{"id":31118,"date":"2023-11-14T05:00:14","date_gmt":"2023-11-14T09:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/?p=31118"},"modified":"2023-11-13T15:59:21","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T19:59:21","slug":"what-to-do-when-your-conception-of-god-does-not-line-up-with-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/what-to-do-when-your-conception-of-god-does-not-line-up-with-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"What to Do When Your Conception of God Does Not Line Up with Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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\u2019t ultimately work.<\/p>\n

Why Traditional \u201cSolutions\u201d to the Problem of Evil Don\u2019t Work<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/iframe><\/p>\nIn 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.<\/p>\nThe 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\u2014approaches which either require us to ignore some of our experience or play the \u201cmystery\u201d card when things get tough. I suggest that the proper starting point is what we know\u2014our own experience\u2014rather than starting with assumptions about what we want God to be.<\/p>\nWhat 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.<\/p>\nNot even God, I would argue. If one chooses to begin with the assumption of God\u2019s love, as I do, one is already choosing to deny God\u2019s 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<\/sup> century philosopher, theologian, social activist, and all-around iconoclast Simone Weil that provided me with the tools to escape the rut. Weil\u2019s evocative claim that \u201cthe absence of God is the most marvelous testimony of perfect love\u201d 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.<\/p>\nI teach this aspect of Weil\u2019s 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.<\/p>\nIn last Thursday\u2019s essay I briefly mentioned a recent episode of the podcast \u201cThe Bible for Normal People\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"SKoBKMkRAz\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thebiblefornormalpeople.com\/episode-28-thomas-jay-oord-the-problem-of-evil-part-2\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Episode 28: Thomas Jay Oord \u2013 The Problem of Evil (Part 2)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; visibility: hidden;\" title=\"\u201cEpisode 28: Thomas Jay Oord \u2013 The Problem of Evil (Part 2)\u201d \u2014 The Bible For Normal People\" src=\"https:\/\/thebiblefornormalpeople.com\/episode-28-thomas-jay-oord-the-problem-of-evil-part-2\/embed\/#?secret=YvIZVxZw9o#?secret=SKoBKMkRAz\" data-secret=\"SKoBKMkRAz\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\nThomas Jay Oord has coined a word\u2014\u201camipotence\u201d\u2014to describe his own conception of a God who is wholly and completely love (and hence not omnipotent). From the podcast:<\/p>\nTo use philosophical language, I think God is maximally powerful. But God\u2019s power is always shaped by love. So if you want to talk about sovereign love, the word I\u2019ve invented is amipotent<\/em>, \u201cami\u201d for love, \u201cpotent\u201d for power. God\u2019s power is the power of uncontrolling love.<\/strong><\/p>\nI like this strategy a great deal, but Oord takes the implications of \u201camipotence\u201d in a direction that I have not to this point considered fully. My own conviction has for some time been, influenced by Weil\u2019s thought, that God chooses<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\nNoting that he has \u201cfriends 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,\u201d Oord says, \u201cI have a God whose nature is love, and always loves, has to love and therefore can\u2019t control anyone, or anything.\u201d 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 \u201cuncontrolling love,\u201d cannot <\/strong>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<\/strong> control or manipulate\u2014even for the best reasons.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-31124\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2023\/11\/process-theology-300x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\"><\/p>\nOord\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n[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\u2019t control a worm. God can\u2019t control you and me. God influences everyone and everything at every moment at all levels of complexity, but this God can\u2019t control anyone or anything . . . Most of Christian theology has been written from a philosophical assumption that we call \u201csubstance philosophy,\u201d which says, \u201cWell, there\u2019s some changes, but they\u2019re not really changes to what\u2019s at the core of what it is.\u201d And process says, \u201cNo, we should start with change as we try to understand reality.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\nAs noted earlier, there is a big difference between believing that God chooses <\/strong>not to be powerful in the interest of love and saying that because God is essentially love, God cannot<\/strong> be powerful in a way that would violate love.<\/p>\nI 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\u2014the 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\u2019s 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,<\/p>\nI think that\u2019s something that a lot of people are hungering for, frankly. They want to hold on to this faith. But it can\u2019t look the way it did. It has to have something else in the center of it. It can\u2019t have coercion and control, and mental assent and heady theological frameworks, but has to have this relationality and this love at the center.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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\u2019t ultimately 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":31124,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,20,21,32,35,40,48,63,73,76,96],"tags":[242,329,383,390,588,1187],"class_list":["post-31118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-belief","category-change","category-christianity","category-evil","category-faith","category-god","category-human-nature","category-love","category-philosophy","category-power","category-theology","tag-god","tag-love","tag-philosophy","tag-power","tag-problem-of-evil","tag-thomas-jay-oord"],"yoast_head":"\n<title>What to Do When Your Conception of God Does Not Line Up with Reality<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The choice to believe in God\u2019s existence is the beginning of choices, not the end. 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