Exaggerated Rumors of Omnipotence’s Death
By Alan R. Rhoda
Thomas Jay Oord’s case is weak, mainly because (1) he does not adequately define omnipotence or the key notion of control; (2) his treatment of the problem of evil overlooks a crucial distinction, and (3) amipotence is founded on an defective conception of love.
In The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence, Thomas Jay Oord (hereafter “Tom”) argues against the traditional monotheistic doctrine of divine omnipotence and for its replacement by amipotence, his neologism for a thoroughly “uncontrolling” conception of divine power. More specifically, Tom argues that omnipotence has no biblical support, that it is undermined by thousands of exceptions, that it is refuted by the problem of evil, and that amipotence is a worthy replacement concept. I think Tom is wrong on all counts and that his arguments against omnipotence and for amipotence are objectively weak.
Given the space afforded this essay, I limit my criticisms to the following claims: (a) Tom does not adequately define omnipotence or the key notion of control. Throughout his book he slides between different meanings of these terms, resulting in numerous non sequiturs, conflations, and straw men. (b) Tom’s discussion of the problem of evil overlooks a crucial distinction between willing the possibility of an evil for a greater good and willing its actuality. That distinction allows one to reconcile gratuitous or “genuine” evil with the omnipotence and love of God. (c) Amipotence is based on an imperfect conception of love. Rightly understood, love is not incompatible with omnipotence. Indeed, perfect love entails omnipotence.
Omnipotence and Control
Best practice when criticizing an idea is to “steel man” it by focusing one’s fire on its most plausible and defensible formulations. Unfortunately, Tom doesn’t do this. Omnipotence, he says, entails “at least one of the following: 1. God exerts all power. 2. God can do absolutely everything. 3. God can control others or circumstances” (3).[1] But none of these, individually or collectively, is adequate to define omnipotence. That God “exerts all power,” an idea Tom doesn’t explain, is only strictly true for occasionalism (the view that God is the only cause of all events) and divine universal causation (the view that God specifically concurs with and supplies all the positive reality of every creaturely event). That God exerts all power may also be true in a qualified sense for theistic determinism (the view that God is the ultimate sufficient cause of all events) and meticulous providence (the view that God specifically ordains whatsoever comes to pass), but many proponents of those views would emphatically deny that God “exerts all power.” In any case, omnipotence entails none of these four views, for those views concern how God exercises power whereas omnipotence concerns how God could exercise power. Associating omnipotence with the idea that God “exerts all power,” thereby strawmans omnipotence by loading it down with extraneous theoretical baggage.
Likewise, the view that God can do “absolutely anything” is one that, Tom himself eventually admits (67), almost all proponents of omnipotence reject. This sets up a straw man by associating omnipotence with a much more extreme position than its proponents generally hold.
The third component, that God “can control,” seems at first glance too weak. Most omnipotence proponents believe God can do much more than merely “control” other things. But initial appearances are deceiving, because what Tom means by “control” is far stronger than what the word normally means. According to Tom, “To control another person, creature, or situation, a controller must entirely determine the other or the outcome[,] … act as the sole and sufficient cause[,] … [and] bring about a result singlehandedly[,] … without influence from other actors or factors” (32). This notion of control—let’s call it total control—contrasts sharply with what “control” normally means. In common parlance, one exercises control by having enough influence in a situation to exclude or prevent undesired outcomes, thereby channeling results in the general direction one wants them to go. I’ll call this effective control. When I drive my car to work, for example, I control (through the steering wheel and other mechanisms) where the car goes. In so doing, I don’t exercise total control—I’m not providing power to the car and all its parts—but I am the chief deciding factor as to whether the car, operating normally as it does, goes left or right and speeds up or slows down. When Tom describes omnipotence in terms of God’s ability to “control” in the sense of total control, he’s using the word idiosyncratically. This serves his purpose when he contends that the Bible never depicts God as “controlling” creation, not even when raising Jesus from the dead (33), but when he turns to the problem of evil Tom’s concern shifts to denying that God ever possesses effective control (97–98), something the Bible does clearly attest (e.g., when Jesus calms the storm, heals the sick, casts out demons, etc.). By conflating these two notions of control, Tom also makes his claim that love is inherently “uncontrolling” seem more plausible than it is. While it is plausible that, if S loves P, S won’t exercise total control over P, it is implausible that love precludes ever exercising effective control, as, e.g., when a parent forcefully prevents a child from running into the street. In any case, while it is part of omnipotence to claim that God has total control over whether creatures exist—because an omnipotent God creates ex -nihilo—it is not part of omnipotence to claim that God ever exercises total control over creatures once they do exist. Nor it is part of omnipotence to claim that God can exercise total control over an existing creature, for the omnipotence proponent may argue that exercising total control over an existing creature is logically impossible because it would effectively nullify the creature’s existence, making it as if the creature were no longer there. If that’s right, then total control can be employed to create but not to manipulate. By suggesting that omnipotence entails that God sometimes does or even can exercise total control over existing creatures, Tom again sets up a straw man.
Tom’s uncharitable characterization of omnipotence and his idiosyncratic notion of control lead to numerous non sequiturs throughout his book. There are too many to itemize. One example will have to suffice. Thus, Tom writes that “[i]f we follow the logic of omnipotence, we should presume … [that every instance of political] oppression is God’s will” (93), but the consequent doesn’t follow. That this or that instance of evil is “God’s will” only follows if we assume meticulous providence. In other words, the inference only works if we conflate omnipotence with other, more radical ideas.
Omnipotence and the Problem of Evil
This brings us to the problem of evil. Tom sets it up as follows: “The problem of evil … rests on three basic claims: 1) genuine evil occurs; 2) God loves all creation; 3) God is omnipotent” (79). By “genuine” evils, Tom means what philosophers more commonly call gratuitous evils, evil that are not individually necessary for any greater good and thus “make the world, all things considered, worse than it might have been” (80). Tom believes that defenders of omnipotence must either deny that there are genuine evils, deny that God is all-loving, or appeal to blind mystery (79–80). But none of this follows. There is no contradiction in affirming 1–3, for God may have sufficiently good and loving reasons for allowing evils to occur that God could otherwise have prevented. Indeed, this is the central claim of every theodicy. Tom replies that this renders the evils in question no longer “genuine” (104). But, again, this doesn’t follow, for Tom overlooks a crucial distinction between (a) evils the actuality of which is necessary for a greater good and (b) evils only the possibility of which is necessary for a greater good. The former evils are non-genuine. Their occurrences make the world better overall, or at least not overall worse, than it might have been. The latter, however, are genuine evils because their actuality does make the world worse overall than it might have been. If there are sufficiently good reasons for God to allow the possibility of certain types of evils, then God cannot also systematically prevent those evils from ever becoming actual. For example, the free-will theodicy says that there being morally free creatures is a very good thing because such freedom is necessary for the possibility of certain great goods, like freely loving relationships. But God can’t give creatures moral freedom while systematically preventing them from ever misusing that freedom to, say, harm others. So, the theodicy proposes, the price of moral freedom is that God must often allow creatures to commit moral evils, even though God could have prevented them. This is compatible with God’s wanting creatures never actually to commit moral evils. The proponent of omnipotence, then, can coherently affirm 1–3. There can be genuine evils that God could have prevented but doesn’t, not because the evils are individually necessary for a greater good, nor because God is unloving, but because the possibility of those evils is necessary for a greater good.
Omnipotence and Perfect Love
The foregoing distinction undercuts Tom’s argument against omnipotence from the problem of evil, but Tom also argues directly against omnipotence from the nature of love. “Love,” says Tom, “can’t be omnipotent” (122) because “love prevents preventable evil. A loving person does not allow pointless pain if they can stop it” (100). But must love always prevent preventable evil? No. Exceptions are easy to find. Suppose a loving father goes hiking with his young son Johnny knowing there is some small risk that Johnny could fall and get injured. Knowing the risks, the father can either (a) be an extreme “helicopter parent,” hovering over Johnny at every moment to catch him the instant he should start to fall, or (b) allow Johnny to face age-appropriate risks without parental hovering so that Johnny can learn his own limits, develop self-confidence, and not become overly dependent on his father. Tom thinks a loving and omnipotent God should be like a helicopter parent, always swooping in to prevent anyone and everyone from ever suffering. Thus, he repeatedly says that victims and survivors “rightly” doubt God’s love given omnipotence (96–98). On the contrary, such a “helicopter God” would be deficient in love. Such a God would, in effect, spoil us. Without the potential for us to face real risks, real dangers, and real consequences, we’d never learn the importance of self-control, discipline, courage, generosity, or concern for the welfare of others. Instead, we’d lazily assume that no matter what, God’s going to swoop in and save the day.
The central problem with amipotence, I submit, is that it’s based on an imperfect conception of love. Perfect love perfectly understands the true good of its object, perfectly desires that good, and perfectly acts to promote that good. Sometimes promotion of the good requires power to prevent or effectively control events, as when a loving parent stops a child from running into the street. And sometimes pursuit of the good requires a more hands-off policy, one that guides but deliberately does not prevent evils that could have been prevented (because there are sufficiently good reasons for allowing the possibility of evils of that sort), as when a loving father refrains from intervening so his children can learn to take responsibility for their own well-being.
Reflections on theodicy (plausible reasons God might have for not preventing evils God could have prevented), the nature of goodness and value (axiology), and the nature of God and divine providence (e.g., whether God’s providence should be understood as meticulous or general) can help us make sense of many of the evils we witness, but they do not provide a comprehensive explanation. At this point we should acknowledge our limits—God’s perspective is much better than ours—and remember that our true good, what God most wants for us, is not a problem-free life in this world, but union with God and others in the world to come (2 Cor. 4:8–11, 16–18).
Bio: Alan R. Rhoda is the Systems and Fulfillment Librarian at the Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, IN. He earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Fordham University and is the author of Open Theism (Cambridge Elements, 2024) and many articles exploring the openness of the future and competing models of divine providence.
OORD’S RESPONSE
Alan Rhoda thinks I’m wrong about practically everything I assert about omnipotence. Despite the fact that I quote John Calvin, Paul Kjoss Helseth, and others, he doesn’t think some theologians say God exerts all power. Despite the fact that I quote Augustine in saying that God is “He who can do all things,” Alan thinks I put up a strawman. And despite the fact that I define carefully what I mean by “control,” he thinks I mean what he calls “total control.” On the one hand, he thinks I’m not careful enough when defining my terms. But when it comes to me defining “control” as a sufficient cause, unilateral determination, or bringing about results singlehandedly, he chides me for not using the word in the way others might. Alan then introduces a term to apparently replace mine that he calls “effective control.” I considered something like this but found it wanting.
When it comes to the problem of evil, Alan misunderstands what I mean by “genuine evil.” I have defined genuine evil in several books as an event that, all things considered, makes the world worse than it otherwise could have been. Alan says that God “may have sufficiently good and loving reasons for allowing evil to occur that God could otherwise have prevented.” But my definition of genuine evil denies there are good reasons to allow events that make the world worse, and a perfectly loving God would not have good and loving reasons for wanting the world to be worse overall. In other words, I’m denying that an event can rightly be called genuinely evil if God has good and loving reasons to allow it. Alan seems not to understand this.
Typical free-will theodicies implicitly claim that no actual is genuinely evil, although these theodicies readily admit there is real suffering. I say “implicitly claim,” because these theodicies assume that God providing free will to, say, a rapist is better, all things considered, than denying freedom to the rapist. We see this in Alan’s example of the hiking parent. I and most people would say a parent would be unloving if he failed to rescue Johnny from sexual assault… if the parent could have rescued him. In fact, Alan earlier claims that perfect love would stop a child from running into the street. But in the hiking example, we’re left to assume that perfect love would allow a rapist to sexually abuse Johnny because freedom to rape is more important than not being raped. Alan looks at the situation from the perspective of the perpetrator’s freedom rather than the victim’s well-being.
Given all this, I’m not convinced by Alan’s objections. And I don’t find his alternatives to be better. Omnipotence remains dead.
On Oord addressing six dimensions of the problem of evil, see this article.
[1]. Numbers in parentheses supply page references to Oord’s book.