Abstract
Since the time Nietzsche declared the death of God, while Auguste Comte
postulated in the Law of Three Stages that humankind had gone pass the
religious/mythical stage as well as the metaphysical/speculative stage and was
now living in the positive/scientific stage, there has been the consistent
institutionalization of atheism and secularism. The early part of the 20th century
saw Freud’s publication of the Future of an Illusion in which he predicted that
as science continues to advance, religion will become obsolete. The logical
positivist too lumped up metaphysical and religious propositions as meaningless
and nonsensical. It is within this atmosphere that Alfred North Whitehead
comes into philosophy. The main question that this paper seeks to answer is:
Why does the concept of God occupy an eminent place in Whitehead’s system
when all his contemporaries consider God a hypothesis they no longer needed
as Laplace had earlier maintained? Of great interest here is the fact that before
1925 Whitehead’s writings had no concern for God. However, in his 1925
Science and the Modern World, the chapter on “Abstractions” required that
there be such an explanatory factor, reason for which it is immediately followed
by the chapter on “God”. The last part of his Process and Reality treats
elaborately the nature of the relationship between God and the world. This paper
explores the reasons why Whitehead places a lot of interest on God and the role
that this God plays in his system.