On the Whiteheadian God

Abstract

It is significant that Whitehead makes no explicit reference to God in the preliminary delineation (pp. 27–45) of the categoreal scheme in Process and Reality, This is no accident, for Whitehead’s God emerges only as a construct in terms of the metaphysically basic entities, namely, actual occasions, eternal objects, and prehensions, prehensions in turn being themselves a kind of actual occasion. Immediately, however, amends are made in the following chapter, “Some Derivative Notions.” We are straitaway told that the “primordial created fact is the unconditional conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects. This is the ‘primordial nature’ of God. … God is the primordial creature; but the description of his nature is not exhausted by this conceptual side of it. His ‘consequent nature’ results from his physical prehensions of the derivative actual entities …”