The Active Future as Divine :: Philosophy Religion Papers

The Active Future as DivineNormally, drill is regarded as observable, but according to relativity theory whatever is discernible lies in the agone of the discernible. Only the present subjective immediacy is right active. Subjectivity is properly understood as present becoming objectivity as preceding(a) being (so Whitehead). I propose that we extend the demesne of subjective immediacy to include the future day as well as the present. This future universal activity is pluralized in the present in damage of the many actualities coming into being. Subjectivity is the individualization of becoming, and so can view as to the future as a whole as well as to particular present subjects. The future as nobleman grows out of Whiteheads revisions of tralatitious suppositions of omnipotence and omniscience. But he separates creativity (best understood in terms of Hindi and Buddhist thought) from the God of Western theism. This separation can be cut across if God is future creativity individualized in its own realm, which is the initiation of the creativity within each of us.Ordinarily we think of the future as a blank background on which we imaginatively project our plans, hopes and fears. Or we may consider it as a receptacle, passively registering the conditions the present and past lays upon it. Once all these conditions argon completed, it comes into being-only then it is no longer future but present. As long as it is even future and still indeterminate, we do not see how it could be active. How could the future actively perk up and respond to its being?Besides the ordinary passive future we are all familiar with, I wish to propose a notion of the future which can serve as the appropriate mode of divine activity. First, I need to show how an active future is possible. Then I must try to show that God can be suitably conceived as the activity of the future. In this account I shall be relying hard on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, pr imarily as fix in his main work, Process and Reality (1929). In part I shall be presenting his ideas, while in part I shall be structure on them in ways he did not foresee.The future is commonly considered to be exclusively passive because it lacks any discernible activity. Most agree whatever discernible activity there is to be present, relegating to the past whatever is no longer active. This makes good sense for those who assume that gentlemans gentleman is constituted out of enduring substances, but it makes less sense if the world is conceived in terms of events.