Minimalist Creation ex Nihilo and the God Who is Surprised

By Joe Pettit

Minimalist creation ex nihilo can affirm the death of omnipotence and the birth of amipotence.

In everything he writes, Thomas Jay Oord tries to do at least two things: think clearly and think lovingly. I can only aspire to his incredible level of achievement in both commitments, but I will use this short essay to offer first a conceptual disagreement with Oord and then to show what this disagreement entails for a life of love.

Let me start by presenting a concise version of my position. I think Oord, along with most in the process theology tradition, is wrong to affirm the co-everlastingness of the world alongside God. Instead, God’s creation of the world from nothing – ex nihilo – is the more coherent position. However, the best way to understand creation ex nihilo is in minimalist terms. By this, I mean that what is created has the least amount of definition built into it as possible. God leaves it to created things to become in relation to other created things. God not only does not foreordain or have a plan for what things will become, God literally must wait to find that out. That is, God is constantly “surprised” by creation. Such a God is not omnipotent in the classic sense that Oord so thoroughly critiques, and, by enabling all things to experience the gift of being in the world, God is the meaning of love. Thus, omnipotence should indeed be replaced with amipotence.

Perhaps the most direct way to identify the difference between Oord’s position and mine is that Oord insists that God “acts” in a metaphysically similar way to humans. I would rather say that God is act itself but does not act in a way that makes God temporal. I do affirm that God changes and so the world makes a difference to God, but this change does not make God one who acts like us. Oord writes, “Amipotence assumes God’s acting is like creaturely acting, at least in some ways. The basic meaning of “act” applies to God and creatures, for instance, as well as the basic meanings of “relate,” “experience,” and “love” (129). In addition to necessarily relating to something, Oord claims that God “selects among the best options” (126) of how to love creatures, whereas I think God just loves. In fact, it is precisely our creatureliness that causes us to “select” and to “act.” We cannot take in the whole world at once and so must choose what part of it we will relate to. Pursuing that selection is what it means to act temporally. This need to select and then act is not a constraint that an all-inclusive God has, and so I am not sure what it would mean to say God selects or that God acts like we do.

The shortest version of the case for creation ex nihilo comes from the idea of an unconditioned condition. All things that depend on other things to exist are conditioned. This means that the chain of conditions for anything either keeps falling back on other conditioned things ad infinitum, resulting in nothing ever actually getting created, or that chain terminates in an unconditioned condition. Being unconditioned as such, that unconditioned condition is necessary. It cannot not be because it does not depend on anything to exist. This unconditioned condition is God. Everything else exists only because this unconditioned condition enables it to exist. There is nothing other than the unconditioned condition required to enable conditioned things to exist. God therefore creates ex nihilo.

When process thinkers like Oord claim that the world must exist co-everlastingly with God so that God has something to relate to, they either beg the question of how God has a world available to relate to when everything in the world somehow still needs God to exist, or they make the class “world” a necessary thing, even if no given instance of the world is necessary. The former position is always a metaphysical step behind in its explanatory power, and the second somehow makes a class a necessary condition of actual things which is metaphysically confusing and also makes it easy to deny that God is necessary for things to exist. If the class “world” is somehow enough to ensure that there is a world, then the world does not “need” God.

God either creates things with no power to act on their own, or things with power to act. The first would be a mechanistic and deterministic world that unfolds exactly like God wants it to. We might call this maximalist creation ex nihilo. There are lots of good reasons to reject maximalist creation ex nihilo that include the denial of real freedom and reducing history to nothing more than a cartoon with a divine animator. The second option, where God creates things with the ability to act, can be divided into what I call “planned” creation ex nihilo and “minimalist” creation ex nihilo. Planned creation ex nihilo asserts that everything has an essential nature of greater or lesser specificity. In short, everything has a plan for how God wants it to be. Created things then act in ways that make them more or less consistent with their plan, or essence.

There are many problems with planned creation ex nihilo. First, one may ask how detailed the plan for something is. If plans are too general, then they lose their value and meaning as plans. If plans are too specific, then we get closer and closer to maximalist planning. Second, planned creation ex nihilo is invariably hierarchical, making some kinds of things better than others. This hierarchy relates between kinds of things (e.g. humans are more important than animals) and it also creates hierarchies within kinds. One could then assert that one sex is greater than another or insist that there are “unnatural” or “ontologically disordered” ways of being human. These hierarchies always seem to mirror cultural prejudices rather than provide reliable insight into the nature of things.

The most important objection to planned creation ex nihilo is that God decides in advance of our individual existence how we are “supposed” to enjoy the world, and, more importantly, how we are supposed to be. This leads at minimum to constant anxiety about whether or not we are doing what God wants us to do. This anxiety is unjustified if no such planning exists. It also gives too much power to those who insist they somehow know what God’s plans are. Finally, it just seems strange. To give the gift of life and then to specify how that life should be lived seems like handing someone a menu and telling them exactly what to order.

Minimalist creation ex nihilo lets the world decide how it is going to be. Things that are created make “decisions” about how they will relate to other things and so how they will be in the world. These decisions, or actions, create orders in the world, places where some created things exist one way rather than another way. These orders relate to other orders, and so create new orders. What emerges in the world is nested order where all order that emerges is consistent with the order it emerged from. Orders can be “broken” and so disorder created, but if order is nested, then disorder at one level is still consistent with, and so maintains, larger domains of order. If it were not consistent with the larger domains of order, it could not exist. The so-called “laws” of nature are levels of order that emerged over time and with which further nests of order that emerge must remain consistent.

Because the orders that come to be always have a genesis that relates all levels of order to each other, metaphysical restrictions are placed on what even God the creator can do. God could not just add something ex nihilo in the world to prevent some evil from happening. What God added to the world would literally not “understand” how to be in a world where everything only came to be through a complex creation of countless orders over time. God would have to “pre-order” whatever was inserted. This would make it completely different from everything else. It would not fit in. Additionally, God could not just “delete” a portion of creation without disrupting the orders that have emerged in relation to what was deleted. Lastly, if God’s love of creation extends to every level, then there is no reason why God would suddenly destroy what is loved. Minimalist creation ex nihilo thus ends up being able to make almost all of the same critiques of omnipotence found in Oord’s book.

Because God has not planned out how the world should be, God must wait to see what the world will become. God is constantly “surprised” by the world. This makes the world something that God can take delight in. The ability of all creation to define itself through acts that bring new ways of being is exactly what God does in creation. Creation itself is in the image of God.

If there are no divine plans for creation, then one might wonder if any way of being will do and so all notions of ethics and morality disappear entirely. I don’t think so. The ability to relate and create reaches down to the basic nature of everything. It is the minimal of minimal essences and this essence creates the norm of creation: live with creation much as possible. At most levels of existence, this norm is never “willfully” violated. Things just go on existing as they have emerged in creation. Expressions of order come and go. At the human level, however, our actions have considerable impact on how individuals, groups of individuals, and nonhumans are able to relate to the world. We can either act to expand the ability of people to relate to the world or constrict it. When we do the former, we are being like God, creating ways for others to be. When we do the latter, we act against God.

Rather than think of ourselves as “co-creators” with God in the world, minimalist creation ex nihilo enables us to be “co-hosts” with God in the world. God is the original Host, making all being in the world possible. We are able to act in ways that promote the ability of others to be in the world. This is love. The ethical life that emerges from this does not insist that we follow a specific plan. It does not even require that we have our own plan. No one should be able to decide ahead of time how we should relate to the world. No one can tell us we are doing it wrong except when we act in ways that directly restrict the lives of others. But, as co-hosts, we need to be attentive to the world, especially to suffering, injustice, and all things that prevent people from delighting in the world and defining themselves however they wish.

Many people today think they are somehow not good enough, that they are the “wrong” kind of person. Minimalist creation ex nihilo challenges these conclusions by insisting that there is no right way to be. We cannot be wrong in how we choose to live except when we fail to care for the ability of others to choose their own lives. God’s loving creation encourages each of us to delight in world and to care for those in it. We are able to respond to God by living in God’s image.

Bio: Joe Pettit is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Morgan State University. He has published academic essays on racial and social justice, pragmatism, and he has written many Op-Eds in the Baltimore Sun. He has had a decades long interest in metaphysics and religion and science. He blogs at notsodeepthoughts.com.

OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE

Joe Pettit critiques my rejection of creation out of nothing, preferring to describe God not as an actor but as act itself. I can affirm his view that God is unconditioned, yet I don’t believe this necessitates the power to create from nothing. Pettit highlights some concerns I share about creatio ex nihilo. However, my primary objection lies in the kind of power such a God would require. While I appreciate many aspects of Pettit’s vision, I believe my own view can incorporate its strengths while still rejecting the traditional notion of creation out of nothing.

For more on Oord’s view of creatio ex nihilo in a series on the subject, see this article.

* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.