MAKING SENSE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Whitehead's concept of experience is larger than the scientific one, since it includes the religious experiences of humankind. These are not difficult to accommodate within Whitehead's conception of nature, according to which we live literally immersed in an ocean of feeling. Consider the human body, which Whitehead describes as a society harbouring myriad other smaller societies, each of which is in turn constituted by myriad mind-like entities. It may look like a wild speculation, of course, but in the same way in which a bodily cell or a neuron has a relation to our mind, so could our mind stand in relation to one or more high-level minds. We may never realise this. Occasionally, however, our ordinary awareness may rise to a more or less clear consciousness of such higher mental presences, none of which needs to be identified with God. It would seem therefore that nothing compels Whitehead to introduce a Deity into his metaphysics. Nature could be conceived as a self-organising whole, one that gives rise in the course of evolution to new layers of increasing social complexity. And with the increase of complexity, higher levels of mentality could be achieved.

This is not Whitehead's conclusion. He does indeed forcefully reject the view of God as an all-powerful, omniscient, perfect being; this theology, he contends (PR 343), has been once and for all refuted by Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). But there are undeniable facts of our experience, he also urges us to consider, that can be accounted for only by postulating some kind of extra-worldly, divine Reality.

NOVELTY AND ORDER REVISITED: TWO THEISTIC ARGUMENTS

In order to show that a process theory of nature needs to be supplemented by a process theory of God, Whitehead appeals to two main arguments. God first enters his system with what appears to be a veritable coup de théâtre towards the middle of Process and Reality.