One of the 20th century's greatest philosophers offers a rational and empirical defense for the existence of God based upon reason and love. The ground for the book is "a conviction that a magnificent intellectual content is implicit in the religious faith most briefly expressed into three words, `God is love,' which words I sincerely believe are contradicted as truly as they are embodied in the best known of the older theologies, as they certainly have been misunderstood by atheists and skeptics" (ix).
Hartshorne offers a solution to the problem of evil that is based upon a notion of divine power that is in harmony with creaturely power. "In their ultimate individuality things can only be influenced, they cannot be surely coerced" (xvi). Hartshorne's understanding of God as both absolute and relative provides a fundamental thesis for process theology's doctrine of God. In some respects, God is unchanging; in some respects, God changes. Because God is unchanging love, God's experiencing of love and gift of love must change in moment by moment existence.
Hartshorne's understanding of love plays a pivotal role in the development of the book's themes. He argues that "love is the desire for the good of others, ideally all others" (14). Divine love includes social awareness and action from that awareness. It includes both selfish and unselfish acts by God. "In God there is a perfect agreement between altruism and egoism" (161). He argues that theologians went through many contortions to show that God's love both was love and nothing of the kind. "They sought to maintain a distinction between love as desire, with an element of possible gain or loss to the self, and love as purely altruistic benevolence; or again between sensuous and spiritual love, eros and agape. But benevolence is a form of desire" (116).
"The whole idea of religion," says Hartshorne, "is that we can know God as He is in Himself, though vaguely, for we know Him through love. We know ourselves and everything else in relation to a dim but direct sense of God's love. Love of God is the norm of creaturely love; for religion, all other human love is deficient" (127). In words sound poetic but that Hartshorne takes seriously, he writes, "the divine as love is the only theme adequate to the cosmic symphony" (216).
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