The Force and Form of Love and God’s Cosmic Body

By Darren Iammarino

God must move into states of togetherness, but God chooses to love according to philia, storge, and agape.

On page 140 of The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence, Thomas Jay Oord, under a section entitled, “Putting it Together,” lays out eight claims to help us answer the question, “what does God actually do?” I am in near complete agreement with points two and four-eight. However, I believe that point number one needs to be modified and point number three can be made more compelling and refined with different examples.

Issue #1: God Must Love

Point one is as follows, “The amipotent Spirit always loves everyone and everything” (Oord, 140). This particular formulation I have no issue with; however, it is the details that lead to a problem. When spelling out what he means here, Oord states, “In amipotence, by contrast, divine love comes logically prior to sovereign choice. Consequently, God has to love creatures and creation; it’s God’s eternal nature to do so. When love comes first, God cannot choose not to love” [emphases mine]. There are three issues or potential problems that seem to arise here. First, if God must be in loving relationships with all creatures, is that really the best or healthiest analogy for an ideal or genuine love relationship? I certainly would not want my significant other to only be with me because they had no choice. Furthermore, it is odd to me that humans have the free will power to choose not to love God, but God can’t do that. It does not seem that this is a logical contradiction for God to be able to choose not to love.

Continuing to address the first problem, can we draw fair parallels to human love relationships when Oord appears to still hold to the belief that, “the Maker always makes love recipients” (Oord, 126), “God necessarily and everlastingly creates others to love” (Oord, 127), “amipotence assumes that divine love always and necessarily provides power to creatures” (Oord, 127). If God still is the one who created us and granted us power, then it can theoretically be taken away at some future point. My apparent love for God seems radically mismatched when it comes to the power in the relationship. God made me and so I feel inferior and indebted to God and also God cannot help but be in a loving relationship with me. Maybe God does not want to be in a loving relationship with me anymore due to the decisions I have made with the power God gave me? However, God is compelled by nature to remain engaged. These sorts of potential dynamics, if superimposed onto purely human relationships, would not look very good to independent observers nor feel very good for the participants of the relationship.

To deal with point number one from a different angle, and move towards a possible alternative approach, we will need to briefly look at the Platonic Forms and also at Whitehead’s notion of togetherness at the beginning of his work, Process and Reality. Before doing that, though, I will first jump straight to my claims and suggestions for a revision to point number one. A pluralistic metaphysics provides a superior answer when talking about God and love, and it does so in two ways. First, love can be understood as a universal, capable of being instantiated in numerous actual entities simultaneously. Most of these universals, as abstract entities, can be within the mind of God and part of God’s essence, but it should be highlighted that at least some of these Forms or universals, like love, are a set of initial data given for God and also given as available for other simple actual entities. What I am getting at is that it might be useful to be able to think of the Forms, including perfect love, as a separate component of ultimate reality, related to, but separable from, the rest of God. The love of philia, storge, and agape can be primary and God’s defining attributes as Oord claims, but if we eternally have a pluralistic metaphysics, then the Form of love can also be instantiated in other entities. This means that God may be love, but love is love as a distinct ideal entity, blueprint, archetype, or initial and eternal data that is accessible to all entities within our reality.

The second way in which a pluralistic metaphysics helps to understand God and God’s love is through Whitehead’s view on “Creativity as the ultimate of ultimates” and togetherness. Here, it is more about love as an impersonal force—eros—that automatically exists as a third term when you have God plus other actual entities. It would be akin to gravity in that when you have two massive bodies proximity then there is a gravitational pull towards a state of togetherness. This is viewing love as eros, but in the most abstract sense of a force that pulls all actual entities into a state of togetherness and sharing of feelings and information. Love, thus conceived, is all-encompassing and so we could suggest a term like paneneros with God and all other actual entities within love. This would somewhat exonerate God for constantly wanting to relate with us, even if we don’t want to; we all have to, period. It is not up to any of us to choose. We are forced into togetherness again and again by the attractive force of “love as eros.” Given that may well be the dynamic of the universe, then “we best define the love in amipotence as acting intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being” (Oord, 122). We are all interrelated and it is in everyone’s best interest to help work towards flourishing.

Issue #2: God Does Not Have a Body

Point three is as follows, “The amipotent Spirit has no body but has material and mental dimensions” (Oord, 140). I agree that “God is a universal but invisible spirit without a localized body” (Oord, 130). However, I guess the question is what would a divine body even mean or look like; what is the appropriate scale? True, God walking in the garden or Moses seeing God’s back may all be metaphorical, but can’t the entire cosmos be conceived as God’s body? I have a body, but I can’t localize my psyche down to a skin cell that has developed cancer and make it go away at that cellular scale. Nevertheless, I have a body and intermediate networks that transmit information for me.

There are two things I am driving at here. First, can the whole cosmos be understood as God’s body in whom we live and move and have our being? The quick answer here seems to be: yes. Many other panentheists and pandeists have suggested as much. I am not sure if this is Dr. Oord’s position or not, but either way, I agree with him about nonsensory perception and that, “we may infer the Spirit’s activities, however, from what we observe in the world” (Oord, 137-138).

In fact, contrary to Oord, we may soon be able to directly observe some aspects of God’s body. There are many spheres, horizons, boundaries and membranes operating at a very large macroscopic scale, such as: event horizons, our cosmological horizon, dark matter halos around galaxies, and possibly a noosphere developing around Earth. All too often, the focus with God is on the inconceivably large and so God vanishes into immateriality and mystery. However, there are other scales and ways to probe the seemingly immaterial. For example, recent insights into holography and the AdS/CFT correspondence, as well as breakthroughs in the dark sector where it may now be likely that dark matter particles can form dark atoms and dark stars etc. all highlight the notion that there are material and likely mental aspects of the universe that we are able to witness, albeit dimly.

This leads me to my final proposition, which is to shift the focus onto the intermediate realms between the human scale and the largest possible scale, which represents God as a whole. This area has traditionally been the domain of angels and messengers highlighting the role of information transference across large scales. Today, we can do way better and I suggest that some of these spherical boundaries be understood as godlike, material, and mental. This helps to bridge the gap to God’s cosmic body, as encompassing all of whatever reality ultimately entails. It might even be useful to discuss “polyenmicrotheisms” or polyliminal panentheism where these various domains constitute something similar to cells within God’s cosmic body, which are able to share information due to holography and quantum entanglement. On this view, the Spirit’s activities which seem incorporeal and immaterial are actually information being transmitted via different processes due to the distinct scales. I don’t speak English to my cells; ligands encode chemical messages, or physical signals occur via light, temperature, pressure etc. God may be operating directly via nonsensory perception or prehensions, but also via other larger scale activities.

This is the final point of potential disagreement with Oord’s views. He seems to propose that only God operates universally and “Creaturely action is localized” (Oord, 138). However, it seems that, at least to some extent, all actual entities affect all others via Whitehead’s principle of relativity and via partial or complete quantum entanglements within spacetime. It is just that God has the most profound degree of moment-to-moment influence because God provides relevant, ordered options as initial aims, which thus stand out and are valued up.

In the end, I believe that Oord’s numerous writings have done a tremendous service to those open-minded Christians who would love to reconcile their faith with reason and with a theology based in love and hope. It is my hope that he continues to explore unique ways to navigate open theism, Christianity, and process-relational theology.

Bio: Darren Iammarino (PhD) joined the faculty at the University of San Diego in 2022. He specializes in comparative religious studies, interreligious dialogue, and process theology. He earned his doctorate in philosophy of religion from Claremont Graduate University in 2010. In 2024 Dr. Iammarino launched a YouTube channel called Two Truths, which explores controversial topics in: religion, philosophy, and history.

OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE

Darren Iammarino offers two criticisms of amipotence. The first has to do with my claim that God must love. There is a disanalogy here between God and creatures. Darren suggests the idea that the forms of love are available to creatures and are not identical with God. I agree. Saying God must love does not contradict saying the forms of love are available to all. I’m not attracted to identifying eros with creativity. I think that doing so undermines the notion that creatures do not always love, a notion common in scripture and everyday living. Darren also raises the issue of whether the universe can be God’s body. I think it is in a metaphorical sense. Unlike the mind-body analogy for humans in which both mind and body are creaturely, the God-world analogy should not portray the world as divine.

For more on Oord’s view of why God must love us, see this article.

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