Minimalist Creation Ex Nihilo and the God Who Is Surprised

Last year, I was asked to contribute to a collection of responses to Thomas J. Oord’s newest book, The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence. Contributors were asked to do one of three things: support the main ideas of the book in new ways, critique the main ideas of the book, or expand on the ideas of the book. The short essay that I wrote for this effort is a strange combination of all three. I think that Tom is correct that traditional understandings of divine omnipotence are misguided. I think Tom’s development of this core idea in his books The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence and God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and other Evils are incredibly important and very well presented. However, I disagree with Tom’s support for the idea of the co-everlastingness of the nondivine world with God. Instead, I think that a version of creation ex nihilo is the better way to understand God’s fundamental relationship with creation. Tom has opposed creation ex nihilo in part on the grounds that it creates a version of the problem of evil where if God can create from nothing, then God could continue to do this at any time. God could then create from nothing any reality needed to prevent something from happening (say, a wall to stop a bullet). In this essay, I propose the idea of “minimalist” creation ex nihilo that I think is entirely consistent with Tom’s critique of omnipotence and so avoids at the least the problem of evil critique of creation of ex nihilo. There are other problems that remain, most notably connected to the problem of saying anything at all about God. Given the 2,000 world limit the editors asked me to strive for, this latter problem could not be solved in this essay. However, I hope it at least opens one more door on to the debate about how we think about God and especially how we think about what God can and cannot do in the world. Here is the essay.