Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

In Reality As Social Process Hartshorne repeatedly equates human freedom with chance or randomness, e.g., “Chance is the particularity of the particular, its Peircian firstness, freshness, spontaneity, originality — or, in Whiteheadian language, its self-creativity.” (87) Now I agree that quantum randomness shares with human freedom one property: unpredictability. But that’s where the similarities end. For I have written that free will is contrasted with the will as that which chooses is contrasted with that which loves, desire, and enjoys. Thus, free-will adds something to will, namely the fact that not all desires can be satisfied and therefore desires have to and can be ranked according to urgency or subjective importance. Human desires are circumscribed by man’s nature, but my analogy of how desires originate is that the external objects (perceived by sensation) or thoughts and states of mind (perceived by reflection) fit the heart as keys fit the lock. The reason why desires are unpredictable is that we do not know which keys fit which locks, even in the case of ourselves. But there is nothing random about emergence of desires.

It is true that men are partly undetermined; they are mutable, for good, for evil, for different goods. But the actualization of such indetermination is not a random happening, as though I would be indifferent between choosing or just as likely to choose a or b, or that b would be picked randomly, or that my becoming a good person as vs. a bad person is a random and uncaused event. The soul is fitted the object, and if the object fits, the soul desires it or rejoices in it. This act of fitting is not at all random; it depends fully upon the configuration of the soul and the object whose goodness is being analyzed. In other words, I think that an omniscient God could predict our desires.

Another question presents itself. God, according to our author, does not know the future. But how can he not, given that he knows all the potentialities of existing things and how each thing can advance in its process of concrescence? It might be replied that despite that fact, God does not know which of these potentialities will coalesce into actual entities; that is, he does not know which eternal objects the actual entities will choose to pursue. But this seems like as inadequate response. For every actual entity consists ultimately of eternal objects realized in the actual world and arranged in a harmonious unity. Using this information God should be able to predict how any entity’s concrescence will proceed. He can examine each entity’s value scales, its knowledge and power, given that “all hearts — not only as they are but as they have been — are open” (42) to God, and determine exactly how it will act.