Why Can’t God Do More?
By John H. Buchanan
Could God’s uncontrolling love be more powerfully persuasive than Oord’s theory suggests?
This essay examines the limits of God’s influence and power within a process metaphysics. More specifically, I question whether Thomas Jay Oord’s idea of amipotence, of a God who works solely through uncontrolling love, adequately circumscribes God’s potential powers.
I am by no means proposing to abandon Oord’s approach to the problem of evil, nor his beautiful depiction of divine love as always persuasive, never coercive. And Oord’s remarkable ability to express in such clear and simple ways these complex philosophical and theological ideas provides an invaluable service. And yet, I can’t help wondering whether the metaphysical ideas behind Oord’s theological speculations allow, or may even call, for God to be more persuasive.
First of all, it is important to establish why, in process theology, God works solely through persuasion. Metaphysically speaking, the difference between persuasion and coercion is absolute. It is the difference between “none and some.”[1] For coercion to exist, one entity must completely control another. While in persuasion, the effect partially determines itself. The fundamental reason that God does not, cannot, act coercively is directly related to what Whitehead calls the Category of the Ultimate. The key idea here is that everything actual arises out of the creative synthesis of the past many into a novel one. Every actuality is understood to possess at least some, however slight, modicum of creativity and self-determination. This means that God cannot have total control over events and thus is not omnipotent.
A pitfall concerning Oord’s (and David Griffin’s) understanding of the question of omnipotence relates to the difference between its metaphysical and psychological meanings. This potential confusion arises from applying persuasion and coercion in accord with their everyday usage. For example, threatening someone with a weapon may seem to entail full-on coercion. Yet the threatened individual in fact has a choice to resist, try to escape, call for help, beg for mercy, etc.[2] So although this may appear to be coercive from a subjective point of view, from a metaphysical perspective, this situation constitutes persuasion rather than coercion. No matter how desperate or unappealing they may be, choices are available.
Therefore, God is not omnipotent in any traditional sense.[3] In a process metaphysics, no one entity holds complete control over the becoming of another.
There is another metaphysical factor restricting God’s ability to exert coercive control over the world. As Oord makes clear, a process-informed view would prohibit God from employing what we normally think of as physical causation.[4] Since God does not have a localized body, God cannot physically act on other bodies. In Griffin’s words: “God cannot coerce, then, because God is not one finite, localized agent among many others, but the one universal, omnipresent agent.”[5]
Making a distinction between the metaphysical and psychological meanings of persuasion and coercion is helpful. Yet I can’t help wondering, even given this limitation, if God couldn’t do more. Just because total control over events by God is not a metaphysical possibility, could not God still intervene in more powerfully persuasive ways? And since the centerpiece of Oord’s theology is uncontrolling love, wouldn’t even an uncontrolling God feel compelled by love to intervene more strongly in certain situations?
For example, while a loving parent could not instantly stop a car from hitting their child, or levitate the child out of the way, they could jump in the car and hit the brakes, or push the child out of the way. But of course, these actions are exactly the kind ruled out by God’s omnipresence. That is, God lacks a localized body to physically interact with other bodies or things.
But what about the initial aim: God’s guiding influence on each occasion? Might God’s powers of persuasion via the initial aim be greater than is usually thought?
According to process philosophy, each newly unfolding event is affected by all past events (even though the influence from most is negligible). The most important contributor to every actual occasion is God’s own experience and vision of what might be. Thus, each new event begins with an unconscious intuition of God’s presence that serves as a lure for actualization. This feeling provides an ideal or a schema for how each moment might best integrate the myriad other influences also flooding into the new occasion. Of course, even though this initial aim provides important guidance, God’s influence is not completely determinative of the resulting event. This is especially true for more complex entities like human beings.
Griffin does hypothesize, however, that God’s persuasive powers might at times be considered compulsive in nature—that is, “insistent and difficult to ignore.”[6] Furthermore, God’s initial aim is often deemed to be optimally adjusted to each individual moment. This leads me to wonder why God couldn’t modulate the intensity of the initial aim to provide a stronger push in a certain direction.
If so, and God did not do so, God could be more culpable for some of the world’s evil than Oord’s amipotence would suppose.
Something else troubles me. These questions concerning the limits of God’s persuasive powers initially arose out of my interest in transpersonal psychology. I began to wonder whether God might be able to intervene in worldly matters more powerfully and directly via the use of PSI, that is, parapsychologically. The transmission of God’s initial aim operates through what Oord refers to as “nonsensuous perception,”[7] or what Whitehead calls a more primary mode of perception. This activity could well be described as a telepathic connection between God’s experience and the “creatures” (Whitehead’s actual occasions).
So, why couldn’t God’s influence, as felt through the initial aim, at times function akin to parapsychological powers? These psychic abilities could operate in a manner analogous to how the human psyche affects its own body during psychosomatic healing. But given God’s presumably far greater intensity of experience, God’s potential for PSI influence should dwarf that of any human being. If so, powerful energies for healing, psychokinesis, and telepathic compulsion would be at God’s disposal.
David Griffin describes psychokinesis in terms of an attunement between a psyche and the experiential centers of the atoms and molecules of another object or body.[8] If this is the case, God’s consequent nature[9] might have the ability to exert energies of parapsychological compulsion to push humans toward better decisions, or even to use telekinesis to align the atoms of objects in such a way as to avert accidents or even natural disasters. To be clear, though, these kinds of PSI powers would still be persuasive in nature, metaphysically speaking, since they rely primarily on attunement between events, rather than on brute force.
The explanation that I have been offered about why none of this is plausible revolves around God’s omnipresence. I can see how God’s nonlocalization prevents physical causation of the everyday variety. But I don’t understand how the explanation that “God is omnipresent” is applicable to why God cannot exert directed PSI powers. At first blush, it might seem reasonable to hold that even a purely spiritual being would need to be localized in order to enact PSI influence. However, I think this is belied by the idea of the initial aim being carefully attuned to each event according its own particular circumstances. From this perspective, God is already telepathically in touch with every new moment, so why not more powerfully in touch? If God is attuned to us in this way, why not do more fine tuning when called for?
This issue is complicated by the development of Whitehead’s thought about God’s nature and how the initial aim is derived.[10] If it primarily comes out of the primordial nature’s valuation of pure possibilities, then the initial aim might only give gentle, general guidance. But if the consequent nature’s mediation of the creative advance is more prominent, then the initial aim would be more particular and forceful, I should think.
These two formulations lead to distinctive ways of understanding how the initial aim functions. Is it fine-tuned to very specific ideal outcomes for every moment? Or is there a more general push toward increasingly valuable experiences, including beauty, the good, intensity, truth, and the multitude of values related to these principles? For example, just how hard was God trying to persuade Hitler to shut down the SS, to stop listening to Goering, or even to go back to art school? Or was God’s influence on Hitler’s initial aims directed at fostering a more loving, kind, and empathetic person?
Or perhaps the cosmological check on God’s powers is more logistical in nature. Maybe God’s limited ability to affect events more directly is a temporal issue, or one of complexity.
The former limitation could grow out of the temporal duration created by God’s moments of experience. The duration of actual occasions is thought to get longer as the complexity of the event increases (atomic events being extremely short, human occasions being perhaps one tenth or twentieth of a second). How much larger still might be the Divine moments of experience? Perhaps God’s occasions are far too long to allow for detailed adjustments to every initial aim of every new (much shorter) event. If so, in many cases, the initial aim could be limited to a push toward ideals of a more general nature. In this case, some instances of evil could occur simply because they arise within the gaps in God’s ongoing involvement with the creative advance.
Regarding limitations due to complexity, I wonder if with billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, the universe is too labyrinthine even for God to provide a new, fine-tuned initial aim for every moment of every entity. Perhaps a less ambitious hypothesis would entail God drawing primarily on the hierarchical values envisioned within the primordial nature. Guidance from initial aims would still be adjusted to changing circumstances—but more slowly—through the long-term experiences of the consequent nature’s engagement with the universe.
Bio: John H. Buchanan received his master’s degree in humanistic/transpersonal psychology from West Georgia College and his doctorate from the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University. His book, Processing Reality: Finding Meaning in Death, Psychedelics, and Sobriety, based upon his continuing interests in process philosophy and transpersonal psychology, was published in the fall of 2022.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
John Buchanon wonders if God could be more persuasive than I have depicted God. I’ve previously argued, as John does here, that “coercion” is typically a psychological, not metaphysical, concept. However, John wonders why God couldn’t amplify the intensity of the initial aim to push creation in a specific direction, thereby preventing some evils. My response is that if God could do more to prevent evil but doesn’t, God becomes culpable for allowing preventable harm. A God operating at “half-throttle” is neither loving nor just. I believe God always does the absolute best possible in every moment to prevent evil.
For more on Oord’s view of coercion in its psychological and metaphysical senses, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. David Ray Griffin, Evil Revisited: Responses and Reconsiderations (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), 102. Fortunately, I consulted this excellent study by Griffin, which addressed a number of my questions, and put a fine point on others.
[2]. See Griffin, Evil Revisited, 102-6.
[3]. However, a process God is omnipotent in the sense of being as powerful as any Being could be in a universe with real novelty and shared creativity.
[4]. Thomas Jay Oord, God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love After Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils (USA: SacraSage, 2019), 32-34.
[5]. Griffin, Evil Revisited, 104.
[6]. Griffin, Evil Revisited, 106-7.
[7]. Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence (USA: SacraSage, 2023), 136.
[8]. David Ray Griffin. Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 144-45.
[9]. Whitehead describes two fundamental aspects of God. The primordial nature is God’s eternal, graded envisagement of all potential forms. The consequent nature represents God’s conscious engagement with all creation.
[10]. See Griffin, Evil Revisited, 106-9.