Last Thursday I posted my second recent essay revisiting the problem of evil, arguing that the most common and popular solutions to this thorny problem don’t ultimately work.
Why Traditional “Solutions” to the Problem of Evil Don’t Work
In this final essay on the problem of evil, I suggest some strategic changes that provide an entirely different angle on the issue than most traditional attempts employ.
The problem of evil arises when one assumes the omnipotence and omnibenevolence of God while also observing the evil and suffering that is rampant in our world. Traditional approaches start with the assumptions about God then seek to adjust the reality of our experience to those assumptions—approaches which either require us to ignore some of our experience or play the “mystery” card when things get tough. I suggest that the proper starting point is what we know—our own experience—rather than starting with assumptions about what we want God to be.
What we know about love and power from our human experience, for instance, reveals that they are incompatible. To the extent that one chooses to love, one also chooses to set power aside. If a theist seeks to piece together a tentative sketch of what is greater than us starting with what we experience on a daily basis, the theist will have to choose between divine love and divine power as possible starting points. There is undoubtedly evidence in relevant sacred texts for both possibilities, but one cannot have it both ways.
Not even God, I would argue. If one chooses to begin with the assumption of God’s love, as I do, one is already choosing to deny God’s omnipotence. After many years of spinning my wheels in the problem of evil rut, saddled as a person of faith from my youth with the traditional conception of God as all-powerful and all-loving, it was the work of the 20th century philosopher, theologian, social activist, and all-around iconoclast Simone Weil that provided me with the tools to escape the rut. Weil’s evocative claim that “the absence of God is the most marvelous testimony of perfect love” is a one sentence expression of her belief that if God created the world out of love and invites a response to that love, then by necessity God must step back from creation as God waits and hopes for a free and loving response from the creatures God created. God chooses, in other words, radical love at the expense of radical power.
I teach this aspect of Weil’s thought frequently to mostly Catholic juniors and seniors in an honors capstone seminar. The students invariably find the idea of a God who out of love chooses diminishment in power to be challenging, to say the least. Yet the evidence for such an interpretation is at the heart of the Christian narrative. God became human and lived a human life in humility and weakness; from within these parameters, parameters that define all of us, the world was changed forever.
In last Thursday’s essay I briefly mentioned a recent episode of the podcast “The Bible for Normal People” in which Pete Enns and Jared Byas conversed with theologian and philosopher Thomas Jay Oord about the problem of evil. Their conversation raised a number of interesting issues that are worth considering.
Thomas Jay Oord has coined a word—“amipotence”—to describe his own conception of a God who is wholly and completely love (and hence not omnipotent). From the podcast:
To use philosophical language, I think God is maximally powerful. But God’s power is always shaped by love. So if you want to talk about sovereign love, the word I’ve invented is amipotent, “ami” for love, “potent” for power. God’s power is the power of uncontrolling love.
I like this strategy a great deal, but Oord takes the implications of “amipotence” in a direction that I have not to this point considered fully. My own conviction has for some time been, influenced by Weil’s thought, that God chooses to reduce divine power in the interest of divine love, with the (unspoken) implication that God could, under certain circumstances, choose to use the divine power that has been set aside (as in the case of miracles, for instance) for reasons known only to God, just as a loving parent might choose to use their power and authority to override the free (but harmful) choices of a child.
Noting that he has “friends who think that God chooses voluntarily not to control at least most of the time, but could if God wanted to, and maybe occasionally does,” Oord says, “I have a God whose nature is love, and always loves, has to love and therefore can’t control anyone, or anything.” An amipotent God does not put omnipotence in its back pocket, ready to be pulled out on occasion when necessary. A amipotent God, one whose very nature is “uncontrolling love,” cannot set love aside for the sake of power. There is a huge difference between a being who chooses to love but might on occasion override love with power, and a being who essence is love and, accordingly, cannot control or manipulate—even for the best reasons.
Oord’s conception of God as amipotent fits well with what we have learned through science about our physical reality over the past century or so. At the foundation of our world is change and unpredictability, an open-endedness that belies our assumptions that at the core of things is stability and permanence. Although everything influences everything else, nothing controls anything. As Oord notes in the podcast, this has had a powerful effect on both philosophy and theology.
[This is] a way of looking at reality that says no one can control anybody else in the sense of being the only cause. And when I say no one, that includes God. Even God can’t control a worm. God can’t control you and me. God influences everyone and everything at every moment at all levels of complexity, but this God can’t control anyone or anything . . . Most of Christian theology has been written from a philosophical assumption that we call “substance philosophy,” which says, “Well, there’s some changes, but they’re not really changes to what’s at the core of what it is.” And process says, “No, we should start with change as we try to understand reality.”
As noted earlier, there is a big difference between believing that God chooses not to be powerful in the interest of love and saying that because God is essentially love, God cannot be powerful in a way that would violate love.
I have believed the former for some time now; I am not yet ready to commit to the latter, much stronger claim. This is not something that can be decided by going to the sacred texts—the Bible has extensive evidence to support belief in both an omnipotent and an omnibenevolent God. God both changes and does not change in scripture, sometimes in consecutive passages. The choice to believe in God’s existence is the beginning of choices, not the end. What God do I choose to believe in? What sort of God makes sense in the context of the world I experience daily? As Oord describes at the end of the podcast,
I think that’s something that a lot of people are hungering for, frankly. They want to hold on to this faith. But it can’t look the way it did. It has to have something else in the center of it. It can’t have coercion and control, and mental assent and heady theological frameworks, but has to have this relationality and this love at the center.
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