Charles Hartshorne Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes,

Albany, State University of New York Press, 1984, pp. 10-26.

The idea of omnipotence in the sense to be criticised came about as follows: to be God, that is, worthy of worship, God must in power excel all others (and be open to criticism by none). The highest conceivable form of power must be the divine power. So far so good. Next question: what is the highest conceivable form of power? This question was scarcely put seriously at all, the answer was felt to be so obvious: it must be the power to determine every detail of what happens in the world. Not, notice, to significantly influence the happenings; no, rather to strictly determine, decide, their every detail. Hence it is that people still today ask, when catastrophe strikes, Why did God do this to me? What mysterious divine reason could there be? Why me?

I charge theologians with responsibility for this improper and really absurd question. Without telling themselves so, the founders of the theological tradition were accepting and applying to deity the tyrant ideal of power. “I decide and determine everything, you (and your friends and enemies) merely do what I determine you (and them) to do. Your decision is simply mine for you. You only think you decide: in reality the decision is mine.” Since the theologians were bright people we must not oversimplify. They half-realised they were in trouble. Like many a politician, they indulged in double-talk to hide their mistake even from themselves. They knew they had to define sin as freely deciding to do evil or the lesser good, and as disobeying the will of God. How could one disobey an omnipotent will? There were two devices. One was to say that God does not decide to bring about a sinful act; rather, God decides not to prevent it. God “permits” sin to take place. Taking advantage of this decision, the sinner does his deed. Yet stop! Remember that God is supposed to decide exactly what happens in the world. If someone murders me, God has decided there shall be precisely that murderous action. So it turns out that “permits” has here a meaning it ordinarily does not have.

Ordinarily, when X gives Y permission to do such and such, there are at least details in the actual doing that are not specified by X (and could not be specified, since human language can give only outlines, not full details, of concrete occurrences). But omnipotence is defined as power to absolutely determine what happens. I have Thomas Aquinas especially in mind here. God gives a creature permission to perform act A, where A is no mere outline but is the act itself in its full concreteness. So nothing at all is left for the creature to decide? What then is left of creaturely freedom? The most famous of all the scholastics finds the answer, and this is the second of the two devices referred to above. God decides that the creature shall perform act A, but the divine decision is that nevertheless the act shall be performed “freely”. Don’t laugh, the saintly theologian is serious. Serious, but engaging in double-talk. It is determined exactly what the creature will do, but determined that he or she will do it freely. As the gangsters sometimes say, after specifying what is to be done, “You are going to like it” – in other words, to do it with a will. If this is not the despot’s ideal of power, what is? What, let us ask again, is the highest conceivable form of power? Is it the despot’s, magnified to infinity, and by hook or crook somehow reconciled with “benevolence”, also magnified to infinity? This seems to have been the (partly unconscious) decision of theologians. Is there no better way?

Of course there is. After all, the New Testament analogy – found also in Greek religions – for deity is the parental role, except that in those days of unchallenged male chauvinism it had to be the father role. What is the ideal parental role? Is it that every detail is to be decided by the parent? The question answers itself. The ideal is that the child shall more and more decide its own behaviour as its intelligence grows. Wise parents do not try to determine everything, even for the infant, much less for the half-matured or fully matured offspring. Those who do not understand this, and their victims, are among the ones who write agonised letters to an agony aunt. In trying to conceive God, are we to forget everything we know about values? To read some philosophers or theologians it almost seems so.

If the parent does not decide everything, there will be some risk of conflict and frustration in the result. The children are not infallibly wise and good. And indeed, as we shall argue later, even divine wisdom cannot completely foresee (or timelessly know) what others will decide. Life simply is a process of decision making, which means that risk is inherent in life itself. Not even God could make it otherwise. A world without risks is not conceivable. At best it would be a totally dead world, with neither good nor evil. Is it the highest ideal of power to rule over puppets who are permitted to think they make decisions but who are really made by another to do exactly what they do? For twenty centuries we have had theologians who seem to say yes to this question. Some theologians have said that, while  God could determine everything, yet out of appreciation for the value of having free creatures, God chooses to create human beings to whom a certain freedom is granted. When things go badly, it is because these special creatures make ill use of the freedom granted them. As a solution of the problem of evil, this is perhaps better than the nothing that theorists of religion have mostly given us. But it is not good enough.

Many ills cannot plausibly be attributed to human freedom. Diseases no doubt are made worse and more frequent by people’s not taking care of themselves, not exercising due care in handling food, and so forth. But surely they are not caused only by such misdoings. Human freedom does not cause all the suffering that animals undergo, partly from hunger, partly from wounds inflicted by sexual rivals or predators, also from diseases, parasites, and other causes not controlled by human beings. There is only one solution of the problem of evil “worth writing home about.” It uses the idea of freedom, but generalises it. Why suppose that only people make decisions? People are much more conscious of the process of decision making than the other animals need be supposed to be; but when it comes to that, how conscious is an infant in determining its activities? If chimpanzees have no freedom, how much freedom has an infant, which by every test that seems applicable is much less intelligent than an adult chimpanzee? (One would never guess this fact from what “pro-lifers” say about a fetus being without qualification a person, so loose is their criterion for personality.) There are many lines of reasoning that support the conclusion to which theology has been tending for about a century now, which is that our having at least some freedom is not an absolute exception to an otherwise total lack of freedom in nature, but a special, intensified, magnified form of a general principle pervasive of reality, down to the very atoms and still farther. Current physics does not contradict this, as many physicists admit. When will the general culture at least begin to see the theological bearings of this fact? .

Those who stand deep in the classical tradition are likely to object to the new theology that it fails to acknowledge “the sovereignty of God.” To them we may reply, “Are we to worship the Heavenly Father of Jesus (or the Holy Merciful One of the Psalmist or Isaiah), or to worship a heavenly king, that is, a cosmic despot?’ These are incompatible ideals; candid thinkers should choose and not pretend to be faithful to both. As Whitehead said, “They gave unto God the properties that belonged unto Caesar.” Our diminished awe of kings and emperors makes it easier for us than for our ancestors to look elsewhere for our model of the divine nature. “Divine sovereignty” sounds to some of us like a confession, an admission that it is sheer power, not unstinted love that one most admires. . . . Byron wrote, as last line to his Sonnet on Chillon, “For they appeal from tyranny to God.” But how is it if God is the supreme, however benevolent, tyrant? Can we worship a God so devoid of generosity as to deny us a share, however humble, in determining the details of the world, as minor participants in the creative process that is reality? To fully clarify our case against “omnipotence” we must show how the idea of freedom implies chance.

Agent X decides to  perform act A, agent Y independently decides to perform act B. So far as both succeed, what happens is the combination AB. Did X decide that AB should happen? No. Did Y decide the combination? No. Did any agent decide it? No. Did God, as supreme agent, decide it? No, unless “decide” stands for sheer illusion in at least one of its applications to God and the creatures. The word ‘chance’, meaning “not decided by any agent, and not fully determined by the past”, is the implication of the genuine idea of free or creative decision making – ‘creative’ meaning, adding to the definiteness of the world, settling something previously unsettled, partly undefined or indeterminate. The combination AB, in the case supposed, was not made to happen by any intention of a single agent but by the chance combination of two intentions. Nor was it made to happen by the past; this is the idea of causal laws that physics is getting rid of and that some philosophers long ago gave good reasons for rejecting. The new idea is that causal order is not absolute but statistical. It admits an element of chance or randomness in nature. Many of the leading physicists of recent times are quite explicit about this. But they were preceded in principle by some great Greek philosophers, some French philosophers of modern times, and the three most distinguished of purely American philosophers, Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. All events are “caused”, if that means that they had necessary conditions in the past, conditions without which they could not have happened, however, what is technically termed “sufficient condition”, that which fully determines what happens, requires qualification. Where there is little freedom, as an inanimate nature, there are often conditions sufficient to determine approximately what happens, and for most purposes this is all we need to consider. Where there is much freedom, as in the behaviour of higher, including human, animals, there are still necessary conditions in the past, but sufficient past conditions only for a considerable range of possibilities within which each decision maker finally determines what precisely and concretely happens at the moment in the agent’s own mind, that is, what decision is made. Even God, as the French Catholic philosopher Lequier said more than a century ago, waits to see what the individual decides. “Thou hast created me creator of myself.”

Many decades later Whitehead, also a believer in God, independently put the point with the phrase “the self-created creature”; and the atheist Sartre in France wrote of human consciousness as its own cause, causa sui. Determinists claim that what makes us free is that our “character” as already formed, plus each new situation, determines our decisions. So then the child was determined by the character already formed in its infant past and by the surrounding world, and this character by the preceding fetus and world, and that by the fertilised egg? What kind of freedom is that? By what magic do people miss the fact they are misusing words? Skinner is right; once accept determinism and all talk of freedom is doubletalk. The word ‘voluntary’ (liking it) is good enough for the determinist’s freedom; why not stick to it, without trying to borrow the prestige of the glorious word ‘freedom’? One’s past character is now a mere fact, part of the settled world, almost like someone else’s past character. One may be capable of creating a partly new and better character by using the genuine freedom, some of which one has already long had but perhaps has too little or too ill made use of. Our rejection of omnipotence will be attacked by the charge, “So you dare to limit the power of God?” Not so, I impose no such limit if this means, as it seems to imply, that God’s power fails to measure up to some genuine ideal. All I have said is that omnipotence as usually conceived is a false or indeed absurd ideal, which in truth limits God, denies to him any world worth talking about: a world of living, that is to say, significantly decision-making, agents.

It is the tradition which did indeed terribly limit divine power, the power to foster creativity even in the least of the creatures. No worse falsehood was ever perpetrated than the traditional concept of omnipotence. It is a piece of unconscious blasphemy, condemning God to a dead world, probably not distinguishable from no world at all. The root of evil, suffering, misfortune, wickedness, is the same as the root of all good, joy, happiness, and that is freedom, decision making. If, by a combination of good management and good luck, X and Y harmonise in their decisions, the AB they bring about may be good and happy; if not, not. To attribute all good to good luck, or all to good management, is equally erroneous. Life is not and cannot be other than a mixture of the two. God’s good management is the explanation of there being a cosmic order that limits the scope of freedom and hence of chance-limits, but does not reduce to zero. With too much freedom, with nothing like laws of nature (which, some of us believe, are divinely decided and sustained), there could be only meaningless chaos; with too little, there could be only such good as there may be in atoms and molecules by themselves, apart from all higher forms. With no creaturely freedom at all, there could not even be that, but at most God alone, making divine decisions – about what? It is the existence of many decision makers that produces everything, whether good or ill. It is the existence of God that makes it possible for the innumerable decisions to add up to a coherent and basically good world where opportunities justify the risks. Without freedom, no risks – and no opportunities. Nothing essential in the foregoing is my sheer invention. I am summing up and making somewhat more explicit what a number of great writers have been trying to communicate for several centuries, or at least and especially during the last one hundred and fifty years.

References:

Charles Hartshorne Omnipotence As a Theological Mistake1 philosophy. Anselm’s Discovery (1965) is an influential analysis of the ontological argument. Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984) is the most approachable of his books, written for the layman. See also Existence and Actuality: Conversations with Charles Hartshorne (1984), edited by Cobb and Gamwell. Aged 93, Hartshorne published an autobiography, The Darkness and the Light (1990). Secondary Sources. Volume 20 of the Library of Living Philosophers, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (1991), is devoted to Hartshorne. Process Studies (3, 1973) contains an extensive bibliography by Hartshorne’s wife, Dorothy (also available from the Center for Process Studies, www.ctr4process. org/publications/Biblio/). Evaluations favourable to Hartshorne’s position are provided by Cobb (1969), Cobb and Griffin (1976), Ogden (1966), Pittenger (1970), Sia (1989, 2004), and Viney (1985). For more critical assessments, see Basinger (1988), Boyd (1992), Dombrowski (1996), Gilkey (1969), Gruenler (1983), Hahn (1991) and Nash (1987). 24 The Philosophy of Religion