joint products of persons interacting with each other in their
ongoing interchange with their total environment. No one
link in this chain of evidence for cosmic teleology is, by itself,
strong enough to justify the conclusion that the Creator-
Person is immanent in the orders of being. Consequently,
the wider teleological argument is to be judged for its reason-
ableness as a cumulative whole. But this is no cause for alarm,
since, to take an example from the scientific realm, the hy-
pothesis of biological evolution is accepted as a cumulative
whole despite weaker and missing links of evidence. Accord-
ingly, the theoretical backbone of the broader teleological
theism is its more reasonable interpretation of human experi-
ence cumulatively viewed.
MORAL ARGUMENT. There are theists sympathetic with Ten-
nant’s wider teleology who hold that his view of the ethical
link simply does not do justice to the experience of the moral
consciousness. Their crucial contention is that the value
judgments of persons, although related to their desires and
feelings, are not experienced as originating in them. Rather,
the irreducible moral consciousness becomes increasingly
aware of an objective order of values that exerts imperative
authority over persons’ lives. This unique, normative order,
not dependent on human desiring and not descriptive of ac-
tual processes in the natural world, is most coherently inter-
preted as expressive of the Creator’s goodness.
In sum, according to this moral argument for God, an
unconditional, universal order of values is gradually revealed
not only as morally imperative for persons but necessary in
their struggle for fulfillment. Most reasonably understood as
rooted in God’s nature, it is this objective order of values that
is the strongest link in any argument for a God worthy of
worship. Indeed, without this independent source of norma-
tive values, the cosmological and teleological arguments do
not suffice to assure the goodness of God.
Tennant, however, provides an elaborate critique of this
account of the moral consciousness and the objectivity of
value judgments. He argues that to root value-experience in
desires and feelings does not, of itself, justify the charge that
value judgments are relativistic. He interprets the objectivity
and universality of value-experiences and value judgments as
joint products of each person’s interaction with at least the
natural and social orders. It is the most coherent organization
of such value judgments that is, indeed, the capstone of the
wider teleological argument. For now, persons, experiencing
and organizing their values as joint products of their interac-
tion with orderly trends not of their own making, can better
interpret the immanent direction of the collocation of things.
Hence, the progressive appreciation of the conditions of the
qualitative range of value-experiences remains the normative
insight into what kind of personal growth this kind of world
fosters.
THEORETICAL PROBLEMS. Whichever of the above ap-
proaches to God is most acceptable to the traditional theist,
central to his vision remains the perfection of the self-
existent, transcendent Creator, immanent in his creations
and, especially, in the optimum development of morally au-
tonomous persons. This vision of “absolute” perfection poses
obstinate theoretical problems for the theist himself, as he
tries to clarify the dynamics of the perfection of an immuta-
ble Creator-Person who is immanent in his temporal, chang-
ing creation. This article confines itself to three questions of
especial concern to theists. Adequate discussion of these
alone would require analysis of other knotty metaphysical is-
sues (such as the ultimate nature of space and time or the
specific nature of God’s relation to the spatiotemporal
world).
The first question is “How can God be immutable and
yet immanent in a changing world, let alone in the kind of
changing relations that obtain between him and developing
moral agents?” The theist invariably does not flinch as he
grants that this theoretical conflict is intrinsic to the theistic
transcendent-immanent situation. For a perfect Creator can-
not create without creating dependent, imperfect beings; and
he will not annul the will of persons free to choose changes
within their power. Nevertheless, while thus holding that
there is no intelligible bridge from the changing created
realms to the immutable Creator, the theist urges that God’s
immutability is not to be conceived in rigid and timeless
mathematical fashion. He does suggest analogies within
human experience that render the impasse less stark, such as
those concentrated moments in which the past and future
seem to fuse with a timeless, transcendent unity.
The second question moves the first into perhaps the
most sensitive area of the theist’s belief: the passibility of
God, that is, God’s responsiveness to human need. If God’s
immutable perfection is appropriately responsive to the cre-
ated orders in their kind, how can he be unchanged and un-
changeable? If he is unchanged and unchangeable, how can
he be anything but impassive to the moral struggle of per-
sons? What can it mean to say that he appropriately responds
to their situations (that he “knows,” “suffers,” “redeems,” or
“liberates”) without enduring any change himself? Here the
theist, avoiding anthropomorphism, urges us to realize that
the Creator-Person will not, in the nature of the case, under-
go the psychic states of persons and suffer as we do.
Nevertheless, the moral-religious thrust of the theist’s
resistance to both deism and monism is at stake, for he de-
fends the concept of a morally free person who is ultimately
responsible to God, a God who “knows” and is appropriately
responsive to the ranges of human striving. Can this person-
to-Person relation be honored by a God who, in his immuta-
bility, does not change at all in response to even the worthy
appeals of his repentant creatures? In the face of this impasse,
some theists hold that God’s immutability is compatible
with his passibility, if his responses to need are conceived as
the overflow of his essence and, hence, neither diminish nor
improve it.
The third question is “In view of the amount and quali-
ty of evils, how can one reasonably believe in a Creator who,
omniscient and limited by nothing beyond or within him-9106 THEISM