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Dear Tillich (Details anzeigen)^b,

Lovejoy (Details anzeigen)^c writes me that he "sees no contradiction whatever" in the idea of a being that is omniscient as to past details but not as to future details (the future being held not to contain details, so long as it is future). What L. (Details anzeigen)^d was objecting to was Bergson (Details anzeigen)^es notion that the past and presence mutually „interpenetrate“, and yet change is real. I have always held this a blunder on Bergson (Details anzeigen)^fs part. Past events are internal to present events but not vice-versa, the interpenetration is not mutual and so not properly speaking interpenetration. Lovejoy (Details anzeigen)^g also holds that a changeless being must know the future as completely and in detail as it knows the past. To this I agree. However, I hold that nothing changes in God except his potentialities. His actual contents are indestructible, once actualized. Actuality is immutable in God, but reality as inclusive of actual and potential, is mutable, for the one element is ever passing into the other with an irreversible process.

Your challenging question, how so many philosophers and theologians came to hold the same (according to me erroneous) view is not easy to answer. But the causes of belief are rather complex. For example:

1) It is simpler to say, absolute, than to say, absolute in one aspect, relative in another, and to indicate which aspects are which.

2) Relativity and change and complexity as we human beings have them are obviously defective and full of risks and evils. To make sure that at least God (and we by identification with him, vicariously) escapes these defects, what more natural than to say he is simply without change, relativity, complexity? Escapism is one of the strongest of all motivations in philosophy. Moreover, the kind of relativity and change and composition that is in the creatures is really inapplicable to God. That a superior kind is possible is easily overlooked.

3) The Bible says repeatedly and expressly that God does not change. True we today can see that this was probably not meant as a totaly metaphysical denial of every kind of change; but what more natural than that earlier theologians should have taken the {???} denial in the unqualified sense?

4) Authority of predecessors was strong after Plato (Details anzeigen)^h and still more after Augustine. (Details anzeigen)ⁱ It was easily overlooked that the great Greeks did not exhaust the possibilities for philosophy or anything like exhaust it. Then churchly authority came to strengthen the dogmatism and traditionalism natural to learning in a time of cultural decay.

5) In India (Details anzeigen)^j the main trend was monistic, it is true, but pluralism, including a vaguely temporal view of the absolute being, was early and fairly strongly represented. It is still to be found. A leading Hindu writer on mysticism says God is ethically complete and aesthetically growing, which of course, is my view.

6) When there is a danger of social chaos it is easy to think unity an absolute value, with diversity neutral or evil.

These are some of the possible explanations. | I forgot that the bible says God is perfect (Thomas (Details anzeigen)^k quotes this); and again what more natural than to suppose that no qualification is called for? To be sure I hold too that God is perfect even in this relative and changing aspect, if by „perfect“ is meant, without any lack {???} when viewed in comparison with any being not God., Thus God is that than whom no greater being can be thought, {???} meaning by „greater“ a being, not God, but greater than God. Only God can (in this relative aspect) be greater than God.

Is this view self-contradictory|:?:|. Well, I only await any indication as to where the contradictions lie. They must be shown to follow from the concepts which this view proposes in the definitions given, not from concepts which this view rejects. {???}

That a being can never be equalled by any being individually distinguished from it does not seem to imply that the being can never be surpassed by itself. Merely juggling undefined words {???} like absolute and relative proves nothing, even if our friend Kroner (Details anzeigen)^l does the juggling. My definitions do not yield any contradictions so far as has been shown. That a being which is absolute in any aspect must be so in all aspects may follow from some definition of absolute but not from this, that it means, „to be absolute in a given respect is to be incapable of being excelled or surpassed in that respect, even of being self-excelled.“

The problem of an infinity of past events is the paradox that I feel the most. But I am not sure that a beginning of time, or a first event, is inconsistent with the view proposed. Before the first event there would not be anything, not even nothing, but there simply would be no „before.“ I don't like this, but I am not yet clear that it is impossible. And I also am not clear that an actually infinite memory is impossible. I hope to get help from Schrecker (Details anzeigen)^m and Kaufmann (Details anzeigen)ⁿ here.

As I presume you know my recent book, Man's Wisdom of God, discusses these things.

I do not see any greater difficulty in an event before which is not anything with a changing than with a wholly unchanging God. For we still cannot say that before time began there was God. There is no such before. True, we can give a cause of the first event, the eternal God, but on my view the first event would not be an effect of anything beyond itself but would be a state of God without cause or self-existent|:*:|. I don't like it but is it self-contradictory? And if it is, is the alternative of an infinity of remembered events self-contradictory.

Well, one can't finish this subject in a letter!

|:*:| The first state of the world on the usual view has no „cause“ in the ordinary sense of an antecedent event or finite state. On any doctrine a first state is paradoxical in that it lacks a basic trait of all other states of arising out of an earlier. {That's why I don't like it}

I {need} hardly say that we enjoyed your hospitality.