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Yes, the God business is a bit of a problem, that I too wrestled a bit with years ago when I was reading Whitehead. But one might ask what God is doing there in his schema. Though a descendent of a line of mid-level Anglican clergymen, he passed his entire adult life as apparently a typical late-Victorian agnostic intellectual, then suddenly in his last fully matured expression of his late philosophy, since he was a mathematician for his entire British career, "God" suddenly pops up again. But its doubtful that that can be put down to a reversion to traditional theism and, at any rate, the "God" in question is the metaphysical, not the religious, one, (though he does remark that this "God" "acts" only through "persuasion", not through force or commandment.) Whitehead's primary inspiration was the revolution in modern physics, which he enthusiastically supported, and, realizing that a whole universe of philosophical thinking had grown up around the earlier Newtonian paradigm, he saw the opportunity to strip away those assumptions, and provide a revisionary account of the intelligibility of the natural universe in line with the new physics. (He actually went so far, at one point, as to write an alternative account of the theory of relativity, not because he in any way objected to it, but because he objected to the operationalist form in which Einstein, who had been earlier a professed Machian, had cast it: unfortunately, there were some slight discrepancies in results between his version and Einstein's, so his effort fell by the wayside.) His primary critical target was what he called "the bifurcation in nature" or "vacuous matter", in other words, the reductionism inherent in Newtonian mechanics, insofar as material particles are conceived as the ultimate reality which causally determines all things, insisting on the contrary that reality is real all the way through, never just reducible to epiphenomenal effects of underlying matter. (What is real is defined simply as anything that has efficacy of any kind within an overall statistical distribution of events.) Thus the thrust of his process philosophy is emphatically realistic. (A student of his, Charles Hartshorne, was later to develop his thought as an argument for philosophical theism, but at the cost of shifting it in the direction of an idealist philosophy of relations, against Whitehead's emphatically expressed intent to develop a realist philosophy of causality. Unfortunately, inspite of his being fairly well-known and respected in his lifetime, Whitehead's philosophy has had very little subsequent reception and following development, so perhaps the God-talk did its damage.) And the proposal of a new metaphysics is not a dogmatic account of absolute truth, but rather intended heuristically and approximatively, under faillibilistic premises: in short, the "metaphysics" proposed is simply a highly generalized account suggesting how the intelligibility of nature is conceivable in terms an emergent evolution of levels of reality. In effect, what is proposed amounts to a radical reform of the received tradition, rather than its revolutionary overthrow, as with Heidegger, which has the problem that revolutions tend to drag along with them the very order that they oppose and seek to overthrow. A couple of additional points as to its basic intention should be made. One is that its main critical point is to guard against what he terms "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness", which he views as a threat to scientific civilization emanating from science itself. This partially overlaps with aspects of what Hegelian-Marxist tradition calls reification. The other statement he made was that he wrote in support of the aims of American pragmatism, but to, as it were, save it from itself, presumably meaning by that its somewhat anti-intellectual cast and aversion to theoretical articulation. (It might be noted here that Gramsci, who at some points seems close to pragmatism, specifically denied that Marxism was a materialism, claiming instead that it was a "realistic philosophy".)

So what is "God" doing there in "Process and Reality"? Well, one might note that a "metaphysics" is being proposed, and, along the lines of Heidegger's accounting, that involves an onto-theo-logical schema. Doesn't Derrida also make the point that any such conceptual framework, in order to establish itself, will leave out, but rely on something that is outside the framework, such as "God"? But if I understand Derrida's basic point,- (which I'm not sure I do),- he is claiming that, though there is never any "center" to things, the desire for such a "center" is inevitable, and amounts to a kind of necessary "transcendental illusion", which will always shadow any effort at thinking. But more specifically and to the point, what Whitehead has set himself is the problem of order and that is where his notion of "God" has its function. The doctrine is of " the antecedent and the consequent nature of God" and what "God" is supposed to "do" is presort through the potential infinity of "eternal objects", i.e. the formal and structural aspects of "things" or processes, which are suitable for "conceptual prehensions", which "ingress" them into concrescences of actual occasions of organic experiences, if I recall the peculiar jargon correctly, and to then receive the harmonization of the various processes as the possibilities of the next temporal step of cosmological evolution. (In short, the only thing that "God" actually "does" is to make sure that little sparrows don't fall.) Such a "God" itself evolves with the evolution of the universe and, though said to constitute a "lure" for the development of processes, as do the "eternal objects" themselves, it might be said, exists for the sake of the universe rather than the other way around, as in the traditional Christian version or the Aristotelian account of the unmoved mover as telos telion, out of which all things move out of desire for it. The context, then, for this conception is a certain limited rehabilitation of the notion of "final causes", (which perhaps might be transcribed as a kind of macro-economy of explanation with variable functions), in order to account for formal and structural features and the different levels and modes of causal operations. The basic function that the conception of "God" seems to be performing within the overall philosophy, then, is as a kind of anti-relativistic guarantee of the objectivity of truth within processual reality, inspite of the highly relational or "relative" interactions of processes comprising it.

Your other objection about experiences as opposed to organisms in relations seems to be a somewhat short-circuited misreading. William James formulated the criterion of "neutral monism" as a desideratum for the project of developing a "critical realism": namely, that any "ultimate" description of reality be neutral as to whether the reality in question is mental or physical. That is what is being carried out in a highly generalized and systematic account of reality in terms of "actual occasions of organic experiences", with all its odd vocabulary, and the proposal refers to objective beings as "experiences", not to subjective experiences of beings. (There is, though, a residue of aetheticism there, insofar as the overall "goal" of cosmological process is said to be the intensification of "feelings", a looser word that Whitehead uses as synonymous with the more technically specific "prehensions".) In other words, not just literal organisms, but physical entities, subatomic particles, say, are said to be "experiences" that make "decisions", (an odd way perhaps of talking about quantum indeterminacy as a marker of the independent constituency of realities.) And the "actual occasions of organic experience" do interact, relate to and co-constitute each other, insofar as they form and are formed by "prehensions" of each other. In part, what all this amounts to is a revised monadology, wherein the monads are no longer quite so pregnant, windowless, nor chained to a pre-established harmony.

At any rate, my only point here is that some points made by the post-structuralist brew, concerning the basically pluaralistic nature of the world and its constitutive temporality, without timeless and unchanging "essences" or any priority of being over becoming, though these are not the whole of the brew, and the context and motivations are clearly different, were already made by Whitehead, perhaps in a better, i.e. stronger and less obscurantistic, form than that offered up by post-structuralist writings. This isn't to say that one has to swallow Whitehead whole, or that his account is necessarily complete or adequate, only to suggest that one can still take away from him something useful for thinking, even if in other terms. In the '30's, responding to a paper comparing his work, as an "open dialectic", to Hegel's, he was asked at a conference about Hegel and he said that he had only read one page from Hegel, on mathematics, which he found so wrong-headed that he never read anything else,- (he certainly must have read Bradley, and one of his Cambridge friends was McTaggert, so he must have talked a lot of Hegel),- but he did see a certain similarity between his conception of process and Hegel's dialectical development of ideas. But, he remarked, Hegel to him seemed to take up a God-like standpoint, and that to him seemed impossible and there he parted company from Hegel.

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