Charles Hartshorne
Philosopher of a God who changes with the world, he revived the modal form of the ontological proof in the 20th century.
Life
Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) was an American philosopher, an assistant to Whitehead at Harvard and later a professor at Chicago and Austin. He developed process theology: God is perfect, but with a perfection that includes change, since God shares in and receives everything that happens in the world. He also revived Anselm's ontological proof in the 20th century in a modal-logic form. He was also a recognised ornithologist, a specialist in bird song.
Main works
Defends a two-aspect God, eternal in essence and changing in concrete life (panentheism).
God is relative to the world, since he knows it and is affected by it.
Contains the modal version of the ontological argument.
A critique of the idea of an all-powerful and unchanging God.
In his own words
« My ultimate intuitive clue in philosophy is that "God is love" and that the idea of God is definable as that of the being worthy to be loved with all one's heart, mind, soul, and entire being. »
« The argument may seem cogent, but it is so only if two assumptions are valid: that it is possible to conceive of a meaning for "perfect" that excludes change in any and every respect and that we must conceive God as perfect in just this sense. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceGod exists, but a God who is affected by the world and changes with it (panentheism), not the unchanging God of classical theology.
Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (1948)
Everything real has some inner feeling, from atoms to God (panpsychism): mind is not confined to humans.
Hartshorne, Reality as Social Process (1953)
The future is genuinely open: each being creates something new, so strict determinism is false.
Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (1970)