Charles Hartshorne: Quotes about God

Charles Hartshorne was Philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on god.
Charles Hartshorne: 46 quotes0 likes

“The idea of revelation is the idea of special knowledge of God, or of religious truth, possessed by some people and transmitted by them to others. In some form or other the idea is reasonable. In all other matters people differ in their degree of skill or insight. Why not in religion?”

Charles Hartshorne

Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984)

“God thus includes the world; he is, in fact, the totality of world parts, which are indifferently causes and effects. Now AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is equally far from either of these doctrines; thanks to its two-aspect view of God, it is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism. AR means that God is, in one aspect of himself, the integral totality of all ordinary causes and effects, but that in another aspect, his essence (which is A), he is conceivable in abstraction from any one or any group of particular, contingent beings (though not from the requirement and the power always to provide himself with some particulars or other, sufficient to constitute in their integrated totality the R aspect of himself at the given moment).”

Charles Hartshorne

Source: Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (1941), P. 348.

“I had a happy, idyllic, old-fashioned childhood. Go to the town where I spent that childhood, you will not find my happy hours there. Yet they remain definite constituents of a divine reality about which true statements can still be made. My happy childhood was a gift my parents and the world offered to God.”

Charles Hartshorne

"A hundred years of thinking about God" (1998)

“God thus excludes the world; he is only its cause; in no sense is he effect, of himself or anything else. Pantheism (better, "pandeism," for again it is not really the theos that is described) means that God is the integral totality of ordinary cause-effects, and that there, is no super-cause independent of ordinary causes and effects.”

Charles Hartshorne

Source: Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (1941), P. 347.

“What we need is to make a renewed attempt to worship the objective of God, not our forefathers' doctrines about him.”

Charles Hartshorne

"A hundred years of thinking about God" (1998)

“Too many intellectuals look down on religion and think it will go away. God is not going to go away. There are far more religious people in the world today than when I was born.”

Charles Hartshorne

"A hundred years of thinking about God" (1998)

“In Plato’s Republic one finds the proposition: God, being perfect, cannot change (not for the better, since "perfect" means that there can be no better; not for the worse, since ability to change for the worse, to decay, degenerate, or become corrupt, is a weakness, an imperfection). 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.”

Charles Hartshorne

Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984)

“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.”

Charles Hartshorne

The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne (1991), edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn, p. 700