Is the Amipotent God the World-Soul?

By Joanna Leidenhag

Amipotence seems to make God into a world-soul and amipotence cannot guarantee that love wins. I offer an alternative.

The idea of a world-soul is an ancient one that has appeared within many different philosophies and theologies across history. Broadly speaking, to affirm the world-soul is to believe that the universe as a whole is a living thing with a soul that governs and binds it together. For Plato and Augustine, the world-soul is a creature distinct from God, but other thinkers have identified the world-soul with God (i.e., twelfth-century theologians like William of Conches and Thierry of Chartres, and nineteenth-century environmentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson). Oord never uses the phrase ‘world-soul’ to describe his view of the amipotent God. However, I think a number of things he says either imply such a view or lead to such a conclusion if followed through.

The idea of God as the world-soul is implied when Oord describes God as “the Loving Mind of the universe” (p.150) or uses the phrase “divine-creation synergy” (p.148). The world-soul view of God is also the logical conclusion of other things Oord says about God and creation. For example, Oord says that God has both mental and material aspects which place God in ontological continuity with the universe, and thereby allow God to act as one efficient cause among many in the universe (p.130, pp.133-134). (I don’t see why Oord calls God’s attempts to influence creatures an efficient cause, as opposed to a final cause, but I won’t pursue that point here). Furthermore, Oord denies creation ex nihilo and the claim that God could ever exist without creation. Creation, for Oord, is co-eternal with God.

Oord denies that God has a localized body, which would limit divine action to just one part of spacetime. Instead, Oord affirms God’s omnipresence as a way of establishing that the “amipotent God has maximal power,” because, unlike creatures, “the Spirit influences all creation at all times.” (pp.138-39). So, if we ask Oord, where is God’s material aspect? Presumably he would say, “Everywhere!” Oord says he affirms divine incorporeality (p.130) and that “[c]laims about divine embodied action are metaphors” (p.136). However, the main (perhaps only) metaphysical difference between God and creatures seems to be one of scope—God’s spirit is universal, whereas creatures are always localized (p.138). So, although Oord clearly denies that God has a localized body, I take it he would affirm that God has a universal, unlimited body (God’s material aspect), which we also refer to as ‘creation’ or ‘the universe.’ If the entire and eternal universe is the material aspect of God, and if God is the “Loving Mind of the Universe,” then it seems that, for Oord, God is the world-soul.

Would the idea that God is the world-soul be a problem for Oord? I’m not entirely sure. However, it is worth spelling out some of the implications of the world-soul idea for Oord’s primary areas of concern; love and the problem of evil.

Oord defines love as acting with intentionality, in relation to others, to promote flourishing (p.122). As Oord goes on to say, “It’s a metaphysical impossibility that God would love in absolute isolation; the Maker always makes love recipients.” (p.126) If God is the world-soul, then it is not clear that there are other recipients apart from God for God to love. The recipients of God’s love are parts, or individuated sub-sections, of God’s own being. So, when God loves us, God is also loving Godself. This subtly changes Oord’s conception of love, but it might also be thought to strengthen Oord’s claim that God has to love creation (p.126). For the world-soul God to will the flourishing of creatures, is also to will God’s own flourishing—the two are intimately connected. So, Oord might not consider this to be too serious of a problem. It depends on how much his view of love requires the recipients of love to be distinct from the lover. In Christian theology, the love within the Trinity might be taken to suggest that ontological otherness is, in fact, not necessary for genuine love.

The world-soul has a different relationship to evil than the traditional, transcendent God. This is because, if God is the world-soul, then all the evil and suffering of the world is part of God’s being. This, however, does not necessarily make God morally responsible for evil. Let’s return to the analogy of the world as the body of God. In Western society, I am considered able-bodied. Even so, my body does some things against my will, such as getting sick. Again, although Oord doesn’t use this exact example, everything he says about how God acts by way of a mental-material ontology as an efficient cause in continuity with how creatures act seems to fit this model of divine embodiment. I do not will my body to become sick, so I cannot be held morally responsible for getting sick; but I am still affected by the sickness. This seems to fit with Oord’s idea of an empathetic God who experiences, but neither wills nor permits, suffering. Like me, God simply cannot act unilaterally to heal God’s own body. The only worry here is that, unlike localized creaturely bodies, there can be no foreign invaders for the divine body; even the deadliest viruses are part of God’s being. The world-soul God might not be responsible for suffering, but this God is not perfectly pure or holy either. I do not know if this is a problem for Oord, or something he is willing to embrace.

Lastly, the main reason that Christian thinkers have affirmed omnipotence is to provide assurance that God can ultimately set things to right. Although an amipotent God always does what is loving, an amipotent God cannot guarantee that love wins. If God is already doing all that God can to promote flourishing, then we have strong reason to doubt that things will ever get better.

This is clear in the world-soul idea, where God is weakened by the evil and suffering in creation just as a body is weakened by sickness. Even if Oord rejects the world-soul idea, he still faces the question of whether even a maximally powerful amipotent God can guarantee the resurrection of the dead and creation of a new world without evil or suffering. Since God cannot control creation, for Oord, God had to persuade the micro-subjects of Jesus’ body to reunify on Easter Sunday. We might say that Jesus got very lucky, because the billions of micro-subjects of his body cooperated with God’s Spirit—but God could not be sure of this outcome, and God cannot guarantee it will work again. In the future, perhaps some people will be lucky enough to be resurrected and others will not be so lucky. More worryingly, God will not have any control over who is resurrected and who is not. It all depends on the cooperation of micro-subjects. It might be that some of the cruelest people in the world are resurrected and that innocent victims receive no future compensation for their present suffering. Even if humans (and all the other creaturely agents) stopped resisting God’s will for a time, they would always have the freedom to return to their previous evil ways. The amipotent God cannot guarantee that love wins. In the end, this is my main reason for rejecting Oord’s amipotent God.

However, I don’t want to end my response here. Instead, I want to make some comments of appreciation and offer an alternative solution. This book is one of the most clearly written and intellectually challenging books on the topic of divine power that I have read. So, despite my disagreement, I am grateful to Oord for having written this book. In brief, I agree with Oord that the biblical data does not demand the classical doctrine of omnipotence and that there are things even an omnipotent God can’t do (e.g., God can’t contradict Godself or perform logically impossible tasks). Furthermore, I do not know why God allows evil and suffering to persist—I only know that through the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus, God has suffered as we suffer and has won victory over death and evil. I take this hope to be the central, organizing claim of Christianity and the primary revelation of who God is.

I have always been happy to affirm omnipotence. Oord’s book has not only made me think harder than ever before about the potential cost of this commitment, but also to question what I really mean when I affirm omnipotence. So, in conclusion, I offer another possible definition of omnipotence, which I hope will appease some of Oord’s main concerns with the view, but maintain the certainty of Christian hope.

I take omnipotence to mean that God, whose primary attribute is love, is the source of all power. What this means is that nothing exists, not even the recipients of God’s love, unless God creates them out of nothing (or out of God’s own being). However, to say that God is the source of all power is not the same thing as saying God exerts all power. Instead, God’s power is primarily one of empowerment of others. In loving creation into being, God gives creatures a limited amount of power and freedom. Since God cannot contradict God’s self, I agree that God does not exert total control over free creatures, thereby dictating how creatures can and cannot use their power. But I also think the God of love, who is the source of all power, can also take away power. To be blunt, God can (and will) annihilate evil, and God can (and will) restore that which has been destroyed. Why God so often shows mercy and does not annihilate evildoers sooner—say, before they commit their crimes—I do not know. But, on the whole, I am grateful for God’s mercy. And I know that, even after abuse, torture and death, the omnipotent God can and will restore all things.

Bio: Dr Joanna Leidenhag is Associate Professor of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Minding Creation: Theological Panpsychism and the Doctrine of Creation (Bloomsbury, 2021), and co-author of Science-Engaged Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

OORD’S RESPONSE

Joanna Leidenhag has (at least) two worries about my view of God and amipotence. One pertains to the idea that God is the world-soul, which she says means deadly viruses exist as part of the divine being. If true, God cannot be pure and holy. My response: In other writings, I’ve distinguished between God’s experience and God’s essence. I call this the divine essence-experience binate. I think God feels and suffers in the divine experience, but God’s essence or nature is unchanging and pure. Therefore, God’s nature does not become impure when God suffers from the evil creatures sometimes do. In her second concern, Joanna rightly says that an amipotent God can’t guarantee that love wins. I acknowledge this, but I think the alternative view – that an omnipotent God isn’t preventing evil now – is worse for belief in God overall. We can’t trust that God will guarantee love wins later. My position does offer genuine hope that God‘s love wins through persuasion, however. Finally, I can accept Joanna‘s alternative definition of omnipotence as “the source of all power.“ But as is, it’s too vague; more must be added. I would add that the divine source necessarily gives power to every other creature capable of expressing power. In other words, love always and necessarily motivates God to give away power. Because of this, God cannot fail to provide power to others, cannot withdraw power from others, and cannot override the power of others.

For more on Oord’s view on God’s essence-experience binate, see this blog article

For the original book this essay is found in, click here.