The three types
of divine power can be expressed nicely by an analogy with driving a car.  This
analogy does not come out very well for DP₁.  Here God is the driver
and each of us passengers have kiddy seats with plastic steering wheels,
clut�ches, brakes, and accelerator pedals.  We are all going through the motions
of heading in our own directions, but God obviously is still in complete and
direct charge of our destination.  In DP₂ the vehicle is a driver
training car equipped with dual controls.  I am at my wheel and God is letting
me drive, but he can intervene and take control of the car at any time. In DP₃
I have an ordinary car and God is a very per�suasive �back seat� driver; or, as
one of my students suggested: God is in the trunk and her⁵
suggestions are barely audible.  My student’s quip embodies a common criticism
of the process God: that it is a godling who has been marginalized and made
insignificant.  If the God of DP₁ is a tyrant, then the God of DP₃
is a wimp.  I will attempt to defend the process God against this charge.

 

B.  A
Critique of DP₂

If we are committed to the freedom of the will and the concept of
individual moral responsibility, I believe we must reject divine omnicausalism
outright.  DP₁ is not mentioned in contemporary discussions in
philosophy of religion, but I believe that it is important to include this
alternative.  It is after all the position of the Reformers, their neoorthodox
followers, and a major evangelical theologian. Many Christians rightly contest
their claim that this is the biblical view of divine power, for the Bible has no
monolithic view on most all theological issues.  As Erasmus pointed out in his
debate with Luther, God would not have called us to choose him if Luther’s
position were correct.  One would have to agree, however, that divine
omnicausality certainly dominates in many biblical narratives.

 

I will now focus our attention on what I believe to be major
shortcomings of DP₂.  My argument in part will be based on Immanuel
Kant’s moral theory.  Kant’s second form of the categorical imperative states
that we should always treat persons as ends in themselves never merely as means
to our ends.  I propose, then, that the existence and ultimate use of divine
�veto� power in DP₂ constitute a violation of this form of the
categorical imperative. I am assuming that we can appropriate this principle
from Kant’s moral theory without assuming the rest of it as true, including his
restricted view of what a person is.   In addition, a process view of
self‑determination, for example, will be quite different from Kantian doctrine.

 

My argument has its best chance if Augustine and Aquinas were
right about the reasons for creation.  They both believed that God created the
world to glorify himself.  If this is true, then one could conclude that God
does use nature and crea�turely wills as simply means to his own ends.  William
T. Jones phrases Augustine’s position aptly:  �It was a greater demonstration of
God’s power and glory to create a sinful man and then to use this creature as an
instrument of his larger purpose than it would have been to create a sinless
man.�⁶   Aquinas has the same view: �Now God wills and loves His
essence for its own sake: and it cannot be increased or multiplied in itself, as
it appears from what has been said: and can only be multiplied in respect of its
likeness which is shared by many.  Therefore God wishes things to be multiplied,
because He wills and loves His essence and perfection.�⁷  The
categorical imperative obviously allows us to use other people for our own ends,
but only if there is sufficient respect for persons.  But if God’s real
intention for creation is self‑glorification by using his creatures, then it is
difficult to see how this condition can be met.

 

The best biblical support for this argument is the story of Job. 
Even the evan�gelical New Bible Dictionary has to admit that Yahweh does
not give a moral justifica�tion for his actions against Job.⁸
Yahweh’s answer out of the whirlwind is essentially an expression of raw cosmic
power, not a compassionate response to Job’s legiti�mate concerns.  In effect,
Yahweh has used Job as means to win a wager with Satan.  In the end Job’s
fortunes are restored twofold, but his original children were lost to him
forever.  Using Kantian terminology once again, a price could be placed on his
lives�tock, but his children had dignity as persons and were irreplaceable. 
They, too, were sacrificed for Yahweh’s own ends. 

 

There is, however, a neo‑Platonic justification for divine
creation: God created the world out of unbounded love for creatures themselves. 
Catherine of Siena is espe�cially eloquent on this point: �So it was love that
made you create us and give us being, just so that we might taste your supreme
eternal good.�⁹
The claim of divine self‑glorification contrasts
sharply with Catherine’s emphasis on God’s humbling him�self in the Creation and
the Incarnation.  �In name of this unspeakable love,� God emptied himself of his
glory and became a human being.  I cannot imagine a traditional theist who would
not choose Catherine over Augustine‑Aquinas on this point.  If Catherine is
correct, then there does seem to be sufficient respect for persons in God’s
plan for creation.

                  

The primary difference between DP₂ and DP₃
is that the classical God has the freedom to intervene or not, while the process
God cannot intervene, even if she want�ed to.  Proponents of DP₂ can
then draw some moral implications from their view, which initially seem quite
attractive.  The God of DP₂ can exercise power in all things and
events, but, for the most part, chooses not to.  Using my own argument to their
advantage, my critics would say that God does this primarily because he has a
Kantian respect for persons. This God, then, is like mature, loving parents who
allow their children to choose freely and allow them to make their own
mistakes.  One could say that this requires enormous restraint on God’s part, as
well as, of course, allowing the development of virtue in human beings. 
Furthermore, the traditional God can insure the final triumph of the good and
the defeat of evil.  Process theologians openly admit that their God, while
totally committed to goodness, truth, and beauty, cannot bring about the
perfection of these values unilaterally.

 

In traditional theism nature has no intrinsic value, so the fact
that it exists merely for God’s purposes and then destroyed is of no moral
consequence.  Under DP₂ God has created a self‑regulating nature as a
predictable framework in which we can freely choose our destinies.  But in the
end, according to traditional beliefs, nature will have only instrumental value
and will ultimately be discarded.  Again the Platonic view appears more
acceptable.  In the Timaeus Plato assures us that the world is
everlasting and contends that only an evil being would �undo that which is
harmonious and happy� (36e;41b). In the medieval period, God’s absolute dominion
was expressed in the concept of private property as the right to create and
destroy � to use and abuse � the fruits of the earth.  This is a philosophy of
property that, unfortunately, is still being practiced today.  In a world in
which Earth Day has become a major world holiday, such a theology of nature is
simply no longer acceptable.  A process theology of nature, in which every
occasion of experience has some power of self‑determination, is one of the best
options for environmental ethics today.  It requires that we not only give up
the notion of divine ownership of the earth, but also divine ownership of our
souls as well.

 

Proponents of DP₂ might respond by quite gladly giving
up the view that nature has just instrumental value.  This is a definite
possibility, but the full implications of DP₂ may force them to give
up far more than that.  The main reason that nature lacks intrinsic value is
necessarily linked to the orthodox idea of creatio ex nihilo, a view that
essentially makes all created things completely contingent upon divine power.
Staying within a religious view of the world, there are at least two ways to
conceive of nature having intrinsic value.  First, pantheists believe that the
being of the world is divine, so it would obviously be absurd for God to destroy
it.  Second, there is the Aristotelian‑Whiteheadian view that God and nature are
equiprimordial. One might say that Moses Maimonides, a medieval Jewish
philosopher, escapes my critique, because, as he says:  �We do not consider it a
principle of our faith that the universe will again be reduced to nothing.�¹⁰
But Moses’ cosmos is still lacks intrinsic value, because it is completely
contingent upon God’s sustaining power. I believe that self‑determination and
value are necessarily related, so it is only the Aristotelian‑Whiteheadian view,
coupled with DP₃, that can ground individual inherent value.   More
argument on this issue is obviously needed, but we can provisionally conclude
that an acceptable theology of nature must reject creatio ex nihilo.  It
is safe to say that giving up this doctrine is tantamount to giving up classical
theism.

 

The initial superiority of traditional theism over process theism
erodes even more quickly when we look at the problem of evil.  The implications
for DP₁ for the origins of evil are clearest in Luther’s claim that
Satan is a �mask� of God.  This provoc�ative view is expressed in many biblical
passages where God is cited as the direct cause of evil (Ex. 5:22, 32:12; Jer.
18:11; Amos 3:6; Micah 1:12, 2:3; 1 Kgs. 22:20‑22; Job 42:11).  The theology of
these ac�counts is summed up in Second Isaiah: AI form light, and I create
dark�ness: I produce well‑being, and I create evil,  I  Yahweh do all these
things� (45:7, AB). When confronted with this verse, most Christians try to
mitigate its prima facie meaning.   But Carl Henry criticizes those who
wish to soften its meaning and reasserts his Calvinist view of absolute divine
sover�eignty and the implication that all evil is by divine commission rather
than permission.¹¹
Returning to Job, the traditional reading of this
story assumes that God dele�gates power to Satan and allows him to persecute Job
by divine permission.  However, if one reads the story carefully, Job, his wife,
and his friends all clearly acknowledge God as the source of Job’s woes.  They
seem to be unaware of both the existence of Satan and the wager he and God have
made.  At the end of the story the author ex�plicitly speaks of �all the evil
that the Lord had brought upon [Job]� (42:11).  Whether this is DP₁
or DP₂, evil by commission or permission, clearly, both views imply
that God is responsible for evil.

 

Let us look at our driving analogy again.  (This particular
example is derived from Nelson Pike.)  Let us say there is a car with dual
controls and Arthur is the driving instructor and Bailey is the student driver. 
Let us imagine that Bailey is approaching an intersection at which he is
required to stop.  Out of inattention, Bailey fails to stop, and is just about
to run into a school bus loaded with children.  Arthur quickly takes over the
controls, stops the vehicle, and averts the impending disaster.  If Arthur had
not done this, we would have condemned him for his inaction and would have held
him jointly responsible for the great loss of life. Pike’s scenario is obviously
designed to show the mechanics of DP_2,
i.e., the delegation of power
to free creatures � but also the direct complicity of God in the evil these
agents do.  (Pike’s attempt to resolve this by an appeal to Augustine’s view
that there is ultimately no real evil is unconvincing.)  Responsible earthlings,
such as Arthur, do attempt to intervene when they are able, and within reason,
to prevent harm to others.  Even though the traditional God has the power to
extend aid in a decisive way, it appears as if he has not and will not intervene
to prevent unnecessary evil. 

 

Why does not the traditional God do much more?  Why doesn’t God
do what Arthur could do in our example or others in similar positions do
everyday?  This is the principal moral challenge to the God of DP₁ or
DP₂. Friedrich Nietzsche expressed the point most provocatively: �As
a father, God does not care enough about his children: human fathers do this
better.�¹²  We can blame the classical God because, according to DP₂,
God can intervene if he chooses to.  But we cannot blame the process God because
she cannot intervene.  Initially, the classical God’s option of unilateral
action appeared to be a virtue, but now it is looking more like a deficiency.

 

All of us know the evocative phrases of the Lord’s Prayer very
well: �Our Father who art in Heaven/Hallowed be Name/Thy Kingdom come/Thy will
be done/On earth as it is in Heaven. . .� (Matt. 6:9‑10).  Viewed in the
traditional apocalyptic way, this prayer appears to be a request for God to
discontinue the system of DP₂ (the implication of the permissive will
is clear), and replace it with a DP₁ regime.  It is also a
recognition that the latter is the preferred state, and that the former is
simply a means to the full exercise of God’s sovereign power.  The Lord’s Prayer
is a request for God to substitute his direct power for his permissive power. 
It is a petition for God to use his �over‑power� all the time, rather than just
some of the time.  If we phrase the preceding conclusion in Kantian terms, we
realize that the Lord’s prayer is a request that our lives be fully heteronomous,
not autonomous.  To put it more provocatively: we are praying that our autonomy,
the noble badge of Kan�tian morality and the grounds for the value of persons,
be taken away from us. 

 

Our return to Kant at this point reveals a troublesome
inconsistency in his moral theory, one that I have pursued in a separate
study. Kant’s moral argument for the
existence of God requires divine �over‑power� to make our souls immor�tal and to
actualize the fulfillment of justice.  Here his conception of the Kingdom of God
appears to be thoroughly orthodox.  On the other hand, the third form of the
cate�gorical imperative requires full autonomy to join the Kingdom of Ends. 
Kant’s moral argument for God demands a deity who exercises power in the
traditional manner, but his principal moral theory requires that he become a
process theist on the question of divine power.

 

Another analogy suggests itself at this juncture.  Let us imagine
a child learning how to ride a bike.  In my own case, I held my daughter’s bike
while she got a feel for the right balance.  Within a couple of weeks she was
happily riding on her own, so free in fact that she had an accident and got a
big bump on her head.  According to tradi�tional theology, God will ultimately
take full control of our bike‑wills.  This biking analogy is especially apt for
Erasmus’ view of divine power.  In his famous debate with Luther he proposes a
�doctrine which attributes entirely to grace the first impulsion which
stimulates the soul, but which leaves to the human will. . .a certain place in
the unfolding of the act.  Since all things have three parts, a begin�ning, a
development, and a completion, those who hold this doctrine ascribe the two
extremes to grace, and admit that free will does some�thing only in the
development.�¹³
Erasmus’ view is very elegant, but it simply does not
conform to our strong preferences for autonomy over heteronomy.  This is
especially true if I think of the advisability of intervening in my teenage
daughter’s �biking� now or later on in her adult life.  My intervention seems
not only inappropriate but also immoral.  As John Cobb and David Griffin have so
eloquently said: �If we truly love others, we do not seek to control them.�¹⁴
One could argue that, paradoxically, we ultimately have more power by gentle
persuasion than by overbearing coercion.

 

You may have noticed that at this point I have ceased
distinguishing between DP₁ and DP₂.  Both views preserve
God’s essential monopoly of power, and, in the end, according to the
implications I have drawn from traditional doctrine, DP₂ collapses
into DP₁.  Divine over‑power is the preferred state of affairs.  If I
am correct, then we should reject both of them for the same reas�ons. First, in
these views nature has only instrumental value and this conflicts with the
strong moral intuitions that we now hold from environmental ethics.  Second, the
logic of divine over‑power makes God responsible for all unnecessary evil in the
world.  Third, the ultimate value of individual wills has also been undermined. 
I believe that we must agree with Mackie that the only will worth having is one
that is immune from external control. 

 

One might say that the foregoing argument hinges too much on the
assumption of a traditional Last Judgment.  Classical theists might hold instead
that God brings about the triumph of good without punishing the wicked and
destroying nature.  But this �kinder and gentler� view of divine justice would
still require a substantial reordering of both human wills and nature. Some
classical theists are now saying that natural evils � such as famines, floods,
and earthquakes � are due to the constraints of any created world, not to acts
of divine intervention.  On this view such events might be called �necessary�
evils.  David Basinger and Bruce Reichenbach contend that God could not have,
for example, created water to quench thirst and clean without it also drowning
mammals and eroding the foundations of buildings.¹⁵ But if Basinger
and Reichenbach believe that God can unilaterally cause the defeat of evil, then
their God will have to use his �veto� power not only to restrain evil wills,
but also to eradicate natural evils as well. David Griffin has made the keen
observation that creating a liquid that quenches thirst and cleans but does not
have negative consequences is a logically possible state of affairs.¹⁶ 

The classical God, while being prevented from creating a round square,
would have no trouble creating completely �good� water.

 

C.  Nelson Pike’s Electrical
Analogies

In an article �Over‑Power and God’s Responsibility for Sin,�¹⁷
Nelson Pike has produced the most innovative defense of DP₂. 
Using ingenious analogies from electrical circuitry, Pike attempts to make
divine power sharing intelligible and compatible with divine �veto� power.

 

The first
circuit is one in which Arthur (A) has complete control over the light bulb. 
Bailey (B) can use his switch all he wants, but he does not have any control
over the light.  Pike says that this circuit models the way Calvin views divine
power and it obviously represents DP₁.  The second circuit is one in
which Bailey has the possibility to light the bulb.  If Arthur leaves A₁
open but closes A₂, then Bailey is now able to light the bulb.  At
the same time, Arthur has not lost any power, or possibility of acting, by
sharing power with Bailey.  Indeed, by closing A₁, Arthur can assume
full control in the operation of the light.  Here is the
second diagram above changed to "divine veto mode."

 

Clearly Pike wants us to assume that Arthur is playing the role
of God in these circuits.  Therefore, it seems as if Pike has successfully
explained a previously unclear aspect of DP₂, the idea of divine
power sharing.  If God distributes power as we distribute electricity, then we
can see how he could delegate power without losing any of it, and still maintain
the control that orthodox theology demands. There is, however, a fatal weakness
in both the electrical and driving analogies.  They essentially beg the question
about the source of power in both the circuits and the cars.  We must also ask
how the agents themselves are empowered to operate the switches.  To complete
the electrical diagrams above, a central power source must be attached to the
lead wires at the left; furthermore, additional wires must lead from this source
directly to all agents and their switches.  God’s veto power is maintained by
direct lines to each agent. This is shown in the diagram
below.

 

Using a main switch for all of creation would not allow God
specific discretionary power � e.g., to control the will of Judas, but not John
and the other disciples.  In my expanded circuitry there is no main switch; or
if there is one, it would be closed all the time.  Without this provision the
universe, by analogy, would fall into nothingness.  The result is that Pike’s
attempt to salvage DP₂ actually collapses into a form of DP_1. 

Another way to see this collapse is to imagine God, as he would during and
after the Last Judgment, permanently closing switch A₁ and leaving A₂
open forever.  The second circuit would then be essentially the same as the
first Calvinist one. Following my lead, Pike’s
diagrams naturally lead one to think of God as a power plant, upon which many
autonomous systems draw their current.  In such a system, it would be absurd,
for example, to blame the power plant for a disastrous fire caused by a short
circuit in one of the appliances.  But the notion that God is some passive
source of power is totally alien to all revealed religion as well as most
natural religion.  If one adds the divine attributes of active will,
intelligence, beneficence, providence, and foreknowledge to the source of
power, then our conclusion about the hypothetical fire is a very different one.

 

Our power plant God with these attributes, just like the driving
teacher above, would not allow such a disaster to take place.  Furthermore, if
such an agent was also the creator of the appli�ances, then it would also be
responsible for the defect that caused the fire.  The complicity of the
classical God in evil is now even more fundamental than before.  Not only can
such a deity can be blamed for not intervening, but also held responsible, by
virtue of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, for natural defects as well
as deficient wills.

 

D.  A Response to David Basinger

Next, I consider David Basinger’s critique of DP₃ in
his book Divine Power and Process Theism.  Basinger believes that he can
have all the advantages of DP₃ without giving up the concept of God’s
unilateral control.  Basinger believes that process theists, and by implication
many traditional theists, have misconstrued how God is able to coerce.  God does
not veto our decisions by making us completely impotent (coercion_a);
rather, God simply makes it impossible for us to fulfill our self‑determined
desires (coercion_b).¹⁸
In the terminology of the free‑will
debate, God can prevent us from acting freely by obstructing our open
alternatives, but he cannot disempower us from making the choices in the first
place.  Basinger believes that he is endorsing a type of DP₃, but he
is actually still within the framework of DP₂.  His two types of
coercion lead me to distinguish be�tween two subtypes of DP_2–DP_2a
and DP_2b–with the latter not collapsing into DP₁.
Basinger implies that coercion_b is easy to comprehend because it is
analogous to the ways in which we can physically restrain others without
determining their desires in any way.  Indeed, Basinger appears to expose
process theists to an embarrassing inconsistency: we can exercise the power of
coercion_b, but the process God is impotent in this regard. 

David Griffin, however, has explained away this oddity in a
compelling response.¹⁹  We humans can coerce_b primarily
because we can use our bodies (or technological extensions thereof) to restrain
the actions of others.  The process God is fully embodied in the universe and is
obviously unable to exercise power in this way.  The classical God is not
embodied at all, so it is exceedingly difficult to imagine how this God could
use coercion_b either. Not only is Basinger unable to make divine
coercion_b intelligible, he also appears to be wrong in implying that
the traditional God does not exercise coercion in the strong sense of unilateral
determination.  If we understand creatio ex nihilo, the Incarnation,
miracles, and the Last Judgment in orthodox ways, then these doctrines seem to
require divine coercion_a.  Creating the universe from nothing,
forging a union of human and divine natures, and causing the defeat of evil �
each of these events would involve full ontological determination by God.  I
have already argued that conceiving of divine justice in less tradi�tional ways
does not alleviate the need for divine over‑power.

 

God could restrain the Pharaoh from jumping into the Nile after
he had freely formed the desire to do so (coercion_b), but he could
also harden the Pharaoh’s heart so that he could not form a desire to free the
Hebrews (coercion_a).  Clearly, orthodox Christians want to support
the possibility of both types of divine action. Concerning miracles, one might
say that one kind, such as restraining a person from falling off a cliff,
requires only coercion_b.  But if we look at the major type of
miracles found in the Bible and claimed by popular piety, we are dealing, for
the most part, with unilateral divine action. Furthermore, there are at least
two problems with the first type of miracles.  (1) It is virtually impossible to
tell whether these are really miracles.  Divine acts of this sort could be
happening all the time without our ever knowing it.  (2) It is difficult to
conceive, as we have seen above, of the mechanisms by which God could exercise
power in this way.  How did, for example, God make the earth stand still so that
Joshua could finish his battle?  Did he physically hold it in place (coercion_b)
or did he fail to give it impetus (coercion_a).  If such a God exists,
it seems eminently more reasonable to assume the latter.  (If God made other
heavenly bodies hold the earth still, then that also required an act of divine
over‑power.) Attributing coercion_b to God would be making him into
the deus ex machina that has long been rejected in philosophical
theology.  As David Griffin observes: �Although traditional theism insisted
verbally that God is incorporeal, it in effect regarded God as a ubiquitous
Superman.�²⁰  The superman deity uses Basinger’s coercion_b,
and he must realize that the disembodied God of classical theism can, if he is
actually able, only coerce in the strong sense (coercion_a).

 

Returning now to Pike, we can see that there is yet another
problem with his driving analogy, as well as his other example of a government
commission with a veto power analogous to divine over‑power.  He says that the
driving instructor is different from God because unlike God, Arthur cannot
control the desires of his students.  (Simi�larly, I could force my daughter to
get on her bike, but I could not force her to form the desire to do so.) 
Arthur can only prevent his students from acting on the driving decisions they
have freely made. Pike has to acknowledge that both the instructor and the
commission have the power to coerce in the weak sense only, while clearly the
tradi�tional God must have the power to coerce in the strong sense.  Therefore,
we must conclude that both Pike and Basinger have failed to make intelligible a
view in which God can share power and at the same time maintain the over‑power
that orthodoxy demands.  Power sharing must be conceived in John Fowles’ new
theological image: �with freedom our first principle, not authority.�

 

E.  Evil, Pike’s Over‑Power, and
Creation

Although Pike believes that he has salvaged creaturely free�dom
with his arguments, he does conclude that God is responsible for the evil that
could be prevented by the use of divine over‑power.  Let us return to Pike’s
story of Arthur and Bailey, the driving instructor and his student.  Bailey is
of course responsible for the accident, but Pike argues that the teacher Arthur
is equally culpable.  Let us look at Pike’s explanation in full: �…The
circumstances clearly indicate that Arthur may not be just responsible but
liable.  Look at it this way:  Bailey was a trainee � inexperienced, ner�vous
from the outset…However, Arthur was the instructor � experienced and
confident as a driver…He should have anticipated the problem and been ready to
act as soon as disaster began to unfold.  To be sure, Bailey did it � he ran the
stop sign, hit the bus, and killed the children.  But the point is that although
he had operational control of the vehicle, he shouldn’t have had it � Arthur
should have had it.  Arthur had over‑power.�²¹
If one substitutes a
nervous, but experienced sinner for Bailey and God for Arthur, the theological
implications are devastating for the concept of an all‑powerful, beneficent
God."²²

 

Another analogy suggests itself.  Imagine that a city government
has the opportunity to buy a foolproof crime prevention system.  Imagine that it
would be some advanced technology which could incapacitate any would‑be criminal
carrying out a robbery, beating, killing, etc.  Assume that such a system could
be obtained at a reasonable cost.  Should a benevolent government purchase such
a system?  I contend that it would be morally obli�gated to do so.
Pike’s driver example was inspired by Aquinas’ idea of a ship’s pilot who
is not responsible for a wreck �except in the case where the pilot could and
should have been at the helm.�²³ 
But if God is beneficent, God
�could and should� intervene just as the city must buy the surveillance system
and Arthur must use his over‑power.

 

One might object that God, in granting creaturely freedom and
promising to respect the dignity of human choice, must allow evil as well as
good actions.  While this sounds persuasive in the abstract, it does not ring
true in the context of my example or Pike’s.  Any driving teacher should and
would immediately intervene to prevent an accident.  In my example the
surveillance system is simply a technological extension of the police officers
on the street.  They are obligated to prevent a mugging or rape if they are
able.  Indeed, the general denial of freedom to criminals is the cornerstone of
our system of jurisprudence. Human benevolence is always concerned with
minimizing evil as well as promoting good.  There is no sign that God acts like
a divine police officer in eliminating evil.  Again we are forced to concede the
truth of Nietzsche’s dictum:  Even some of the most negligent earthly fathers do
more for their children than the orthodox God has apparently done for his. 
Again, the process God, prevented from intervening by the very nature of the
cosmos, seems to be the preferred option.

 

In discussions about the problem of evil, it is customary to
distinguish among three types of evil: (1) �moral� evil, produced directly by
deliberative will; (2) �physical� evil, pain and suffering due to disease,
mental disturbance, or natural catastro�phes; and (3) �metaphysical� evil, i.e.,
contingency, finitude, and corruptibility. A short analysis of these types of
evil reveals that both moral and physical evils are actually based on
metaphysical evil:  e.g., incorruptible humans would not sin or experience pain,
and a perfect earth would not crack and swallow up houses and people.  But the
earth’s crust could not be broken if it had not been originally made fragile by
the Creator himself. It is clear then that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo
means that the omnipotent Creator is the efficient cause of metaphysical evil,
and is therefore responsible for moral and physical evil.

 

In The City of God Augustine attempts to absolve God of
any responsibility for evil by proposing that moral evil came into the world
because of deficient wills.  According to Augustine, to say that God is the
efficient cause of evil would be to say that a good will is the cause of sin � a
most absurd proposition."²⁴ 
Augustine’s argument would work if he
were not wedded to creatio ex nihilo.  Augustine says that creaturely
wills are deficient because they are made from nothing, but he fails to
acknowledge that God is the efficient cause which made them from nothing. There
is a further implication in Augustine’s view.  In the same passage he states
that �our first parents fell into disobedience because they were already
secretly corrupted.�  Augustine identifies this secret corruption as overweaning
pride, but he ought to have recognized a more fundamental corruption:  creation
itself.  In creating a world apart from himself, God created some thing
fundamentally different from the divine nature.  Creation, then, was necessarily
contingent, finite, and corruptible.  Although declared heretical, Tillich’s
daring proposition was correct:  the Fall began with Creation and not in the
Garden.

 

An engineer friend of mine was once hired by an auto insurance
company to analyze the steel in a broken drive shaft.  He discovered that it was
some of the cheapest steel that Chrysler could have bought for this crucial part
of the chassis.  With photos from an electron microscope, my friend was able to
show a judge the air pockets that were the cause of the axle’s easy frac�ture.
Now it would have been absurd for Chrysler’s attorneys to follow
Augustine’s argument, viz., that the company was responsible for the positive
elements of the steel but not its deficiencies.  At the same time it would be
unfair to demand that the steel manufacturer make sure that there were no air
pockets at all.  This we could demand solely of an omnipotent Creator.  As the
exclusive manufacturer of all natural things, the orthodox God is fully
responsible for the deficiencies in his products. 

 

Evangelicals such as C. S. Lewis, Carl Henry, Stephen Davis, and
Alvin Plantinga propose resurrecting the traditional view that physical evil is
done by Satan and his demons.  David and Randall Basinger call such a hypothesis
�defensive� and �ad hoc.�  Indeed, theists have trouble enough arguing for the
existence of God, and many must be embarrassed by the use of this most unlikely
story.  Even if we grant its plausibility, it still does not absolve God from
the responsibility for evil. Returning to Pike’s driver training example, God is
still sitting next to Satan as he drives into school buses, or more drastically,
as he shakes the earth in Mexico or Columbia.  In his defense Satan could tell
the judge that God gave him not only permission but the power to bring all those
evils upon Job and countless other innocents who have been visited by gratuitous
evils. Insofar as Plantinga accepts DP₃, he can affirm something that
the other three cannot: viz., that Satan’s will cannot be controlled by God. But
if one holds that Satan moves the earth, seas, and heavenly bodies with a power
truly his own, then one walks right into the Manichean heresy, which does, as we
have seen, infect some fundamentalist thinking; and now seems to be implied in
Plantinga’s explanation of the origin of natural evil.

 

In Being and Nothingness Jean‑Paul Sartre argues that
orthodox creationism cannot support the concept of true, objective existents.
Things created out of nothing would be completely passive and could not be
independent in any way.²⁵  Sartre con�cludes that such created things
must still be counted as part of the being of God.  Deficient in real substance,
such things would dissolve and merge with the divine nature.  Orthodox
monotheism wedded to creatio ex nihilo actually turns into pantheism.
Aquinas’ �demythologizing� of creatio ex nihilo can also be expressed in
a manner consistent with Sartre’s critique:  �There is nothing that does not owe
its being, goodness, intelligibility, and reality to God.�²⁶  By
separating God and creativity and rejecting creatio ex nihilo,  Whitehead
and the process theologians have eliminated basic ontological dependence on
God.  In this article I have shown that proponents of DP₁ and DP₂
preserve, even celebrate, this dependence.  They, however, pay a high cost: 
they must not only impute all evil to God but they also undermine human dignity
and freedom, the basic humanistic values of western culture.

 

Carl Henry claims that Plantinga’s demon hypothesis is needed to
make theism consistent.  I contend, to the contrary, that process solutions are
a much more credible way to demonstrate the coherence of theism.  A theology in
which God shares creative power with self‑actualizing and self‑determining
agents may not be fully biblical; but I have already suggested, using the
principle of contextualization, how Christians can reject the Yahweh of
solitary, oppressive power.

 

Throughout the history of the church Christians of all
persuasions have resisted the thesis of this section, viz., that God is directly
responsible for evil.  Such an imputation, however, would not have offended the
ancient Hebrews in the least.  For example, Moses accuses his God:  �O Lord, why
hast thou done evil to this people?� and then later demands that Yahweh repent
of this evil (Ex. 5:22; 32:12).  Yahweh declares:  �I form light, and I create
darkness: I produce well‑being, and I create evil, I Yahweh do all these things�
(Is. 45:7, AB); �…I am shaping evil against you and devising a plan against
you� (Jer.18:11); or �does evil befall a city, unless the Lord has done it?�
(Amos 3:6). The prophet Micah speaks of the evil which Ahas come down from the
Lord� (1:12); and tells of Yahweh �devising evil� against a particular family
(2:3). In a dramatic scene in Heaven Yahweh asks: �Who will entice Ahab?� (1 Kgs.
22:20).  A spirit (presumably Satan) among the heavenly host volunteers to be �a
lying spirit in the mouths of all Ahab’s prophets� (v. 22).  Completely in line
with of DP₁, Yahweh is the one who puts the lying spirit in the
mouths of the prophets and it is Yahweh who speaks evil (v. 23).

 

Instinctively
following out the logic of his view of omnipotence, Carl Henry uses these same
citations and criticizes those translators and commentators who try to soften
the meaning of Is. 45:7.  Henry stresses the parallelism between good and evil
and light and darkness, and contends that we cannot get around the
straightforward meanings of ‘ra as �evil� and �wickedness.�  True to DP₁
Henry rejects the solution that God merely permits evil and affirms the biblical
notion that God is the cause of it.  Although he hedges several times and
resorts to the Satan hypothesis frequently, Henry is the one evangelical who
comes closest to agreeing with Luther: �Since… God moves and actuates all in
all, he necessarily moves and acts in Satan and godly man.�²⁷

ENDNOTES

 

1. Anna Case‑Winters, God’s Power, Traditional Understandings,
and Contemporary Challenges (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1990), p.
27.

 

2. Luther’s Works,
eds. N. Pelikan and H. T. Lehman (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955‑76), Vol. 33, p.
189.

 

3. Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, Six
Volumes (Waco: Word Books, 1976‑1983) vol. 5, p. 325.

 

4. J. L. Mackie, �Evil and Omnipotence,� Mind 64 (1955);
reprinted in Baruch A. Brody, ed. Readings in the Philosophy of Religion
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice‑Hall, 1974), p. 165.

 

5. In what follows the orthodox God will be referred to as �he,�
and the process God will be referred to as Ashe.�  Most preferable, I believe,
would be the pronoun �it,� but this leads to some very awkward locutions,
awkward only because we are so ingrained in thinking of God as having gender. 

 

6. William T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy: The
Medieval Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Janovich, 2nd ed., 1969), p. 107.

 

7. Summa Contra Gentiles
I, 25.

 

8. The New Bible Dictionary,
2nd ed., p. 637.

 

9. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke,
O.P. in The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press,
1980), p. 49.

 

10. Moses Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, trans. M.
Friedlander (New York: Dover Publications, 2nd ed., 1904), p. 201.

 

11. Henry, op. cit., vol. 6, pp. 293‑94.

 

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The
Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954),
pp. 293‑94.

 

13. Desiderius Eramus, �On Free Will,� trans. Mary M. McLaughlin
in The Portable Renaissance Reader, ed. James B. Ross and Mary M.
McLaughlin (Penguin Books), p. 686.

 

14. John B. Cobb, Jr. and David R. Griffin. Process Theology:
An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), p.
53.

 

    15. David Basinger, Divine Power
in Process Theism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), p. 65; and Bruce Reichenbach,   
"Natural
Evils and Natural Laws: A Theodicy of Natural Evils,� International
Philosophical Quarterly 16 (June, 1976), pp. 179‑198. 

 

16. David R. Griffin, Evil Revisited (Albany: SUNY Press,
1991), p. 91.

 

17. Nelson Pike, �Over‑Power and God’s Responsibility for Sin� in
God and Temporality, eds. Eugene Long and Bowman Clark (New York:
Paragon House Publishers, 1984), p. 88. 

    18. Basinger, op.
cit. 

19. Griffin, op. cit., pp. 108ff.

 

20. Ibid., p. 104.

 

21. Pike, op. cit., p. 89. 

22. Friedrich Nietzsche, �Thus
Spoke Zarathustra� in The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 293‑94. 

23. Aquinas, Summa Theologica
I‑II, ques. 79, reply art. 1, Blackfriars ed., vol. 25, p. 207. 

24.  Augustine, The City of God,
XIV, 13. 

25.
Sartre,
Being and Nothingness, p. lxiv.  Sartre’s point is borne out nicely in
a basic ambiguity found in most of Augustine’s discussion about the �being� of
creation:  is it simply God’s being mixed with nothing or is it a separate
created being?  To my knowledge Augustine never answers this question. 

26.
William
T. Jones, The Medieval Mind, p. 230. 

27.
Luther’s Works, Vol. 33, p. 189.