When a fellow has been around for almost 102 years and you haven’t heard anything about him for a month or so, you can’t just assume that he’s still breathing. So I thought it best to check on the status of philosopher Charles Hartshorne before writing this column.
Just to be sure he was still alive, I typed his name into my Internet search engine and told it to “GO.” It turned up no obituary, but what it did unearth was nothing short of phenomenal.
When I got hundreds of Internet search hits on “Hartshorne,” I began to understand why Boston University chancellor John Silber ranks him as one of the top 10 American philosophers in the 20th century. With his 102nd birthday drawing near, this remarkable man whose days soon could span three centuries was still very much engaged in the philosophical fray.
The son of an Episcopal minister with a Quaker lineage to boot, Hartshorne has challenged the popular postmodernism of his colleagues. While they were tossing God into the dustbin and declaring with certainty that nobody can know anything for certain, this highly esteemed philosopher embarrassed them by offering serious arguments for the reality of both truth and God.
“Without God,” Hartshorne challenges his peers, “how can we know what is true?” Surely, he argues, “there must be a larger reality with a higher understanding of truth than ours.”
“God is not going to go away,” he chides his secular friends. “There are far more religious people in the world today than when I was born.”
The author of more than 20 weighty books, Hartshorne was 80 before he published some of his most highly acclaimed works. In his Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes he manages to offend both his unbelieving colleagues in academia and his Christian followers. His thesis that a God who grants free choice to his creatures cannot see the future and, therefore, must change along with them as situations vary violates both secular and Christian orthodoxies.
My God is bigger than his God, but I’m grateful that his aging voice continued for so long to remind intellectuals that smart people with impeccable academic credentials can still find a place for God in their scheme of things.