The dipolar God: is the bipolar primordial-and-consequent God required by the metaphysics, or an unwarranted theological appendix to a perfectly serviceable cosmology?

Alfred North Whitehead, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

God is not introduced into the philosophy of organism as a religious appendix or as an exception to the metaphysical categories. God is itself an actual entity — bound by the same categoreal scheme as every electron — but a non-temporal one, with two natures that exemplify the bipolarity of every actual entity. The primordial nature of God is the unconditioned conceptual valuation of all eternal objects: the order of pure potentiality, the lure of feeling that gives every concrescing actuality its initial aim.¹²³⁴

The consequent nature of God is the physical pole — the prehension of every completed actual occasion as it perishes, the receptive growing pole through which the perpetual perishing of temporal actualities is taken up into the everlastingness of God's experience without loss.⁵ The two natures are required by the system. The primordial nature is required because actualities concresce toward initial aims that cannot have their source in past actualities; the conceptual valuation must be lodged in some actual entity, and the ontological principle requires it.

The consequent nature is required because the perpetual perishing of temporal occasions would otherwise leave the cosmos with only a museum of completed facts and no answer to the cosmological intuition that what has been is somehow preserved in a wider experience. The God of the philosophy of organism is not the omnipotent creator of classical theism; God does not create the world by fiat, does not violate the categoreal obligations, does not stand outside time as cause to time as effect. The world creates God as much as God creates the world.

Sources

1. This primordial nature directs such perspectives of objectification that each novel actuality in the temporal world contributes such elements as it can to a realization in God free from inhibitions of intensity by reason of discordance. (ili) The 'superjective' nature of God is the character of the pragmatic value of his specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity in the various temporal instances.

   Process and Reality, p. 135

2. There is, in this way, transcendence of the creativity; and this transcendence effects determinate objectifications for the renewal of the process in the concrescence of actualities beyond that satisfied superject.

   Process and Reality, p. 134

3. This prehension into God of each creature is directed | with the subjective aim, and clothed with the subjective form, wholly derivative from his all-inclusive primordial © valuation. God's conceptual nature is unchanged, by reason of its final completeness. But his derivative nature is consequent upon the creative advance of the world. | Thus, analogously to all actual entities, the nature of ' God is dipolar.

   Process and Reality, pp. 524–525

4. In each actuality these are two concrescent poles of realization—'enjoyment' and 'appetition,' that is, the 'physical' and the 'conceptual. For God the con- — ceptual is prior to the physical, for the World the physical poles are prior to the conceptual poles. A physical pole is in its own nature exclusive, bounded by contradiction: a conceptual pole is in its own nature all-embracing, unbounded by contradiction.

   Process and Reality, pp. 528–529

5. His 'consequent nature' results from his physical prehensions of the derivative actual entities (cf. Part V). 'Creativity' is another rendering of the Aristotelian 'matter,' and of the modern 'neutral stuff.

   Process and Reality, p. 47

Where the argument is made

• Process and Reality Part V 'Final Interpretation' (the entirety of the climactic Part — Ch. I 'The Ideal Opposites,' Ch. II 'God and the World')
• Religion in the Making (1926, the Lowell Lectures, especially the lectures on God)
• Adventures of Ideas Part IV Ch. XX 'Peace.'

How the argument was received

The most contested element of the system internally and the most contested externally. Hartshorne's The Divine Relativity (1948) developed the dipolar God into systematic process theology; the Center for Process Studies (Cobb, Griffin) institutionalized the theological reading. Donald Sherburne's "Whitehead Without God" (1971) mounted the most serious internal challenge: that the categoreal scheme is metaphysically self-sufficient, that the appeal to a non-temporal actual entity introduces special pleading the system was constructed to refuse, and that the work the consequent nature does (preservation of value in everlastingness) is religious-emotional rather than metaphysically required. The Hartshorne-Sherburne fork remains the central interpretive division within Whitehead scholarship. Classical-theist critics (the Thomist tradition, much of analytic philosophy of religion) hold that the dipolar God is so unlike the God of monotheistic tradition that it is misleading to call it God at all. Secular metaphysicians critical of the categoreal scheme often single out the God-chapter as the point where the speculative ambition outruns its warrant.