- since only a personal God seems to be satisfactory enough in our day and time.