Divine Power and Evil

A Reply to Process Theodicy

Kenneth K. Pak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472463050
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317148890
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Evil perplexes us all and threatens to undermine the meaningfulness of our existence. How can we reconcile the reality of evil with the notion of a God who is perfectly good and powerful? Process theodicy, whose foremost proponent is David Griffin, suggests one answer: because every being possesses its own power of self-determination in order for God to attain the divine aim of higher goodness for the world, God must take the risk of the possibility of evil. Divine Power and Evil responds to Griffin's criticisms against traditional theodicy, assesses the merits of process theodicy, and points out ways in which traditional theism could incorporate a number of Griffin's valuable insights in progressing toward a philosophically and theologically satisfactory theodicy. It provides a new and important contribution to a long-standing debate within philosophy of religion and theology.

1 God's Persuasive Power and the Correlations of Value and Power in Process Theism

How can we answer Epicurus’s old questions? Can we make sense of what Bayle calls monuments of human misery and wickedness we see all around us? Is it really possible to reconcile the unbearable reality of evil with a belief in a providential God who is perfect in power and goodness?

As Griffin sees it, a satisfactory response to this problem of evil is indeed possible, but not if we continue to maintain the traditional theistic notion of divine omnipotence. He thinks that the problem of evil is uniquely a problem for traditional theism because it sees divine omnipotence as deity “having no essential limitations upon the exercise of its will.”¹ The problem is stated as follows:

• 1 God is a perfect reality. (Definition)
• 2 A perfect reality is an omnipotent being. (By definition)
• 3 An omnipotent being could unilaterally bring about an actual world without any genuine evil. (By definition)
• 4 A perfect reality is a morally perfect being. (By definition)
• 5 A morally perfect being would want to bring about an actual world without any genuine evil. (By definition)
• 6 If there is genuine evil in the world, then there is no God. (Logical conclusion from 1 through 5)
• 7 There is genuine evil in the world. (Factual statement)
• 8 Therefore, there is no God. (Logical conclusion from 6 and 7)²
• (Hereafter, I will refer to these premises and conclusion as P1, P2 . . . P8.)

The key issue here for Griffin is this: What does it mean for God to possess perfect power (P2)? Does it mean God possessing power to unilaterally bring about a world without any genuine evil (P3)? Griffin thinks that traditional theism affirms this. But then there’s a problem: If God possesses such power, if P2 does imply P3, then why didn’t God create a world without genuine evil? God’s moral perfection seems to demand that he does. We are now back to Epicurus’s perplexing question: Whence comes evil? As the syllogism suggests, doesn’t the reality of evil simply imply that a God of perfect reality doesn’t exist?

To adequately respond to the problem of evil, Griffin contends that we need to redefine the notion of divine omnipotence. We must redefine it so that God’s perfect power does not extend to God being able to bring about a world without genuine evil. Griffin claims to redefine divine omnipotence in light of metaphysical necessities. These metaphysical necessities correspond to what Griffin sees as a three-step argument for process theodicy. Griffin describes the three-step argument as follows:

The first step in this process theodicy was the explanation as to why the power of God in the world is necessarily persuasive rather than controlling. The second step involved raising the explicit consciousness or at least implicit knowledge that intensity as well as harmony is required for the more valuable form of experience, so that moral goodness will seek to overcome unnecessary triviality as well as discord. The third step is the explication of the correlations involving value and power that are implicit in the foregoing sketch of the evolutionary process by which the present state of our world was created out of a more chaotic state.³

The metaphysical necessities involved in the three-step argument will be discussed more fully. But briefly, the first step shows that there exists a multiplicity of beings in any possible world, thereby making God’s power over the world necessarily persuasive rather than unilaterally controlling. The second step explicates how the metaphysical nature of God’s goodness directs the world toward the highest value possible (harmony and intensity), thereby making it necessary for at least a possibility of evil (triviality and discord). The third step shows the reality of metaphysical correlations of value and power, according to which the capacity for good, the capacity for evil, and power of self-determination all rise and fall proportionately with one another, the consequence being that one cannot have the capacity for good without the capacity for evil as well. Griffin contends that these three metaphysical necessities make it impossible for God to unilaterally bring about a world without genuine evil.

In this chapter and the next, I discuss the metaphysical necessities involved in Griffin’s three-step argument. In the present chapter, I examine (1) the metaphysical necessities that imply the persuasive nature of God’s power and (2) the necessary correlations of value and power. In Chapter 2, I take up (3) the metaphysical necessity involved in God’s divine aim. (I am rearranging the order of discussion between Griffin’s second and third steps.)

Metaphysical Views of the World and God's Power

According to Griffin, how we see God’s power is closely tied with our metaphysical view of the world. He sees the metaphysical views of the world in both traditional theism and in process theism as being reflected in their respective doctrines of creation.

Creation Out of Nothing: The Contingency of the World and the Monistic Power of God

As Griffin sees it, the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, the doctrine that says that God creates the world out of absolute nothingness, implies a purely contingent nature of the world and a monistic nature of God’s power. According to the doctrine, God freely creates the entire universe so that everything in it is brought into existence from absolute nothingness. Since the whole of the universe is from nothing, there is no inherent necessity to the universe prior to its coming into existence. Process thinkers such as Whitehead consider this view as “a wholly transcendent God creating out of nothing an accidental universe.”⁴ Since the whole of the universe is accidental, there is not a single metaphysical necessity belonging to the world. All that is ingrained in the universe is assigned to it on the occasion of creation. The nature of the universe, therefore, is completely contingent. What’s more, Griffin thinks that this contingent nature of the universe applies not only to this particular world, but to any possible world. For the doctrine implies that any universe would be brought into existence freely by God who is wholly transcendent, a God who is “independent not simply of our present universe . . . but of any universe of finite existents whatsoever.”⁵

In Griffin’s thinking, if the universe is wholly contingent, then it has no inherent power of its own since nothing in the universe has inherent essence or necessity in itself. There is “no power that essentially and aboriginally belongs to any other being (dualism) or beings (pluralism)” but God.⁶ God is “the sole formative element of our world.”⁷ All of the aboriginal power of the universe essentially belongs to God. Any powers that finite beings seem to possess are merely apparent powers. They are either mere illusions or at best derivative powers: “God has voluntarily given power to them.” They are neither genuine nor inherent powers. This means that the doctrine of creation out of nothing ultimately implies a monistic perspective of God’s power over the world; “God’s power in relation to the world is therefore unilateral power.” It is a relation in which “God can unilaterally determine what will happen, if God chooses to do so.”⁸ Conversely, the world “has no inherent power, no power of its own, with which it could resist the divine will.”⁹

In view of this doctrine, Griffin does not see how traditional theism could respond adequately to the problem of evil. For, if the world is completely contingent and has no inherent power of its own, if God possesses complete and unilateral power over the world, why didn’t God unilaterally create a world without genuine evil? He sure could have!

Creation Out of Chaos: Metaphysical Necessities in Multiplicity of Beings

Griffin’s process view of the world and the nature of God’s power are deeply rooted in the process doctrine of creation out of chaos. In spite of what its name might imply, the creation out of chaos does not mean that the world was created out of pure or absolute chaos. Whitehead thinks that “the immanence of God gives reasons for the belief that pure chaos is intrinsically impossible.”¹⁰ Indeed, the state from which our current epoch arose was very primitive, so primitive that it didn’t even have the elemental energy such as quarks or photons.¹¹ Nevertheless, Griffin claims that such a state is still “the final state of the previous world”; and as such, that state too was “the product of divine activity.”¹² And no matter how puerile a condition of a state might have been, says Griffin, there would have been at least “the order expressive of the metaphysical principle.”¹³

Unlike the traditional view of creation, this process doctrine of creation does “not involve the absolute beginning of finite existence.” Rather, creation involves “the achievement of order out of a pre-existing chaos.”¹⁴ This resembles the creation portrayed in Plato’s Timaeus: the supreme deity whom Plato calls the Craftsman, or Demiurge, forming the world out of pre-existing plastic material stuff called Receptacle.¹⁵

Since creation involves God’s reordering of pre-existing entities, “there has always been and always will be a plurality of individuals.”¹⁶ God does not create them into existence; they exist even prior to the creation event; they actually exist without beginning. As such they are necessary beings. Lest anyone wonders how a finite being could be considered as a necessary being, Griffin contends that this idea is no less intelligible than the necessary existence of God: “if it is intelligible to hold that the existence of God requires no explanation, since something must exist necessarily and ‘of itself,’ then it is not unintelligible to hold that that which exists necessarily is God and a realm of non-divine actualities.”¹⁷

The reality of a multiplicity of beings, for process theists, means that there exist certain metaphysical principles inherent in the world. As we shall presently see, process thinkers think that there is power inherent in all actual beings, whether infinite or finite. In each actual being, there are twofold powers, one of them ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 God's Persuasive Power and the Correlations of Value and Power in Process Theism
• 2 The Process God's Divine Aim and the Risk of Evil
• 3 Delimiting the Traditional Notion of Divine Omnipotence
• 4 Metaphysical Hypotheses and Divine Omnipotence
• 5 Meaning, Hope and Worshipfulness of the Process God
• 6 Monistic Power of God in Traditional Theism
• 7 Incompatibility of Freedom in Free-will Theism
• 8 Why God Does Not Prevent All Evil
• 9 Genuine Evil and the Task of the Philosophical Theologian
• 10 Conclusion: Toward a More Adequate Theodicy
• Bibliography
• Index