I don't pretend to understand Whitehead, but I do know that Whitehead is one of the few brilliant people in the world who could honestly say he understood Einstein, and he was working out his view of God in large part as a response to Einstein's theory of relativity.
Furthermore, process theology consistently rejects the notion that all that we can know is known from our sensory perception, which is the basis of materialism. I am too lazy to key in the quotes, but if you read David Ray Griffin's "Reenchantment without Supernaturalism" you will see lengthy discussions of this. Process theology says that our knowledge is perpetually unfolding. It does reject the idea that God intervenes in the world in a supernatural way, but says that the presence and activity of God is built into the unfolding fabric of the natural world. Knowledge of that natural world includes not only physics but metaphysics.
It isn't fair to say that God doesn't know the future in process theology. God knows all the possibilities of the future, whereas we only know some. God does not, and cannot, intervene to change the outcome of the future. That would be supernatural. God's presence acts as a lure toward deeper love, and in the midst of all the choices we can make at each and every moment of our lives, we feel the lure of that love, and to the extent that we follow it, we grow closer to God. We, of course, can choose otherwise, and God not only won't, but can't, stop us.
Process theology's notion that we are an enduring succession (what gives us personhood) of actual entities (at each moment we are brand new and have free choice) is worked out by current process theologians in conversation with quantum mechanics and presupposes the notion that there are possibilities that can't be explained by Newtonian physics. Again, the important point is that the explanation won't be found in supernatural causes, but in our unfolding understanding of the universe where God is "naturally" active.
A final point for the moment. You say " Even while Theology seems to be attracting agnostics and rejecting the supernatural, Physics seems on the verge of *proving* that the two most basic tenets of atheistic Materialism--(1) that there is nothing outside the observable material universe, and (2) if we can't measure it, then it doesn't exist--are BOTH simply flat-out wrong."
You seem to suggest in this passage that at the very moment theology is rejecting supernaturalism, physics is embracing it. Process theology, at least, does reject the supernatural, and many of us who do not consider ourselves process theologians 'also' reject the supernatural. Both physics and process theology reject the tenets of materialism. But that doesn't mean that physics is moving to embrace the supernatural. It simply means that physics is opening us to the presence of different levels of reality. And as these levels of reality become known and understood, they will be tested and retested and scientific theory about them will become established. In short, "we can't measure it" -- yet! But we will, and it won't be supernatural.
In the second post I responded to a question about whether process theology held that God could be changed. I said:
Creativity and becoming are core ideas of process theology. There is nothing unchanging, including God. There are aspects of God that do not "change;" God is love and God is always present and God always knows all future possibilities, but at every "moment" God, like us, is recreating herself.
We are participating in that recreation. We add love to God. For process theologian Charles Hartshorne, this was one of the important differences between classical theism and process theology. In classical theology, God's love is given to us and we are to love God in return. But does our love change God? No. What is love then? If God is not affected by the world, then "God is love" has no meaning. Love changes hearts, minds, creates possibilities not dreamed of before. Our love changes God; if not, then what is the point. Our love becomes part of the loving energy of the universe that makes it possible for the universe to recreate itself anew in each moment. God, like us, is both subject and object.
Process theology is not pantheistic. God is in us but beyond us. God is part of the history that makes us who we are, in us as we exist at each moment, lure inviting us to a better future, and there to receive our love when we are dead and gone.
One of the reasons I have continued to read process theology through the years is that I have appreciated its approach to the question of evil and God. Why does God allow bad things to happen? I have never been satisfied with any answer that I have read in classical theology. In process theology God doesn't "allow" evil to happen because God isn't an all-powerful deity who could do something about evil but chooses not to, and occasionally does pop-in to do something about it, and don't you worry He will do something about it eventually... In process theology God wants to prevent suffering and evil, but can't, at least in the sense of having the potential omnipotent power to step in at any moment and stop it. God works in the world by persuasion not coercion. Evil happens in the world because we allow it to happen, not because God allows it to happen. God's hands, our hands. Jewel was right.
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