The appeal of process theology is a God dynamically in sync with an evolving world, a deity more intimately involved than the conventional God of transcendence (read: distant aloofness) and immutability (that is, unsolicitous isolationism). Unfortunately, this choice for a God who changes with the world comes at the steep price of abandoning the doctrine of creation, necessary to prevent the non-identification of God with the world.19 Other problems for theology notwithstanding,20 the consequence of bringing God down to the level of change and process is to strip God of an engagement with the world conceived in transcendent terms. By claiming that God changes with the world and thereby making God subject to its conditions, process thought necessarily makes it impossible for God to act in the world in a transcendent manner and for the sake of a transcendent end.

First, in regard to the loss of the transcendent manner of God's action, the identification of God with world process necessarily means his agency is conceived in terms of the kinds of causality found in the world, if only better by degree. Yet such a reduction unavoidably prolongs the fundamental misconception that modern science has regarding divine actionthat it competes with natural causality and thus undermines scientific accounts of how things happen. With no way to attribute what is nature's to nature and what is God's to God, some process theologians go so far as to celebrate a divine hands-off approach to the world as theologically becoming, reflective of God's humility and wisdom to curtail his power.21

19 Alfred North Whitehead acknowledged that the God of process thought is not the true Creator of the world. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 528f .; cf. John Cobb and David Griffin, Process Theology: An Essay in Cosmology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 66. Aquinas would agree that a mutable God cannot create, since a God of potency cannot be the pure Act that must be the first principle of all that comes to be. See Summa theologiae I, q. 3, aa. 4 and 7. Unlike process thinkers, however, Aquinas realizes that such a theological position leaves the actual existence of God (and the world) unaccounted for, since potency in God prevents his essence from being identical to existence, requiring a further cause to bring what is potential in him into existence. Process thinkers do not seem to realize the import of the metaphysical axiom that "nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality" (ST I, q. 2, a. 3). 20 For criticisms that show the incompatibility of the process system with Christian teaching, see R. C. Neville, "The Impossibility of Whitehead's God for Christian Theology," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 44 (1970): 130-40; and Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Change? The Word's Becoming in the Incarnation (Still River, MA: St. Bede's Publications, 1985), 140-53. 21 For example, Haught gives us a God who practices a "letting-be" (God After Darwin, 111-14) and an "unobtrusive and self-absenting mode of being" (54) vis-à-vis the world. His difficulty with any real divine action in the world seems to arise because he thinks divine causality, as other than natural causality, can be

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Thomas Aquinas and the Need for a Contemporary Theological Cosmology

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