“Being” but Becoming” constitutes the fundament of reality?
2.41 Is it indeed the case, universally:
2.411 That “you cannot step into the same river twice,” since not only the river, but you personally, will not be the same on the second occasion as on the first (Heraclitus)?
2.412 That God should be regarded, not as an Absolute, but in dy-namic relation to the cosmos, either pantheistically (God and the cosmos are coterminous); or panentheistically (God is greater than the cosmos, but the cosmos is a part of God), as conceived by K. C. F. Krause and reflected in the thought of Hartshorne, Pittenger, Cobb, and Gregory Boyd; or, à la White-head, as One who, whilst neither identical to nor including the cosmos, is always conditioned by it?
2.42 These views, whether philosophical or theological, refuse to begin with, or to employ as a fundamental category, an absolute point of reference.
2.43 But all arguments must have a starting point.
2.431 In logic, as we have seen, that point is the non-processive law of contradiction; Hegelian dialectic “logics” in fact presuppose that law without realising that they do so.
2.44 Process positions either make their claim from an unrecognised acceptance of inductive method as an absolute starting point or they absolutise the very concept of Process.
2.441 If the former, they must demonstrate, as a synthetic fact, that flux is more fundamental than permanence and that God does in fact change in relationship with his cosmos—tasks beyond all human competence.
2.442 If the latter, they have the burden of showing that Process is more fundamental than Stasis—which hardly seems likely when any such proof would have to assume the law of contra-diction as its absolute starting point.
2.443 In both scenarios, therefore, Process thinking shows itself in-herently self-contradictory: flux is allegedly primary, but to
ar-gue or show this, one must work from an absolute of either deductive or inductive logic.
2.45 Not without reason, then, the major streams of philosophical thought have followed Plato’s assertion of the primacy of Be-ing rather than a Pre-Socratic commitment to BecomBe-ing.
2.46 Theologically, the notion that God is dependent on his creation poses more problems than it solves.
2.461 Brightman’s “finite God” left the believer with considerable disquiet: if God is not necessarily capable of an eventual tri-umph over evil, why bother to help him? Maybe one would do better to choose the other side?
2.462 An “Openness” theology, which, in the supposed interest of preserving freedom of human decision-making by removing God’s omniscience, leaves God unable to prophesy with any confidence (since, like his creatures, he is limited to statistical prediction within the framework of his limited knowledge) and unable to assure his followers of a positive conclusion to hu-man history.
2.4621 Such a view seems far removed from that of Jesus, who de-clared that “Not a sparrow shall fall on the ground without your heavenly Father knowing it” (Matthew 10).
2.463 Moltmann’s “Theology of Hope,” grounding our theological knowledge in the eschatological future, places religion at the mercy of the least known aspect of life, namely, what is yet to transpire.
2.4631 It gives maximum generality to the “eschatological verifica-tion” argument (to test the truth of the Christian claim, you must first die; you will then know whether there is eternal life)—an argument which, not surprisingly, has led to few reli-gious revivals.
2.464 Similar criticism can properly be directed to the views of Teil-hard de CTeil-hardin, who offers an esoteric “hyperphysics,” subor-dinating entropic drift to organic evolution (in defiance of all modern physical theory), thereby supposedly justifying the promise of a progressive, evolving future where God waits for us “up ahead” at a mystical, christic “Omega Point.”
2.47 For religious Process views to succeed, it would appear that their adherents require a reference point beyond the human sit-uation in order to justify their description of God’s nature; or a special revelation from him providing them with the knowl-edge that He is indeed processive.
2.471 They clearly lack the former (even were they to cry, “Stop the world; I want to get off,” it would not stop); and the latter would have to be an absolute, not a processive, revelation (since otherwise it could not be depended on for its picture of God).
2.472 Chardinian “New Shape” Roman Catholicism cannot, even in principle, offer the needed solid revelational ground for theo-logical Process, since within the “true Church” (as Karl Adam stressed), revelation is organic in character; therefore, future Magisteria will always be capable of revising prior ecclesiasti-cal pronouncements.
2.48 Biblical revelation, over against all such views, asserts unqual-ifiedly that God in Christ is “the same yesterday, and today, and for ever.”
2.49 Religiously, also, there is a most uncomfortable experiential consequence of a Process view of Deity: it forces one, against one’s knowledge of one’s own inadequacies and evil tenden-cies and those of the human race, to see, in the shaving mirrour each morning, the Divine Presence.
2.4901 “The man who denies original sin believes in the Immaculate Conception of everybody” (G. K Chesterton).
2.491 If the world were really “within” God, or God were necessarily conditioned by it, either God himself would be a sinner or there would be no sin at all.
2.492 In Process theology the jettisoning of sin results necessarily in the loss of any meaningful understanding of the need for Incar-nation or for redemption.
2.4921 Which doubtless accounts for the fact that in such writings of the Process theologians as Cobb’s A Christian Natural Theol-ogy, redemption is conspicuous by its absence.
2.5 We are told by existentialists (Heidegger, Bultmann) and