Processual Freewill Without God:
Preface
If processual freewill is dismissed as a theological fiction - a Victorian metaphysic haunted by divine ideals, as Alfred North Whitehead himself lived within - what remains of agency in a godless universe? This question is not rhetorical but ontological. It challenges whether creativity, relationality, and freedom - so central to A.N. Whitehead’s system - can persist when stripped of divine lure. That is, "What might a processual reality look like without a processual God figure in it?"
For some, to remove God from the process framework is to collapse it into a sterile physics of flux, a mere dance of matter without meaning. For others, it is a liberation - the reawakening of metaphysics after the death of theology. Importantly, process philosophy can be striped of process theology yet theology gives to philosophy its soul.
This essay explores the latter view: that processual freewill, grounded in the universe’s immanent creativity, can exist - and even flourish - without invoking divinity. It argues that freedom - rather than a gift bestowed from on high - is the very texture of reality itself: a self-organizing, autopoietic activity intrinsic to becoming.
In doing so, we attempt a secular rereading of Whitehead’s metaphysics as a philosophy of immanence, one capable of reconciling atheism with metaphysical depth. The goal is not to resurrect a hidden God, but to recognize that what theists once called “divine” may always have been the world’s (aka, reality's) own generative potential.
Introduction: Freedom in a Disenchanted Cosmos
The claim “there is no freewill because there is no God” arises from a mechanistic worldview where all phenomena are reducible to material causation. Within such a frame, “freedom” becomes illusion - an epiphenomenal trick of neural computation or randomness within an indifferent universe.
Yet this deterministic materialism is itself a metaphysical inheritance of Enlightenment positivism, not a scientific necessity. The more we learn of the cosmos - through quantum physics, complexity theory, and neuroscience - the more its creative, emergent character resists closure.
If the world is composed of processes rather than substances, if causation is relational rather than linear, and if novelty continually arises from interaction, then the question changes: What kind of freedom belongs to a world still evolving and creating itself?
This essay answers that question by proposing that processual freewill is the universe’s capacity to self-organize and respond creatively to relational pressures. It is freedom without transcendence, meaning without metaphysical guardianship.
I. The Challenge of a Disenchanted Cosmos
The deterministic cosmos of modernity imagines all events as predictable consequences of prior states. In such a universe, human agency is reduced to illusion: consciousness becomes a side effect of causation, and choice dissolves into chemistry.
Process philosophy subverts this vision. It holds that every actual entity prehends its world in some way, synthesizing past influences into novel acts of becoming. The past shapes but does not dictate; the present selects, integrates, and transcends. Even the most constrained event bears some infinitesimal degree of self-determination.
From this standpoint, the “disenchanted cosmos” is a misreading of reality. The universe is not static matter; it is creative relation. It is not indifferent to novelty; it is novelty itself, continually birthing itself through process.
II. Whitehead’s Metaphysical Imaginary
Whitehead’s metaphysical vision emerged in the late Victorian milieu - Christian in vocabulary, post-Newtonian in intellect, and cosmological in scope. Yet his "God" was never the omnipotent ruler of theology. It was the principle of limitation - the vector of "order and value" preventing creativity from collapsing into chaos.
Whitehead’s God may be seen in non-Christian, or non-religious terms, as functioning symbolically: a poetic placeholder for the world’s inherent capacity to aim toward coherence. Read secularly, his system becomes a metaphysical poem about the universe valuing itself. God, then, is not a supernatural agent but a metaphor for the cosmos’ aesthetic striving.
III. Processual Freedom Without Theism
Remove God from the process schema, and the heart of Whitehead’s insight still remains vibrantly intact:
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Each event integrates its inherited world and decides its next form.
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Decision, in this context, is not arbitrary will but the autopoietic act of relational self-organization.
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Freedom is not independence from causality but the creative negotiation of causality.
In an atheistic cosmos, processual freewill names the universe’s immanent creativity - the spontaneous self-patterning of matter, energy, and information into forms capable of response. At every level - whether atomic, biological, social, or conscious - freedom appears as the art of coherence under constraint.
IV. The Emergent Lure of Value
The absence of divine order does not entail nihilism. Cosmic value can be reconstructed as emergent rather than transcendent. Quantum openness, evolutionary novelty, and conscious reflection all reveal the same pattern: degrees of indeterminacy embedded in structure.
Whitehead’s “lure of the good” becomes, in secular terms, the natural bias toward richness of experience. The universe, at every scale, experiments with beauty - the harmony of complexity and intensity.
To affirm freedom without God is to affirm that being itself inclines toward depth and coherence. Value arises not from divine fiat but from the very logic of existence: entities persist by enriching their connections. This is the very foundation of processual evolution.
V. Freedom as Secular Creativity
If we define freedom as the ability to create coherence amid complexity, then processual freewill can persist and navigate within a godless cosmos/reality. Evolution, culture, and imagination are its living expressions.
Human consciousness amplifies this tendency. The artist, scientist, and moral agent each mirror the cosmos’s own creative impulse - transforming data into form, constraint into expression, repression into revolution.
Hence the secular affirmation:
There is no need for divine order to ground freedom, for freedom is the universe’s processual order in cosmic motion.
VI. Conclusion: The Metaphysics of the Possible
To claim there is no freewill because there is no God is to mistake the loss of transcendence for the loss of potentiality. Processual philosophy restores the latter. It shifts freedom from divine intervention to participatory creation.
Whether one names it “God,” “nature,” or “cosmos,” the function is the same: to open futures that are not predetermined by the past.
Whitehead’s so-called “Victorian imaginary” becomes, in secular translation, a metaphysics of the possible - a worldview where even an atheistic universe remains dynamic, relational, and self-surpassing.
Freedom is not abolished with God’s silence; it is amplified by the universe’s unfinished, open and indeterministic, evolution. The cosmos does not need a ruler to be free - it needs only its own capacity to become. Which in the processual imaginary of a processual God, is the very ingredients of God's Self seeded into cosmic reality... that the cosmos is, and is becoming, even when it's creatures strip it of it's Creator-God.
VII. A Comparative Framework: Processual Freewill With God vs. Without God
| Category | Processual Freewill With God | Processual Freewill Without God |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Ontological Ground | God as the primordial actual entity, grounding order and possibility. God’s “lure” invites creation toward beauty and value. | Creativity itself is ultimate. The cosmos self-orders through intrinsic relational processes—no transcendent agent needed. |
| 2. Ultimate Reality | Dipolar deity: the Primordial Nature (ordering potentialities) and Consequent Nature (receiving the world). | Immanent Creativity or Autopoiesis: the universe continually generates novelty through internal feedback and emergent complexity. |
| 3. Source of Order | Divine valuation limits chaos; God is the principle of limitation and coherence. | Physical and informational laws emerge naturally from self-organizing dynamics; order arises spontaneously from relational constraint. |
| 4. Source of Novelty | God’s persuasive call toward the “best possible outcome” ensures creativity remains meaningful and oriented to value. | Novelty arises from quantum indeterminacy, complexity, and evolutionary openness—value emerges as an adaptive aesthetic. |
| 5. Causality | Prehension includes divine influence—each event integrates both God’s ideal and worldly data. | Relational causality alone: each event integrates its environment and prior states, producing novelty through feedback, not divine aim. |
| 6. Freedom Defined As | The co-creative participation of finite beings with divine persuasion. Freedom is relational response to the lure of value. | The self-organizing capacity of systems to generate coherence within constraint. Freedom is emergent responsiveness, not divine dialogue. |
| 7. Value and Ethics | Value is grounded in divine valuation—the universe participates in God’s aesthetic aim toward harmony. Ethics reflects the character of divine love. | Value is emergent and relational: systems that sustain mutual flourishing are “good.” Ethics becomes ecological, grounded in relational well-being. |
| 8. Purpose of Existence | Cosmic teleology: to realize divine aims of beauty, love, and intensity of experience. | Immanent teleonomy: evolution of complexity and awareness. Purpose is self-generated meaning—no transcendent telos required. |
| 9. Role of Consciousness | Human and divine consciousness co-evolve; reflection deepens God’s experience of the world. | Consciousness is an emergent reflection of the cosmos upon itself—a product of relational complexity and neural autopoiesis. |
| 10. The Problem of Evil | Evil is tragic limitation—God suffers with creation but redeems through creative transformation. | Evil is dis-integration: breakdown of relational harmony. There is no cosmic redeemer; repair arises through emergent adaptation and empathy. |
| 11. The Sacred | Found in divine presence within all processes; “panentheistic immanence” (God in all, all in God). | Found in the intensity of relation itself—the sacred redefined as the felt creativity and interconnectedness of existence. |
| 12. Human Vocation | Co-creators with God in the creative advance of the universe; moral response to divine love. | Co-authors of the universe’s ongoing self-creation; moral response to shared interdependence and ecological continuity. |
| 13. Death and Continuity | The soul’s experiences are eternally prehended in the divine memory; no loss in God. | Experience persists only through continuity of relation—our effects ripple forward in culture, ecology, and cosmic becoming. |
| 14. Eschatology | The universe moves toward divine fulfillment—Whitehead’s “Kingdom of Heaven” as aesthetic completion. | No cosmic consummation; the universe is open-ended, always becoming. Fulfillment is local, transient, and ever renewed. |
| 15. Meaning of Freedom | Freedom is divine-human synergy: finite creatures actualize God’s possibilities. | Freedom is ontological improvisation: the universe realizing that it can change itself through the relational play of its own energies. |
Interpretive Summary
| Dimension | With God | Without God |
|---|---|---|
| Metaphysical Emphasis | Relational participation in divine order. | Self-organizing immanence and emergence. |
| Ethical Orientation | Love and beauty as divine persuasion. | Relational flourishing as ecological realism. |
| Cosmic Tone | Tragic-hopeful: redemption through divine empathy. | Open-creative: meaning through perpetual transformation. |
| Spiritual Impulse | The call to co-create with God. | The awakening to co-create with the universe itself. |
Bibliography
Foundational Works
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Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929; corrected edition, 1978).
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Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907).
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Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (1948).
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Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677).
Philosophical & Atheistic Correlates
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Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968).
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Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988).
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Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (2003).
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Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2008).
Scientific Correlates
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Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos (1984).
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Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (2008).
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Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2012).
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Karl Friston, “The Free Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2010).
Process and Theological Reformulations
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Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep (2003).
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Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence (2023).
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Philip Clayton, Adventures in the Spirit (2008).
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Andrew Davis, Mind, Value, and Cosmos (2020).
Comparative & Existential References
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Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943).
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Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).
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D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (1959).
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Laozi, Dao De Jing (trans. Roger Ames & David Hall, 2003).
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