Amipotence and the Nature of Agency
By Simon Kittle
Amipotence holds that love is inconsistent with unilateral control, and agency without unilateral control is possible, but both claims are false.
Thomas Oord suggests that theologies which endorse some or other notion of omnipotence singularly fail to address the problem of evil. The problem for omnipotence-endorsing theologies is this: if God can do anything (or almost anything), then, given the evil we observe in the world, we are forced to conclude that there are many occasions when God could have prevented evil but chose not to. Oord takes this to be a deal-breaker for theology because “the God who chooses not to prevent evil isn’t loving.”[1] He quotes Catherine Keller approvingly: “If God could have prevented but ‘let’ this horror, this child’s painful death, this ancestor’s enslavement, this people’s holocaust, happen, for His own inscrutable reasons—to teach, to punish, to test—then atheism is the only answer.”[2] Oord avoids atheism by rejecting the idea that God could have prevented evil. He calls this alternative understanding of God’s power amipotence.
Amipotence is how we can and should understand God’s power if we accept that “divine love comes logically prior to sovereign choice.”[3] For Oord, because God’s essential nature is love, God necessarily loves every single creature all the time. God’s love is not contingent on God’s will or choice. Moreover, everything God does is characterized—and constrained—by love. Many theologians would agree with this, at least as a basic approach. The distinctive aspect of Oord’s view comes from what he thinks love precludes and requires.
Oord thinks love is fundamentally relational. To love is to “promote overall well-being” in cooperation with others, and this love is “inherently uncontrolling.”[4] A loving being never single-handedly exerts control over another—to do so would be unloving. When we consider personal relationships, this idea can sound very sensible. Cases of peer pressure, gaslighting, coercion, manipulation, bullying, and so on, all involve one party single-handedly controlling another in a way that is harmful, and so antithetical to love.
Some omnipotence-endorsing theologians suggest that this thought can help explain why some evil exists. If God were to step in to prevent evil, that would involve suppressing someone’s own agency and freedom in a manner akin to coercion. That would be unfitting for God, and may frustrate God’s purposes given that God desires freely given responses. Thus, given God’s nature, or aims for creation, God can’t intervene by controlling what creatures do.
Oord sees clearly that this approach to the problem of evil, deployed in the context of an omnipotence-endorsing theology, doesn’t get one very far. Even if God can’t stop people from doing evil directly, because doing so amounts to divine coercion, God could still stop evil in plenty of other ways: God could cause the perpetrator’s car not to start, block the perpetrator’s path, cause a gun to backfire, or a knife to become blunt, and so on. As a result, omnipotence-theologians usually add in other considerations. For instance, the idea that some evil is justified because it provides opportunities for moral growth.
Oord insists that such attempts are futile. For Oord, if God could have prevented evil but (for whatever reason) chose not to, there is no hope of solving the problem of evil. The only way forward is to say that God can’t single-handedly intervene in any situation. There is nothing we can point to and say “‘God alone did that’”.[5] Oord defends this idea by saying that all of God’s interactions with every entity—be it atom, aardvark, or army—are conditioned and constrained by God’s uncontrolling love. God can’t move a grain of sand one millimeter without that sand’s cooperation—to do so would be to trample the sand’s own agency, which would be unloving.
I appreciate Oord’s attempt to address the problem of evil without appealing to mystery, and I think Oord should be commended for following through the logic of his position, even when that means embracing what look to many like undesirable conclusions. Still, I think Oord’s resulting position is unsatisfactory, and for three reasons.
The first problem is that exerting unilateral control over another is not always contrary to love. There are plenty of examples where controlling another person is not only consistent with loving them, but required by it. Consider parenting. Taking one’s child to the dentist is often an act of love because it is part of looking after the child’s health. Yet since children usually dislike going to the dentist, this sometimes requires a parent to exercise unilateral control over (among other things) their child’s whereabouts. The same could be said of many a medical procedure. Likewise, when a parent unilaterally stops a child who is running into a busy road, or prevents a child ingesting something harmful, or stops one child from hitting another, the parent exerts unilateral control over the child, and they do so out of love. If a parent failed to prevent their child from running into fast moving traffic, we would not only think the parent unloving, but deeply neglectful. This sort of example shows two things. First, it’s false that “to control another person, creature, or situation, a controller must entirely determine the other or the outcome.”[6] Control comes in degrees.[7] One can exercise unilateral control over some aspects of another’s situation but not others. Second, love sometimes requires exercising unilateral control over some aspects of another’s situation.
The second problem concerns Oord’s claim that God cannot single-handedly bring about any effect in the world. It’s not entirely clear how Oord intends to ground this claim. On the one hand, Oord stresses that love is inherently uncontrolling and insists that God is at every moment loving everything, including entities such as atoms and sand. On the other hand, when responding to objections to the idea that God almighty cannot single-handedly move a grain of sand a single millimeter, Oord emphasizes that God’s lack of a material body puts constraints on what God can do. Neither reason seems compelling.
Consider the first, that love dictates the way we should act and not act towards all entities. To make this concrete, consider the pile of bricks on my driveway (which I own). Is it really the case that some of the things I could do to the bricks would be loving, while other things would be hateful, or at least unloving? It’s not clear to me that the term ‘love’ has much application here. How does one love a pile of bricks?
I could imagine fanciful circumstances in which smashing the bricks (say) might express disrespect or hatred towards another person or human community. If the bricks were the last remnant of an ancient Cathedral, smashing them might express disregard for the culture to which that Cathedral belonged. But that is irrelevant since the aptness of the value judgement here stems from the importance those bricks have to humans. The bricks themselves have no interests in being in one place rather than another, in being part of a Cathedral or lumped in a pile, or even in remaining bricks. They have causal powers, but they have no agency in any of the robust senses in which that word might be used of ants, bees, cats, dolphins, and humans. They cannot be loved in the way such creatures can be loved. And love doesn’t require us to respect their “agency.”
But perhaps the second thought, God’s lack of a material body, explains God’s inability to unilaterally act on a grain of sand? Well, God’s lack of a body certainly makes some types of action impossible. For instance, by definition, riding a bike involves having a body which is balanced on the bike, and which one uses to propel the bike forward. But this does not apply to all actions. Nothing in the idea of moving a stone, for example, requires acting on the stone with a body. I can move a stone by pushing, by using a lever, by ordering a subordinate to move it, by programming a computer connected to digger, and so on. Computer-brain-interfaces will soon make it routine for people to bring about effects in the world just by thinking the right thought.
Neither of these reasons, then, can explain God’s inability to act single–handedly in the world. It might be, as Oord maintains, that the only theistic solution to the problem of evil is to say, ‘God can’t.’ But Oord has not yet given us an account of how it could possibly be that God can’t.
The third problem also pertains to the idea that God cannot single-handedly bring about effects in the world. According to amipotence, God is always and everywhere calling all “creatures to do what promotes overall well-being.”[8] This divine action is never unilateral because unilateral action is, according to Oord, controlling and thus unloving. But is it possible to act cooperatively without being able to act unilaterally? There are reasons to think not.
Consider an example. Suppose Jess and Hirami are running a workshop together. They put in equal amounts of work and plan a workshop that reflects both of their perspectives. The workshop they deliver is jointly ascribable to both of them. But Jess and Hirami can’t even communicate about (let alone cooperate on) the workshop, unless they can single-handedly cause in each other various mental states. When Jess says to Himari, “Let’s get some paper and plan this bit out,” Jess causes Himari to believe (i) that Jess has uttered a sentence, (ii) that Jess has spoken the word “paper,” (iii) that Jess wants to plan the next bit of their project, (iv) that Jess thinks using paper is a good way to do this, and more. In something as simple as uttering a sentence, Jess has unilaterally caused Himari to entertain myriad mental states.
How does this affect Oord’s position? For Oord, God’s activity consists in God’s constantly “[calling] creatures to act in ways that promote overall well-being.”[9] What form does this call take? When it comes to people, Oord aligns himself with those who’ve spoken of God’s call as a “still small voice,” a “holy nudge,” one’s “moral compass,” an “intuition.”[10]
However, anything along these lines is going to have to involve God producing in someone a thought or feeling about the loving action that God is calling them to. But this just is God’s unilaterally causing in the person a thought or feeling about the loving action. And given Oord’s dual-aspect monism, causing someone to entertain a thought requires causing the atoms and molecules in their brain to take on a certain configuration. Despite claims to the contrary, then, Oord’s position requires us to hold that God can engage in unilateral action in the world. Unfortunately, any such concession would undermine Oord’s solution to the problem of evil.
In response, Oord may suggest that we need to construe God’s action in altogether different terms. One model that suggests itself is gravity: a collection of material bodies exert gravitational forces on each other, and the resultant movement of each of the bodies is the product of all the forces interacting. It’s not that one piece of matter exerts a force which produces an effect in another body, which in turn produces an effect in another, and so on. Rather, every effect is produced by all of the “input” forces operating together. In this type of activity, each entity contributes to each effect, but no entity is single-handedly responsible for any effect.
The problem with this model is that it becomes impossible to say that any one of the agents is calling, prompting, guiding, or luring any of the others in any particular direction. On this model, there can be no call and response, no act of love and loving response, no communication—there is just each agent making a contribution to the result. This model is singularly unsuited for describing the action of a personal God, since it can make no sense of call, response, communication, cooperation, the receiving and giving of gift, grace, love, and the like.
Bio: Simon Kittle has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Sheffield in 2015 where he focused on the nature of free will. He has published in top philosophy and theology journals including Philosophical Studies, The Philosophical Quarterly, and Theology and Science, and is currently writing a book on theology and non-human animals.
OORD’S RESPONSE
I appreciate Simon Kittle’s response to my arguments for amipotence. Unfortunately, I don’t think he understands the nuances of my argument. For instance, to support the claim that controlling others is sometimes loving, Simon appeals to parents who use their bodies to keep children in check. I have addressed this issue in many books, and I claim that no parent ever controls a child. Simon seems to forget that I defined control as acting as a sufficient cause, so control as I use the word doesn’t come in degrees. And it doesn’t entail bodily impact.
In his second problem, Simon rightly sees that my rejection of a divine body accounts for God’s inability to smash bricks. But then he appeals to other ways we might influence a stone without touching it. His examples either assume that we have a body to indirectly impact the stone or that we could control others to use their bodies. But I don’t think God has a body nor can God control others with bodies to do God’s bidding.
In his third example, Simon uses the word “cause“ in a way that sounds like it is a sufficient cause. When people influence the mental states of others, however, they are not acting as sufficient causes. The key issue, I suspect, has to do with the meaning of “cause.” I usually use the word “influence,” because “cause” can sound as if God single-handedly brings about results. And as Simon knows, I reject that view.
For more on Oord’s view of God as one cause among others, see this article.
[1]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (Grasmere, Idaho: SacraSage Press, 2023), 97.
[2]. Keller, Political Theology of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 117.
[3]. Oord, Death, 126.
[4]. Oord, Death, 141, 122.
[5]. Oord, Death, 141.
[6]. Oord, Death, 32.
[7]. All the major philosophical accounts of control agree on this.
[8]. Oord, Death, 141.
[9]. Oord, Death, 141–142.
[10]. Oord, Death, 137.