[Archaea]

Originally Posted by Sleeping in EQ

It's been a long time since I looked at McConkie's comments on this (10 years, maybe), but the idea that he has accurately understood, let alone "debunked," a legit philosophical notion of "self-surpassing deity" would take much more work than I am aware of McConkie putting into the subject.

And Chino being introduced to process philosophy in a class, while worthy, hardly qualifies him to make a definitive pronouncement on the subject.

I'm not going to make one either, but I will say this: I've been studying it for a long time, have integrated it into my doctoral work, and am competent on the subject.

There are many intriguing and compelling ideas in process philosophy. In my field it's a great way to slice the gordian knot that the Marxists and Psychoanalysts have tied themselves in. It's a fresh alternative to trying to synthesize Marx's flows of capital and interest with Freud's flows of desire. Deleuze's iteration of it is the most compelling argument against fascism I have ever encountered.

Remind me of Deleuze's argument. I'm sorry that I ask you simplistic question like this.

I like this part of Paulsen's discussion of James:

Divine Finitude. And James again argues that a God who is not absolutely unlimited--and you'll have to read to get clear about what he means by that--is pragmatically more valuable than a God who is absolutely unlimited. Maybe just a passage from there and we'll be done:
Further, James holds that belief in a finite God is pragmatically richer than belief in an absolutely unlimited God in that it provides greater virility and impetus to our moral endeavors.37 Any world other than a pluralistic one with a finite God takes away all life's real achievements as well as its losses. The finite God in a pluralistic universe is, on that account, more approachable and more of a real leader and inspirer.38 James imagines God, before the creation, putting forth to us the following proposal:
I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own "level best." I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk? (1975, 139)
Yes God, I'll take my time on earth!
In the next section of the paper, I try to show that the God that James finds pragmatically meaningful is the God of the Bible. And I'll just close with a final statement from James:
Though nothing like a full case has or could be made here, I believe enough evidence has been presented to warrant our seriously considering the claim that the God of William James bears significant resemblance to the God of the Bible. James, of course, was not unaware of this. He made it clear that, in rejecting the God of the philosophers, he was not thereby rejecting the God of the Bible:
I must parenthetically ask you to distinguish the notion of the absolute carefully from that of another object with which it is liable to become heedlessly entangled. That other object is the 'God' of common people in their religion. . . . The God of our popular Christianity is but one member of a pluralistic system. He and we stand outside of each other, just as the devil, the saints and the angels stand outside of both of us. I can hardly conceive of anything more different from the absolute than the God, say, of David or of Isaiah. That God is an essentially finite being in the cosmos, not with the cosmos in him. . . . If it should prove probable that the absolute does not exist, it will not follow in the slightest degree that a God like that of David, Isaiah, or Jesus may not exist, or may not be the most important existence in the universe for us to acknowledge. (1977, 54) 39

I claim no competency as it relates to process philosophy, but its dynamicism has always intrigued against the tendency to freeze or objectify or nominalize, when in fact life's systems seem to be more of verbs than nouns.