Being: An Entity, an Activity, or Both an Entity and an Activity?

Abstract

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three major religions of the Western world, are all monotheistic. On the basis of their sacred scriptures, all three profess belief in God as Ultimate Reality, a single transcendent entity who as Creator of heaven and earth is responsible for the enormous diversity of finite entities in this world. Neoclassical theism, based on the processoriented cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead, on the contrary, affirms that Creativity, an activity that transcends its embodiment in finite entities, is Ultimate Reality and that God is its primordial nontemporal embodiment or “accident.” Is there a possible third philosophical position that can mediate between these two rival metaphysical systems by postulating that Being is necessarily both entity and activity? In what follows, I claim that this is indeed possible, if one accepts a revision of the Whiteheadian category of society as more than an enduring aggregate of genetically interrelated actual entities with a “common element of form” or “defining characteristic.” It is instead a new corporate entity that exists in its own right even though derivative in its ongoing structure and scope of operation from the interrelated activity of constituent actual entities frommoment to moment. I argue this point by dividing the article into three parts. In the first part, I critique the preoccupation of classic theism, starting with Thomas Aquinas in medieval scholasticism but also including modern-day Thomists ðe.g., Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, James Felt, and Norris ClarkeÞ with Being as an individual entity rather than Be-ing as an ongoing process with something like Whiteheadian creativity as its principle of operation. Then in