In the previous post I talked about Jay McDaniel’s proposal for a revised account of divine omnipotence and creation based on the suggestion of a primordial chaos that coexists with God, a chaos out of which God creates the world and which limits the divine ability to shape creation.

I agree with McDaniel about the need to re-think some traditional notions of divine omnipotence, and that the Old Testament is ambiguous in affirming creation ex nihilo, but I’m not persuaded to go all the way with him. First, for Christians at least, the prologue to John’s Gospel and other New Testament passages do seem to affirm creation ex nihilo, and this should carry significant weight.

Second, the idea of a primordial chaos co-existent with God throughout all time seems ill-justified. Is it more parsimonious to posit two uncreated realities than one? McDaniel suggests that there may have been a series of universes, contracting and expanding, as suggested by some astrophysicists, and that the chaos of energy events is the remnants of the previous cosmos, but why should there be any cosmos at all? This is the question at the base of the cosmological argument: why is there anything rather than nothing?

Christians should only let themselves be pushed to such a drastically revisionist stance if there are no better alternatives available. And I think there are better ways of dealing with the problem of theodicy available. One is, instead of positing a primordial chaos that limits God’s ability to shape creation, to think in terms of the possibilities that exist in the divine mind. This sea of possibility, if you will, is not an actually existing “stuff” alongside God, but is comprised by the concepts of all the possible worlds that could self-consistently exist.

To create, God can only choose to actualize a world that is, in fact, possible. And, as we saw in the discussion of Southgate’s book, there are reasons for thinking that complex life as we know it is only possible by means of a process that also involves suffering and frustration. So, what limits God is not the recalcitrance of some primordial stuff, but the very logical structure of reality, as expressed by the divine mind.

Further, rather than restricting divine power to the ability to “lure” by presenting possibilities (a notion of dubious coherence when applied to inorganic matter), it might make more sense to see God as intentionally choosing to limit the divine power in order to allow creatures a certain autonomy. This “kenotic” understanding of divine power emphasizes that God wants and chooses to allow creatures to live and develop according to their own divinely-given natures. In restricting the divine power to that of persuasion, the process understanding doesn’t seem to do justice to the biblical and Christian picture of God, which is that of, among other things, a sovereign creator.