10.6 Whitehead's God as Initial Condition and Attractor
Process theology’s God is both the ground of possibility, holding all unrealized potentials available for occasions to select from, and the lure each occasion feels toward greater complexity, which in the language of dynamical systems makes God both the initial condition and the attractor.
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Whitehead’s God is not the God of theism, not a person who intervenes in history or answers prayers. God in Whitehead’s system plays two roles in the metaphysics of process.
First, God is the ground of possibility, the one who holds all unrealized potentials available for actual occasions to select from. Without this role, there is no account of where possibilities come from. An occasion can only actualize what is genuinely available to it. God makes possibilities available.
Second, God is the lure, the initial aim that each occasion feels as a pull toward the best possibility available given its situation. This is not compulsion. The occasion is free to deviate from the lure. But the lure is always there, always pointing toward greater complexity, greater depth of experience, greater integration.
In the language of dynamical systems: God is both the initial condition of the iteration and the attractor the iteration is feeling toward. The universe is not wandering. It is being drawn. Not forced, drawn. The difference matters enormously.
Teilhard’s Omega Point is this attractor made cosmic, the state toward which the entire evolutionary process converges. Whitehead gives the mechanism (the lure operating at every occasion). Teilhard gives the destination[whitehead][teilhard]. Together they describe a universe that is going somewhere, and knows it, at every scale.
