Through Panentheism, Hartshorne sought to correct the errors of
mistranslated and misunderstood literalism and extension of God from
the Bible.... nowhere does the Bible characterise God as the modern
Christian philosophical vehicle of an infinitely powerful being
capable of any feat that is not logically impossible, spanning all
eternity, omnipresent, omniscient, knowing the whole of the future
before creating it.... the God of the Bible is ultimately one among
many, the one that triumphs over all the others and becomes as to
their power, but is never "omnipotent," as powerful as it is -- this
concept of the "all-perfect-in-all-ways God" was invented and built up
on in the third century AD onward, not from the Bible but from the
wishful thinking of Christian philosophers (and philosophers and
logicians have been tying themselves in knots ever since trying to
explain away the logical contradictions in this thinking)....
Hartshorne did the right thing, starting from the basis of logical
possibility and considering the variations - theism, deism, pantheism,
pandeism, polytheism, before finally settling on the logic of
panentheism.... he could have stayed at pandeism, actually, and done
away with the idea of a God who exceeds the Universe even as the
Universe exists (since the pandeistic God begins as a unique and
separate entity and then becomes the Universe, leaving nothing of
itself behind for the duration of the Universe), but Hartshorne felt
that "panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except
their arbitrary negations" (it is debatable, of course, whether the
"negations" of deism and pandeism are in truth "arbitrary"....
God should be viewed through the scope of logic first, faith
second.... to do any less is to deny the foremost gift of logic with
which our Universe is blessed!!
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