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The Return of God?

A God of Limited Power

Philip Goff grasps hold of the problem of evil and comes up with a novel solution.

Human beings often get stuck in binary thought. Do you believe in souls, or do you think the mind is just the brain? Do you think we have free will, or is everything determined? Are you a communist, or a capitalist? One of the biggest two-sided debates of contemporary philosophy is the battle between traditional monotheists and traditional atheists: Do you believe in an all-powerful loving creator, or do you think we live in a meaningless, godless universe? Whose side are you on, Richard Dawkins or the Pope? These are your options, make your choice!

However, in each of these cases there is a wealth of positions in between the dominant extremes. For much of my career as a philosopher, I have explored the middle ground in the philosophy of mind, in particular defending panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe. And in my recent book Why? The Purpose of the Universe (2023), I explored the fascinating middle ground in-between the traditional forms of theism and atheism.

Ultimately, I think each side of the God debate has something right. The atheists rightly point to the difficulty of reconciling a loving all-powerful God with the terrible suffering we can see in the world. The most famous response by monotheists appeals to free will, and perhaps this can explain the suffering resulting from human action – but what about the suffering we find in the natural world? And why would God choose to create intelligent life through the bloody process of evolution by natural selection?

But there are also things atheists struggle to explain. One much-discussed challenge for atheism is the fine-tuning of physics for life – the surprising discovery of recent decades that the fundamental constants of physics are just right to allow the possibility of life, against incredible odds. Some try to explain this in terms of a multiverse: if there are enough universes, then one of them’s going to fluke the right numbers for life.

I used to think this was the right answer myself. However, I’ve been persuaded by philosophers of probability that the reasoning underlying a multiverse explanation of fine-tuning is hopelessly confused.

A thought experiment might help make the point. Suppose we’re in a jungle and we happen upon a monkey typing in perfect English. This surely needs explaining. Maybe it’s a specially trained monkey. Maybe it’s someone dressed up. Maybe it’s a robot… What would not explain it is to hypothesise that there are limitless other planets in the universe on which there are monkeys randomly banging on typewriters, almost all of them incoherently. Postulating other monkeys elsewhere in the cosmos is irrelevant. What we want explaining concerns this monkey.

Now let’s add a little detail to our thought experiment: there is, unbeknownst to us, a sniper hiding in the trees waiting to blow our brains out as soon as the monkey doesn’t write coherent English. Clearly, this would not add any utility to the ‘many monkeys’ explanation just outlined. However, what we’ve now described is equivalent to the ‘many universes’ explanation of fine-tuning. The latter is the claim that because we couldn’t have observed a non-fine-tuned universe (because we couldn’t be alive to observe it), the postulation of many universes, of which a relative few are supermeticulously fine-tuned for life, is sufficient to explain our observation of a fine-tuned universe. But in our modified monkey thought experiment, I equally couldn’t have observed a monkey typing anything other than coherent English (because I couldn’t be alive to observe it); yet still the postulation of many other monkeys does not help explain my observation of a monkey typing English.

A God of Limited Power by Venantius J Pinto

A Limited Explanation

We’ve seen that both sides of the God debate have something they can explain and something they can’t explain. Fortunately, there is a hypothesis that can plug the gap in both sides: a good God of limited power.

The challenge for the traditional monotheist is to explain why God chose to create intelligent life through such a horrific process as natural selection, rather than, say, just bringing people into existence fully formed in a world with free will but without suffering. But if God is not all-powerful, maybe God is simply unable to create complex life in such a manner. Maybe, for instance, God can only build from simplicity – and hence the only option for creating intelligent life was to create a universe with the right kind of physics that would eventually evolve it, with all the suffering this entails. God knew it was going to be messy and unpleasant, and wished there was another way, but it was either that or nothing.

The ‘limited God hypothesis’ can account both for the imperfections of the universe and for the improbably good things, such as the universe’s fine-tuning. So while traditional monotheists and traditional atheists tie themselves in knots trying to deal with suffering and fine-tuning respectively, this hypothesis can accommodate both with ease. I suspect biases on both sides stop us from appreciating this.

The response I probably most often get to this argument is, “Why not a bad God that’s all-powerful, rather than a good God that’s limited?”

I consider this possibility at length in my book. However, ultimately, the postulation of an all-powerful evil God faces mirror-image problems to the postulation of an all-powerful good God. So instead of asking, Why would an omnipotent good God allow such suffering?, one might ask, Why would an omnipotent evil God allow all the beauty, wonder and goodness we find in our universe? (The evil God idea is wonderfully articulated in Stephen Law’s ‘Evil God Challenge’, which you can find on YouTube.)

A Reasonable Hope

Can belief in a limited God provide hope in an afterlife, or an ultimate purpose to the universe?

It seems plausible that, however limited in power, a loving God would want to preserve our conscious minds after death, and would want to move us towards a better world. The uncertainty is whether a limited God would be able to do these things. After all, proponents of the limited God hypothesis think there are many evils that God is sadly unable to prevent, and this is why those evils exist. This leaves life after death and cosmic purpose in the category of reasonable hope. They are things God might be able to do or might not be able to do, and we don’t know which category eternal life and cosmic meaning fall under, because we don’t know the extent or nature of God’s limitations.

But reasonable hope is not nothing. To take an analogy, it’s important that there’s a reasonable chance that we’ll overcome the problems of climate change, even though it’s far from certain that we will. A reasonable chance can make the difference between hope and despair.

A limited God may seem inconsistent with traditional religions. However, in the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981), Rabbi Harold Kushner addressed the problem of evil by postulating a limited God. And Christians in the tradition of process theology, inspired by the philosophy of (non-Christian) Alfred North Whitehead, have made a similar move. Indeed, I think Christianity makes a lot more sense if God has limited power. It’s always seemed to me hard to make sense of why God had to become a human being in order to give us eternal life; but if God is not all-powerful, new ways of making sense of this open up. For instance, maybe the problem is that a timeless, immaterial God is just so radically different to us temporal, embodied creatures that the only way God can allow us to share in their timeless existence is by God fully entering into our temporal existence – becoming more like us so that we can become more like God. In fact, there is already an interpretation of Christianity just like this, known as ‘participatory theory’; but I think it makes a lot more sense when combined with the idea of a limited God.

For a long time now we’ve fixated on the binary of traditional God versus traditional atheism. It’s high time we explored the riches that lie in-between.

Philip Goff is a Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. He is best known for defending panpsychism, the view that consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of everything.