Process Theology

Time is relational, one-dimensional, non-deterministic, discrete, and linear — Whitehead's most distinctive metaphysical claim is that becoming is atomic. Each actual occasion is a quantum of becoming: it concresces from prehension to satisfaction and then perishes, replaced by the next occasion. Between occasions there is no further becoming, so time has a grainy structure even though our perception of it is continuous. Time is relational because it is constituted by the succession of occasions rather than serving as a container within which they occur. Time freedom is genuinely non-deterministic — each occasion exercises real self-determination, novelty enters at every moment, and the future is therefore open even to God. Direction is uni-directional: the arrow runs from the settled past through the becoming present toward the indeterminate future, and is grounded in the asymmetry of prehension.

Space is infinite, relational, undefined in curvature within the metaphysical scheme (its empirical curvature being a matter for physics), three-dimensional, and non-local. Relational because space, like time, is constituted by the prehensive relations among actual occasions rather than being a pre-existing container. Non-local because every actual occasion prehends, to some degree, every other occasion in its causal past; the world is internally related through prehension all the way down. This non-locality is metaphysical rather than merely physical, and it grounds process theology's strong sense of cosmic interconnection.

Matter is infinite in extent, relational in ontological status, three-dimensional, conserved, and non-local. Relational because what we call matter is, on the Whiteheadian view, enduring patterns of actual occasions — societies of occasions with sufficient internal coherence to maintain a recognizable character over time. Atoms, molecules, organisms, and persons are all such societies, differing in complexity rather than in kind. Conservation in the physical sense holds, but the deeper claim is that matter is constituted by relations, not by self-subsistent particles; the relational character of matter is what allows the cosmos to be genuinely interconnected and what allows God to relate to every part of it.

The process-theological observer is a society of actual occasions — a personally-ordered sequence of moments of experience, each prehending its predecessors and the wider world before achieving its own definite satisfaction and perishing into the past. Knowledge is immediate at the creaturely scale (each occasion grasps only what is given to it through prehension) but objectively total at the divine scale (God's consequent nature includes every actual occasion that has ever occurred). Retention is total because nothing that has actually happened is lost: the past is everlastingly held both in the chain of prehensions that constitute the present and, more decisively, in God's remembering. Physicality is both — every actual occasion has a physical pole (its prehension of the settled past) and a mental pole (its grasping of relevant possibilities) — and creatures are body-mind unities all the way down, with no Cartesian gap. Agency is genuinely both: each occasion exercises real self-determination in deciding how to integrate its prehensions, and God's persuasive lure is not coercive but offers the initial aim each occasion is free to accept, modify, or refuse. Observers are plural and span time through prehension, since each present occasion is constituted by its relations to past occasions and to the divine.

Energy is infinite in extent and emergent in ontological status — it is a pattern that arises within the network of actual occasions rather than a substance underlying them. Conservation holds in the standard physical sense: process theology preserves rather than overturns the conservation laws of physics, since Whitehead was at pains to make his metaphysics continuous with relativistic and quantum physics. Dispersibility is irreversible in the ordinary physical sense — entropy increases, occasions perish — yet the perishing of an occasion is not annihilation but transition into objective immortality. The arrow of energy and the arrow of becoming run together: each actual occasion adds itself to the cumulative past and cannot be subtracted.

Information is relational, conserved, and discrete. Relational because, in Whitehead's scheme, information is constituted by the prehensive relations among actual occasions rather than residing in self-subsistent bearers. Discrete because each actual occasion is a quantum of becoming, an atomic unit of feeling and decision, so the informational fabric of the world is grainy rather than continuous. Conservation operates on two registers. At the cosmic scale, objective immortality in God's consequent nature preserves every moment that has ever been: nothing that has happened ceases to be in the divine remembering. At the personal-identity scale, every actual occasion of the person's life is everlastingly held by God — the person is conserved not as a continuing soul-substance but as an integrated pattern of occasions remembered in the divine mind. 'The fellow sufferer who understands' is also the fellow sufferer who remembers, and that remembering is what conservation of personal information amounts to.