The Determined Divine
By Niq Ruud
Thinking God is amipotent has immense implications if the universe is deterministic.
I intend to put forward the work of two philosophers with rather different backgrounds, Thomas Jay Oord and Robert Sapolsky. I want to see if their ideas can proverbially “play ball.” Oord, a theologian, makes a case for what he calls an “amipotent God” in his recent, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence; while Sapolsky, a neuroscientist, makes an appeal for the uniquely linear nature of “the universe’s” trajectory in his 2023 book, Determined.[1]
The question at hand for this chapter is: How might a deity, a God not unlike Oord’s amipotent offering, fit within the confines of a deterministic system as put forward by Sapolsky? I find this to be an intriguing question for several reasons, chiefly as it asks us to consider a God who is not free of will.
Oord has coined the term “amipotence” in an effort to name the infinite power of divine love; combining the Latin word for power (potens) with a prefix for love (ami).[2] This amipotent God continues his push against the classical God—a version of deity who is freedom incarnate. Classical theism posits that God is all-good (has only wholesome desires), is all-knowing (clearly understands what has happened and will happen in the future), and is all-powerful (possesses the ability to toy even with the laws of nature).[3]
As Oord and various others have noted, there are some rather gaping problems with this particular model. For, were such a God to be a reality, there is little doubt that a world like ours, where suffering, pain, and evil persist, could not come to be. For, if a deity could in fact know all things, had the power to make anything happen, and would always choose the highest good over every alternative, the world (and yes, even “the universe” at-large) would be a utopia. Be that as it may, this, of course, is not the reality of existence. People develop disease, wars persist, and literal galaxies collide. In short, according to Oord, the classical God cannot exist—at least not in-full.[4]
Ontologically, then, Oord’s God is not housed outside of “the universe” like in a classical model; and, instead, acts in partnership with those inside the confines of “the universe.”[5] We may also note that the amipotent God is not “the universe” in its entirety (as in a pantheistic model) and instead is a part of “the universe,” though we cannot be sure that what is inside “the universe” is exhaustive of the divine being.
With this in mind, we might speculate Oord’s amipotent God is more closely related to a panentheistic model of divinity—a version of deity he, in another work, defines as being where “creation is in God’s all-embracing, moment-by-moment experience.”[6] Essentially, Oord’s God is a part of “the universe” as is any other entity, experiencing the flow of time without full foreknowledge and perhaps only relying on the hunches and predictions of other agents to make sense of what might yet come.
In Determined, Sapolsky lays his case against human agency out bare. While he notes the possibility of a deity outside the confines of time, Sapolsky’s arguments largely come from the presupposition that there is no divine actor manipulating the cosmos and, instead, everything came to be as it is because of a chain reaction of events beginning at the dawn of time.[7] This chain reaction—leading up to your and my hormone levels when we woke up this morning—he contends, could not have happened any differently than it did; leading me to write and you to read this very sentence at this precise moment. Sapolsky does not stop there, however, and projects his arguments into the future where events will continue to happen in the singular way they have always been destined until time itself ceases to progress.[8]
This perspective has the potential to feel rather unnatural to beings like you and me. In that, I feel as though I had agency in structuring the paragraph above. I chose the words, phrasing, length, flow, and punctuation, even—because I wanted you to get a taste of Sapolsky’s thesis without much effort. But, as Sapolsky would argue, those perceived choices occurred because of an array of happenings far before I put finger to keyboard.
The way I used em dashes to sample a parallel idea to the one conveyed in the sentence-proper, is a great example of something that, in Sapolsky’s mind, I have been primed to accomplish. I didn’t begin using em dashes until after I had finished undergrad; though this was well after I learned what they were and different ways of using them from reading authors such as C.S. Lewis. Of course, I have adapted that style and blended it into my own; but there is a clear and traceable trajectory from my first conscious exposure to such punctuation and my now regular use of the mark.
We could go further back, of course, and note that Lewis’ use of the dash might, indeed, have a similar origin story—to a point in time when he was first exposed to it. And, likely, we could go back all the way until the inventor of the mark either decided they needed it to be created or put one to paper on accident, as it served a similar but distinct role to alternative options. Yes, of course, we might go even further back to the origins of the language in which the dash was created, or the oral rhythm of any language preceding it, and we could invariably go back and back, until the very dawn of time—where the story of the em dash truly began!
The historian in me loves this particular thought experiment (as I’m sure you can tell). Past happenings stack up, leading to the present moment on which the forthcoming future will, too, be stacked.
So, in theory, What might it look like to have an amipotent God situated within a deterministic “universe?” First, it would behoove me not to touch on the role of knowledge in Oord’s model—though not tied directly to the issue of power on which the amipotent God is most focused, knowledge plays a key role here in the perception of will by beings conscious of potential freedom. In that, if a God is all-knowing, such a deity would be able to accurately project the trajectory of each and every entity within its purview (in this case “the universe”).
There is a thought experiment posited by Pierre Laplace some 200 years ago which puts forward essentially the same argument about an entity later deemed “Laplace’s Demon:”
We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in a single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as of the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes.[9]
In short, full and unfettered knowledge lends itself to a deterministic system of existence. Sapolsky’s logic is that, even without an all-knowing being, “the universe” will still continue to operate in a determined fashion (because “the universe” is the way it is, deity or no). He summarizes the problems around omniscience that Judeo-Christian theologians have oft wrestled with, concluding that “God cannot do everything, He can just do whatever is possible, and foreseeing whether someone will choose good or evil is not knowable, even for Him.”[10] Essentially, in this model, if a God were to indeed exist, such a deity would be bound by the same parameters of a deterministic reality as everything else in existence—no matter their level of knowledge.
Oord has worked to make clear that his amipotent God is open to the future. He notes that when one says “God has to love [that] does not mean God is altogether without freedom. Open and relational theologians like me believe God loves moment by moment, facing an open, yet-to-be-determined future.”[11] While I appreciate the sentiment, I am not fully convinced by it, nor would it fit cleanly into Sapolsky’s deterministic perspective.
For the sake of this chapter, I prefer the argument that God is open to the future in that God does not know what will come in the same way I am open to the future yet cannot know what will transpire; even though the same future is already laid out and would be clearly observable and understood by Laplace’s “demon.” Further, the amipotent God does not live in and through multiple timelines of reality and, instead, is bound to the same flow of time as necessitated by a lack of supreme knowledge that you and I are.
Certainly, a being with any semblance of knowledge similar or superior to our own could project what other timelines might be, and even do so in a multiplicity of possible futures and alternative histories, but what they do is, I would argue, just that—a projection. Even the power the amipotent God might have (via external vehicles) would in fact be determined by what God is, thereby lacking an independently-existent freedom of will altogether since God’s actions would necessarily move in the direction of love alone.
Allowing the amipotent God to fit within a deterministic system of reality would likely necessitate the simplification of the deity’s parameters. I have argued in a past work that God is bound by a single characteristic, in that God is “Not simply a God who loves, but a God who is love itself.”[12] While I have often used the word “love” in reference to the metaphysical as a rather mushy platitude, I simultaneously use it as an ontologically binding term—as in all love is God and all God is love, 100 percent in either direction, “nothing more…nothing less.”[13] Because of this, I suggest, God is necessarily bound by the predestined trajectory of goodness in its highest form. In that God cannot be truly free because God must necessarily love above all else.
Theological arguments surrounding free will in Christian circles have often lent themselves to discussions surrounding the elect; or, more simply, those who are perceived to be saved versus those whose fate will have them end in less-than-ideal circumstances. This—from my vantage point, at least—seems to have worked itself toward a relatively contentious perspective of determinism by many religious adherents.
But such a worldview, if it is indeed our reality, does not need to lead humanity toward collective melancholy. Bringing Sapolsky’s work back into the conversation, it is interesting that his grand call for humanity is to begin viewing individual actions as inevitable—seemingly random, yes, but determined, nonetheless. It is because of this that he says we ought “accept the absurdity of hating any person for anything they’ve done,” as “ultimately, that hatred is sadder than hating the sky for storming, hating the earth when it quakes, hating a virus because it’s good at getting into lung cells.”[14] Perhaps we could, too, add: Hating God because things do not work out in the way I had projected them to.
Of course, this sounds like a very small God—perhaps even, some might advocate, one unworthy of devotion and worship.[15] The amipotent God is small indeed, at least when compared to the aforementioned classical deity. But it is difficult to assert as being “real” because of Oord’s insistence that love is not “God’s only attribute.”[16] Conceivably his assessment is right, as a God of only love is incredibly weak, unable to do much of anything without outside assistance. However, in that weakness hides a potential strength. Perhaps, a God who is love alone is so small that it could be palatable even for those whom theism has long been a sore; and maybe it will be in a seemingly weak deity where those who find themselves on variant sides of the science-religion debate can one day find common ground.
Conceivably, as Sapolksy suggests, this could, in practicality, look like our work to become a less heartless species by understanding that everything happens because of what happened before—that the cards dealt could not have been dealt in any other way.[17] What matters is, now that we are conscious of it, we don’t simply reshuffle the deck but intentionally redeal everyone’s cards fairly, as has always been destined to happen. Perhaps in this realization we can better work with a version of the amipotent God’s empathy, desire to heal, and ability to squeeze good from bad—in a predetermined partnership—so as to better do good in its highest and most holy form.[18]
Bio: Niq Ruud is an assistant professor of history at Pacific Union College in California’s Napa Valley. He is the author of Only Love: How Everything Was, Is, and Will Be (Quoir, 2021) and is presently a postgraduate at The University of Edinburgh, researching the history and philosophy of science and religion.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Niq Ruud explores amipotence in relation to the question of cosmic determination. He rightly describes the amipotent God as one who partners with the universe, not acting from outside it but as part of the created order. In contrast, Robert Sapolsky argues that everything is entirely determined. I’m concerned that Ruud’s view, though thoughtful, risks portraying freedom as merely psychological rather than real. I remain unconvinced that a universe which is either predetermined or sequentially determined offers a hospitable environment for understanding God’s immanent, uncontrolling love. Genuine freedom seems essential to experiencing and participating in the love God offers.
For more on Oord’s view of free will as an experiential nonnegotiable, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1] I use quotations around “the universe” in this chapter to make the distinction between the universe being all reality versus a subsection of it (essentially acknowledging there could be multiple pockets of spacetime, of which our “universe” is simply one).
[2] Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (SacraSage, 2023), 120.
[3] See Brian Leftow, “God, concepts of’,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Taylor & Francis, 1998), 6.
[4] See Oord, 115.
[5] See ibid, 130-134.
[6] Oord & Wm. Andrew Schwartz, “Panentheism and Panexperientialism for Open and Relational Theology,” in Panentheism and Panpsychism, Godehard Bruntrup, et al, Editors (Brill, 2020), 234 [their emphasis].
[7] Robert Sapolsky, Determined (Penguin, 2023), 254.
[8] Sapolsky does touch on non-linear and nonlocal time, but primarily deals with classical understandings on the matter; see ibid, 237.
[9] Pierre Laplace, “Essai philosophique sur les probabilités,” in Théorie analytique des probabilités (V Courcier, 1820); translated by F.W. Truscott & F.L. Emory in A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (Dover, 1951).
[10] Sapolsky, 10. In a footnote, Oord (2023) seems to concur, saying: “I believe God knows all that’s knowable. What’s knowable includes what has occurred in the past, is occurring in the present, is possible for the future, and all forms/eternal objects,” 122.
[11] Oord, 126 [his emphasis].
[12] Niq Ruud, Only Love (Quoir, 2021), 23.
[13] Ibid, 170.
[14] Sapolsky, 403.
[15] Benedikt Gocke convincingly argues that a concept of God must be worthy of worship (“perfect-to-the-highest-degree-possible”) for that God to indeed be classified as divine. See Gocke, “Concepts of God and Models of the God-world relation,” Philosophy Compass 12, no. 2 (2017): 2.
[16] Oord, 127 [his emphasis].
[17] Sapolsky, 404.
[18] See Oord, 98-107.