I intend in the near future to do an extended blog review/critique of Tom Oord’s provocatively titled book The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence (2023). Partially in preparation for that, I thought I should do some reflection on the concept of omnipotence. This is me grappling with the topic from my “armchair.”
1. Monotheism
In the first place, then, among monotheists omnipotence is universally regarded as a core divine attribute. By monotheism I mean the view that a singular, personal God is the sole ultimate foundation of reality. This has two implications. One is that if we were to take a complete inventory of reality, then everything on the list would either be God or something that is ultimately wholly sourced in God. The word “ultimately” is important here because I want monotheism to accommodate derivative / non-foundational beings that can have enough delegated independence from God to be proximate sources of their own contributions to reality. My worry is that if God must be the immediate or proximate source of everything (other than Himself) then monotheism will collapse into pantheistic monism and/or occasionalism. By virtue of their delegated independence, non-foundational beings are not mere extensions of God’s being, operations, or will. God has gifted them a degree of agency in their own right. Because this agency is gifted, however, it is still ultimately sourced in God.
A second implication of monotheism is that, as the sole ultimate source of everything other than Himself, there must be at least an initial explanatory moment in which nothing exists but God and God alone. This aspect of monotheism entails creation ex nihilo (CEN), which says that if God directly or proximately brings about the existence of anything other than Himself, then the coming-to-be of those things does not depend, even partially, on anything co-fundamental alongside God.
Note: As a process theist, Oord categorically rejects CEN. He is, therefore, not a “monotheist” as I use that term. While he believes in the foundational existence of a singular being that He calls “God,” He does not believe that this God is the sole ultimate foundation of reality. On the process worldview, God and “creation” are co-necessary and co-fundamental aspects of a larger “world process,” with God supplying the guiding “form” / telos and each successive stage of creation supplying the “matter” for the next stage of the world process.
2. Omnipotence as a divine perfection
Why is omnipotence universally regarded by monotheists as a core divine attribute? There are at least three reasons.
First, it’s a direct implication of monotheism and its CEN corollary that all (omni-) power (potency) is ultimately sourced in God. There can never be any possibility in all of reality that God does not, at some level, make possible. This does not mean, however, that God necessarily exercises all power, otherwise no creatures could have enough independence from God to exercise delegated agency in their own right. But it does mean that whatever power / agency creatures have, they get it ultimately from God.
Second, it’s an implication of the religious idea that God is worship-worthy to the highest possible degree. If God is to command our complete and unconditional allegiance, such that we can be called to love and worship Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Matt. 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27), without any hint of reservation or conditionality, then He must be the greatest possible being, one who can never be upstaged by a greater, more worthy being. A weak God who could never do anything (like create ex nihilo) without depending on something else, would not be worship-worthy in this way. The Bible says God can “do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20) and it is (in part at least) for that reason that He is to be glorified by us forever (Eph. 3:21).
Third, the idea (derived from worship-worthiness) that God is the greatest possible being leads to what is known as perfect being theology (PBT). This is the heuristic idea that God’s necessary attributes include whatever it is absolutely better to be than not to be. There is no complete agreement among monotheists as to what attributes are entailed by this idea, but virtually everyone agrees that God must be necessarily existent, perfectly good and loving (omnibenevolent), have perfect knowledge of all of reality (omniscient), and (as the ultimate source of all power) be able to do anything that it is categorically better to be able to do than not (omnipotent).
The upshot is that, to live up to these three guiding motivations, omnipotence needs to be conceived in a way that is both maximally expansive (i.e., we shouldn’t limit God’s powers any more than necessary) and absolutely perfective (i.e., we should exclude any putative powers that detract from God’s overall perfection). One way to capture both sides of this is to say, as scholar Ryan Mullins does, that omnipotence is “the most power-granting set of abilities with no liabilities,” where a “liability” is an ability that, were God to have it, would be a net negative for God’s overall greatness. For example, the ability to renege on one’s promises is a liability because it would undermine God’s worship-worthiness. How can we unreservedly worship a God whom we can’t trust to keep His promises?
3. Defining omnipotence
While Mullins’ description of omnipotence is a good starting point, it doesn’t tell us anything about what sorts of abilities are “power-granting” and which are “liabilities.” What sorts of abilities contribute positively to God’s overall perfection and which detract from it?
Since we want God’s power to be maximally expansive, it is sufficient to delineate major categories of liabilities and to hold, presumptively at least, that for any putative ability A, God can do A unless it becomes clear upon reflection that A is a liability. So, let’s categorize some liabilities:
One category of liabilities are abilities a full description of which yields logical incoherence. Thus, creating a square circle, making it such that 2+2=5, making a stone so heavy that God can’t lift it, and making it such that God never created after having created are liabilities. If God can do the logically impossible, then we immediately lose all cognitive purchase on God. This completely undercuts theology since such a God could make it that, for any quality Q, God is both Q and not Q. And since we cannot truly worship that which we cannot even partly understand, a God whose abilities put Him beyond logic is not one we can properly worship.
Another category of liabilities are abilities that negate or undermine one or more of God’s other great-making attributes. The ability to commit deicide, for example, would negate God’s necessary existence. Likewise, causing or intending moral evil would negate God’s perfect goodness. Unilaterally consigning creatures to eternal conscious torment in hell would negate God’s perfect love. Forgetting information would negate God’s omniscience. Acting foolishly or irrationally would negate God’s perfect rationality. And so on.
Yet another category of liabilities are abilities that God cannot do qua God because the ability presupposes creaturely limitations of one sort or another. For example, God can’t pick His nose qua God because God as such is not bound by any physical form. The “qua God” qualifier is important here, though. As a Christian I believe God can take on a physical form, just as God the Son took on human nature and a human body in the incarnation. As incarnate, that is, qua human, God the Son can pick His nose, eat fish, suckle at Mary’s breast, bleed, and die on a cross.
I’m going to stop here for now. There may be other major categories of liabilities worth identifying, but I doubt it’s necessary to enumerate them all. I say this because it seems very likely the above categories can be reduced to something more basic. Indeed, all three of the categories I have identified entail incoherence of one sort or another. The first category concerns logical incoherence in the complete description of an act (the exercise of an ability). The second category concerns a sort of metaphysical incoherence between the exercise of an ability and other divine perfections. And the third category concerns abilities that cannot be exercised through the divine nature (i.e., qua God) even if they can be exercised by God through an assumed creaturely nature. The sort of incoherence involved in the third category may be reducible to that of the second. For example, one reason why God can’t pick His nose qua God is because having a nose or any other physical body part conflicts with God’s omnipresence. And the sort of incoherence involved in the second category may be reducible to that of the first if we consider not merely the logical coherence of ability A in the abstract but the logical coherence of God’s exercising A. The main difficulty with this latter reduction is that it can only be carried out if we have a full description of the divine nature, and since it’s impossible for us creatures to grasp a full description of the divine nature, this reduction would be one that only God could perform. Still, even if we cannot carry out a conceptual reduction of these three categories, so long God as can do it there is in effect a logical and metaphysical reduction of all three categories. In sum, then, while it’s helpful for our understanding to distinguish different categories of liabilities, very plausibly they all reduce down to internal incoherence of one sort or another.
Without assuming reduction of my three liability categories, I propose the following preliminary definition of omnipotence:
S is omnipotent =def. S can perform any ability A such that (a) a complete description of A is logically coherent, (b) A is compatible with any attribute that it is absolutely better to be than not, and (c) if A presupposes limitation L, then A can be done by S only qua a type of being for whom L is appropriate and which type of being S can assume without divesting Himself of any attribute that it is absolutely better to be than not.
That’s a bit of a mouthful. I’m sure it can be chisholmed into something better. If we do assume that all liabilities ultimately reduce to internal incoherence, then we can simplify the definition as follows:
S is omnipotent =def. S can perform any ability A such that a complete description of A and of S’s exercising A is internally coherent.
Hi Alan,
I think one of the things I struggle with concerning your general posts is that your thinking tends to stick to a logic that is very limiting. Perhaps it’s a bit like a 2D character trying to describe 3D, or a monochrome person attempting to talk about vibrant colors. I’m not sure quite how to put it into words, so I’m going to pick a couple examples of this current post to see if I can get my point across…
1. Monotheism, 1st paragraph: “if we were to take a complete inventory of reality, then everything on the list would either be God or something that is ultimately wholly sourced in God”
a. I find myself unsure that we have the ability to force binary categorization on the divine, a nature and state of being we know so little about. It seems to me that sometimes in order to get a closer determination of what IS in regard to that nature, we have a better chance of approaching it in an apophatic way, i.e. I’m not exactly sure what the Father IS, but I feel confident that He is not X, Y, or Z. Having been exposed to a lot of mystical theology, I always find it a risky practice to state too strongly that a certain answer has to be either this or that. While sometimes it does seem like a necessary evil, in drawing that dividing line I think we risk dropping the conversation down to a different level where much is lost. If you want me to declare either chocolate or vanilla as the best ice cream flavor, then you lose any discussion of other flavors AND the nuance of different varieties of both the original flavors.
2. Monotheism, 1st paragraph: “ I want monotheism to accommodate X [in this case, derivative / non-foundational beings that can have enough delegated independence from God to be proximate sources of their own contributions to reality]”
a. As an amateur philosopher myself, I do understand that this wanting is fully necessary to move ideas forward. I only mention this because one also needs to guard against these desires taking the lead. A parallel example would be a scientist that wants his theory to be true so much that he (intentionally or not) disregards the actual evidence that comes up in the results of the experiment. In effect he sometimes finds what he’s looking for ONLY because his vision was so narrow that he was unable to see anything else.
That was a general comment, but now I wanted to speak more directly to your topic of independent, non-foundational beings. I have found that while we want to fall back on “either/or” logic, God seems to operate by and insist on “both/and”. Subscribing to that in this case, I don’t believe there is a discrepancy in the existence of beings which both a) are wholly sourced by God and b) have their own independence. Supporting ideas…
1. I find it easy to believe that all existence lies inside the mind of God. If He stopped thinking of any of it, it would cease to be. This is something which makes us uneasy because we know our own human limitations and can identify with them much more easily than we can believe that God doesn’t have these problems. For Him, nothing is unmade or dropped from thought except that He would do it on purpose.
2. From this foundation, I believe that He not only created us but is in fact continually creating us moment by moment. Therefore His sustainment of us is much more than just “keeping the lights on” but rather Him providing the ability for everything in us to continue AND grow – in a very active way that we would find exhausting and impossible.
3. HOWEVER, we are also a prime example of one of those independent beings you speak of. Even though He is in fact sustaining our very beings at all times, it does not follow that we lack independence. With free will and many other qualities, He has gifted us with the ability to act contrary to Him, apart from Him, autonomously.
4. Certain choices we could make would in fact cause us to grow farther away from Him. Separating oneself from one’s life source leads to inevitably to death, but this truth is not in conflict with the truth that we have been created with a great amount of independence. In fact we are called to make the right choices FREELY. Anything less or more constrained goes against the whole reason we were created.
5. The angels are another example of created beings whose whole existence is “funded” by God – and yet have been given autonomy, agency to act based on their own decisions, whether right or wrong.
What I’m wondering here is your attraction to having “enough delegated independence from God to be proximate sources of their own contributions to reality”. What is it that you want to be true in order to accept the idea of monotheism and His omnipotence? At first glance at least this desire reminds me of the reason the Fall in the Garden happened in the first place, i.e. I want to do whatever I choose to do AND control the outcomes.
There is much more to your post – and that I could comment on – but I will stop here with one final comment, and I think it links back to my general comment. God does not think like we do. In this case we approach omnipotence with silly questions like, “Well can He create a rock so big He can’t lift it? Can He make a square circle?” We again seem to be looking at the topic in a very flat, analytical way. We want to measure and test His power in all ways.
But while we’re doing that, He is busy practicing weakness, meekness and humility. He isn’t just demonstrating it for our benefit; He’s winning the world and accomplishing His will in this fashion. So here is the juxtaposition: We are measuring His muscles while He is repeatedly not using them to do any of the true heavy lifting. While you’re busy asking how powerful He is – and by extension, how powerful we are – He is busy winning through weakness.
I think it would be beneficial therefore to stop and ask why we care so much about His omnipotence. What does it buy us? Is it worth our time? Speculation can be fun, but in matters seemingly so central to the core of our being, it would be a good idea to know where we hope to end up.
Hi Drewster,
Thanks for the thoughtful and engaging comment. I don’t have time to process everything you’ve said. Briefly, though, you’re right to find some dissonance between my way of thinking and what one might find in someone of a more “mystical” mindset. That said, different modes of discourse serve different purposes. If I were trying to be devotional, then I would be more mystical. But I’m trying to deal with are intellectual challenges to monotheism, in this case ones coming from the direction of process theism. Alluding to 2 Cor. 10:5, I aim to “cast down arguments” that oppose the knowledge of God. The only way to truly “cast down” an argument or a bad idea is to refute it. That requires terminological precision and analytic rigor.
Re 1. We know enough about God to know that God is categorically different than any created being. I think that’s enough for me to make the distinction between God and things “ultimately wholly sourced in God.”
Re 2. I appreciate the warning about wishful thinking. We certainly don’t want to arrive at conclusions because we want them to be true. That said, I have several independent reasons (which I won’t enumerate here) for thinking that at least some creatures do in fact have “enough delegated independence from God to be proximate sources of their own contributions to reality.” You suggest that this is compatible with the idea that God is “continually creating us moment by moment.” I disagree. Again, I won’t lay out an argument here, but I’m quite convinced that a continuous creation model of divine sustenanceentails occasionalism, the view that God is the only active agent and that creatures have no delegated independence at all.
You then ask what attracts me to the idea that some creatures have “enough delegated independence from God to be proximate sources of their own contributions to reality”. Here’s a couple reasons. First, Scripture teaches as much, from Gen. 2 where God invites Adam to name the animals to every place where people are invited to repent, pray, ask, seek, knock, taste and see, etc. Second, because if creatures have no delegated independence from God, then it becomes very hard to see how God is not the ultimate “author of evil”. The early Church fathers were nearly unanimous in recognizing this problem, which why they nearly all (at least until Augustine) affirmed that humans have moral freedom and thus it is they who are responsible for evil, not God.
As to your closing comments, I quite agree that it’s important to reflect on what we’re doing and ask whether it is worthwhile or not. That applies to any human endeavor. With respect to my blogging, my efforts (feeble as they may be) to think hard about God are one of the ways in which I worship God, not a God merely of my own imagination, but the God beyond who reveals Himself to us such that we grasp Him genuinely albeit “dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12). By the grace of God, perhaps some of my efforts will help others to worship and love God with all their minds as well. If others find little of value in my work, that’s perfectly okay. I don’t write for them. I write for God, for myself, and those who do find some value in what I have to say.
Thanks Alan,
I appreciate your thoughtful reply. I will do you the honor of taking some time to reflect some more before I rejoin it. I certainly appreciate your work and don’t want to discourage you from blogging. These are good thoughts. My only real goal is for us to spur each other on in our efforts to use all we have for God’s glory.
yours, drewster
Hi Alan,
I want to apologize again for my original brusque response. It certainly wasn’t called for.
1. Your philosophical work on the blog definitely has merit and should not be discredited. As you said, “By the grace of God, perhaps some of my efforts will help others to worship and love God with all their minds as well.”
2. And yes, there is a difference between mystical thinking and what you do here (sorry, don’t have a name for it right now). I do believe mysticality shouldn’t really be excluded from philosophizing exercises, but perhaps that point will come to the forefront later down the line as we discuss the more immediate topics.
In fact, though there are several comment/question points, I will back up and start from the beginning. What I will start with is this. Please explain the basic premise of your post.
Are you suggesting that either God is omnipotent and everything else is sourced from Him? OR God is not omnipotent and there are therefore independent beings besides God? And that the answer must be either one or the other?
For me at least it would work best for me to just chew all this one piece at a time. So I’ll start with that one. You don’t have to spell out all the implications of both possibilities. I just need enough understanding each time to go to the next conclusion.
thanks again, drewster
Hi Drewster,
To answer your question as to the basic premise of your post, I’m planning to blog a review/critique of a recent book by Tom Oord, a process theist, wherein he proclaims “the death of omnipotence.” He contends that God is not omnipotent, in any traditional or robust sense of that term. Before tackling his book, I thought it would behoove me to reflect on omnipotence so that I can better articulate what I think Oord gets wrong and why it’s wrong.
I believe BOTH that God is omnipotent (with everything else being ultimately sourced in Him) AND that there are beings (like us humans) that have “enough delegated independence from God to be proximate sources of their own contributions to reality.”
Alan
Hi Alan,
If you’re willing, I would like to continue this dialogue here in the comments. Not only will it help me understand your thinking, but it might also help you develop your thoughts for the Oord review. So my next comment…
I’m a little confused because you state here that you believe that both are true: God is omnipotent AND there are independent beings. But in the beginning paragraph of the post it sounded like you didn’t believe that. Or maybe you were only saying that monotheists don’t believe that.
I think I’m a monotheist and I believe in the both/and, but perhaps I’m not nuanced enough in my understanding. So questions coming from this:
1. Are you a monotheist?
a. If not, why and what are you then?
b. If so, then I’m still trying to grasp the issue with allowing God omnipotence simultaneously with the existence of independent beings.
2. (taking the chance of adding a second topic in here) You said you don’t agree with the idea of God creating us moment-by-moment. In so saying, what is your view on his relationship with us as regards the creative process.
Again, I’m not envisioning a 20-page thesis from you in the comments section – just some concise language about the general idea. Though it can be a challenge in these circles, I find it very helpful to do the work of putting ideas in a form that a philosophical luddite could have a chance of understanding.
thanks again for the discussion, drewster
Hi Drewster,
Yes, I am a monotheist as I defined that term in my OP. That is, I believe in “a singular, personal God [who] is the sole ultimate foundation of reality.” The word “ultimate” there is key to how I reconcile monotheism with the idea that creatures have a degree of delegated independence. Thus, God remains the ultimate source of everything we do in that He makes it possible for us to do anything at all, but in bequeathing us a degree of delegated independence, He gives us a free will and enables us to be the *proximate* source of our own free choices. To put it another way, God supplies everything we need to “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) but doesn’t fully specify how those “supplies” must be used. That affords us the freedom to add our own specifications to what God has enabled.
I think the way God sustains creation is primarily “energetic” rather than “existential.” I discuss this issue in Section 2.5 of this post: http://alanrhoda.net/wordpress/2025/09/making-sense-of-the-essence-energies-distinction/
Roughly, the idea is that God doesn’t sustain or recreate the *whole being* of creatures moment-by-moment. That would make us like holographic projections, having no agency of our own. Rather, in creating ex nihilo God bestows a gift of being that naturally persists as long as God doesn’t actively rescind it. But created things cannot persist in complete self-sufficiency. Because God created us for fellowship with Himself, he created us dependent on Himself. So, while we can continue to exist (after a fashion) without God’s constant input, we cannot function or live well apart from the constant energetic inflow of God’s eternal life.
Well, that’s about as much as I have things figured out. Press me much further and I may have to throw up my hands and say “I don’t have a clue!” Lol. I do enjoy the discussion, though.
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Hi Alan,
1. The Creative Process: I read the section you referenced and I think I can easily embrace your choice:
“Continuous energetic sustain: Creation can continue to exist (in some sense) without God, but it can’t function properly, even for a moment, without being “plugged in” to the divine power source. The more fully creatures are plugged in to God, the better they function.”
He created us a one-time thing, thus granting the independence we’ve been talking about, but we don’t function without Him for very long at all. I will also note that the connection to Him isn’t just about sustainment but rather growth, development, becoming the fullness of who we were made to be. And I think that’s why the “moment-by-moment” thought came along. But I’m good with the “continuous energetic sustainment” path because then the growth goes well with the “starting to wilt without Him” piece.
2. Self-sufficiency: I think these 2 topics really go together. He created us with a delegated amount of independence but is still the ultimate source of everything. I consider myself an amateur sociologist and have noticed this in groups of people all the time. The best scenario for a boss is for him/her to enable and guide the employee – but allowing the employee to be empowered and to develop as much as possible. The extreme of micromanaging on one hand would be God just creating automatons – and at the other extreme, Him creating a bunch of little gods who could source themselves, and then He walks away and has nothing more to do with us. Many other examples could be used for the same. When I see something naturally embedded here in the world, I know that in some fashion it is mirroring God and therefore tells us more about Him.
3. Logic vs. Mysticism: While I don’t have a specific topic to apply this to right now, I do find that mysticism isn’t just applied in prayer. You’ll often see it pop up in Eastern Orthodox theology. There come points in the conversation where logic will take us no further. Or where 2 things are simultaneously true even though they are diametrically opposed. Hebraic block logic versus Western step logic.
I guess our current topic could do for an example. We know that God is the ultimate source, thus omnipotent. We also know that He has delegated a certain amount of independence. However, the details about how those 2 truths meet seem shrouded in mystery at a certain point.
I know that I can take my independent power and do all kinds of evil with it, but I also know that God can turn it all to good for others AND that He can even do that in my own life if I were to turn back to Him. I know that God doesn’t violate our free will, but on the other hand He can be extremely persuasive. I know that I can cut my life short, and yet otherwise He has numbered my days. But in fact that number might also be variable based on how I live my life. And on and on and on.
This is the long way of saying I think it’s wise in philosophical discussions to always be ready to admit we have come to the end of our ability to understand further on a particular train of thought. And the best end is often a mystical interpretation. Hopefully that makes sense.
Thanks for continuing the conversation, drewster
Thanks for your comment, Drewster. I agree with everything you say here. As you say, when talking about God we should expect to descend into the abyss of “mystery” at some point. My main complaint against some apophatic thinkers (not you) is that they punt to mystery before even trying seriously to think things through. Mystery for them becomes an intellectual cop-out. I say that we should think about God as hard as we can. That’s part of what it means to love God with all your mind. Yes, as finite creatures grappling with the infinite we’re going to reach an impasse sooner or later, but we’ll never know how little or much we can understand if we play the mystery card at our earliest convenience.
Mystics: Your critique is well cited. OGM can’t be the default response and is easily, as you say, a great cop-out.
Moving on in our discussion, since you and I have agreed on the fact that God can be omnipotent simultaneously with the fact that He creates being with delegated independence, can you give me a high-level understanding of what Oord is saying to the contrary?
Drewster, Oord tries hard to skirt the label, but he’s basically a “process theist” in evangelical drag. Process theism rejects creation ex nihilo (CEN) as well as God’s power unilaterally to effect change in creation. Instead, God and creation have always existed as co-necessary aspects of a larger “world process,” with God supplying final causal or “persuasive” suggestions but never able to “coerce” creation to go along with those suggestions. In the process theistic worldview, “creativity” is a metaphysical absolute, and so *every* level of creation, from molecules to man, necessarily has the intrinsic freedom to “choose” whether or not to follow God’s suggestions.
The process worldview, in short, is fundamentally bi-polar and Nestorian. God and creation can influence each other, but they cannot synergize or co-operate because process theism sees influence as a zero-sum game. For God unilaterally to control *anything* in creation is ipso facto (on their view) to destroy the integrity of creation. This is obviously very problematic for Christianity because it means there can be no genuine incarnation. Thus, Oord defends a strong kenotic view according to which the Son literally lays aside His divinity in becoming man. He’s not a God–man. He’s just a man who used to be (in some sense) divine. As for miracles, on Oord’s account this ultimately amounts to “Something unexpected and wonderful happened because God got lucky that creation decided to cooperate with His promptings.”
Wow! That sounds extremely complicated and contrived! In fact, in my experience when something is trying to be other than what it really is. I hope this image isn’t too big of a leap, but sometimes when I see someone completely covered in tattoos or piercings, it’s as if they are trying to hide their true selves – and therefore start to look really complicated.
I wonder what the appeal is in this for Oord. When something is contrived, there is usually something the contriver is trying to accomplish, as when a scientist keeps manipulating an experiment to get a certain result or an accountant massages the numbers in order to get a certain expected total. In theology I find that sometimes people have a certain view of God they have to get everything to add up to – instead of simply meeting the real One and accepting Him as He is. And of course the same thing can happen with any relationship.
In any case, thanks for the explanations. I’ve never heard of process theism, but that’s not surprising for an amateur theologian. (grin) Would you be willing to take a stab at what is behind his thinking? What he’s trying to make work?
Hi Drewster,
You make a great observation about how seemingly overly complicated/contrived systems are often hiding something. With respect to modern process theism in general, that really started with A. N. Whitehead. In his 1929 book Process and Reality he tried to develop a comprehensive metaphysics taking becoming and process as fundamental rather than being or substance. That’s where the idea of “creativity” as metaphysically foundational principle comes from. A generation later, Charles Hartshorne focused Whitehead’s system in an explicitly theological direction, thereby creating modern “process theism.” Part of what comes off as “contrived” in Oord’s synthesis is that he aims to package process theism for evangelical Protestant consumption. Accordingly, he talks like an evangelical but means like a Whiteheadian/Hartshornian.
Most process theists, and Oord is as clear an example of this as any, base their process theistic views on two driving motivations: (1) a deep conviction that the problem of evil cannot be adequately answered without rejecting divine omniscience, and (2) a deep desire to make theism scientifically respectable by denying the possibility of unilateral divine interventions in creation (i.e., there can be no “miracles” in the traditional theistic sense of that term). Both of these motivations drive Oord, but especially (1).
I appreciate your treatment of monotheism in section 1. at the beginning of your blog. When you say that you want monotheism to accommodate derivative/non- foundIational beings that could have enough delegated independence from God to be proximate sources of their own contributions to reality I see that as an explanation of human free will. Your assertion that by virtue of delegated independence, non-foundational beings are not mere extensions of God’s being, operations, or will would be the biblical foundation of God creating man in his own image and yet endowing him with the ability to make either good or bad decisions the result of which issue in man’s contributions to reality(either good or bad).
Your note which clarifies your assertion that Oord is technically not a monotheist because his process world view requires God and creation as co-necessary and co-fundamental aspects I believe force him to accept a theory of the eternality of matter. This theory is at present scientifically unsustainable.
Hi Fr. Steve,
Thanks for the comment! You are quite correct that I want omnipotence to allow for genuinely free creatures, like us. Oord rejects omnipotence in part because he thinks it doesn’t allow for free creatures. You are also correct that Oord’s position commits him to an eternal physical universe. He accepts that consequence, but it does put him in some tension with Big Bang cosmology.
God bless,
Alan