Is Process Theism Compatible with Relativity Theory?

Abstract

Several years ago John T. Wilcox raised A Question from Physics for Certain Theists, 1 pointing out difficulties between certain temporalistic conceptions of God and Einstein's special theory of relativity. Temporalistic or process theism certainly includes the thought of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, but many other philosophers and theologians, who hold that God is a spirit or person at least partially partaking of the becoming in nature, implicitly maintain a similar view. 2 Wilcox defines it as any theism which portrays God as an experiencing subject, the knower of temporal process(es), whose knowledge is itself subject to growth, expanding as the temporal reality he knows grows.3 Now if God's knowledge grows such that he knows event P as actual only when P in fact becomes actual, some interesting problems arise concerning simultaneous If Q is a contemporaneous event quite distant from P, God must either know P just before he knows Q, or just after, or exactly at the same time. In any event, some absolute meaning for simultaneity has been established by the way God experiences P and Q: P is either simultaneous with one of Q's predecessors, or with one of Q's successors, or with Q itself. Yet according to the special theory of relativity, There is physically no unique meaning for simultaneity in the case of causally separate events. 4However God experiences P and Q,