Could Process Theodicy Uphold the Generic Idea of God?

To live in this world is to live in the midst of evil. The reality of evil seems all too real and yet ever-perplexing in that it scoffs at any attempt to make rational sense of the world. Can we dare to insist, as traditional theodicy does, that such a world is not only created by but is also under the providence of God who is seen as perfect in both goodness and power? Many find such an attempt incredulous if not scandalous.

David Griffin, a foremost process philosopher of religion and the leading proponent of process theodicy, too, finds the traditional theistic theodicy philosophically and theologically unsatisfactory.¹ The main reason for its failure, Griffin thinks, lies in the traditional conception of God’s omnipotence: that God “could unilaterally bring about an actual world without any genuine evil.”² Griffin finds such a notion of God’s power incoherent and problematic. He insists that we must delimit the conception of divine omnipotence. In doing so, Griffin conceives a process theodicy that he thinks is “self-consistent, adequate to and even illuminating of the facts of experience, adequate to the generic idea of God in our tradition, and expressive of the distinctive Christian suggestion about divine power in particular.”³ By delimiting the notion of God’s power, Griffin claims to have arrived at a theodicy that is not only rationally consistent and does justice to the facts of our experience but also upholds all the essential conceptions of God that belong to theism. These essential concepts—what Griffin calls the generic idea of God—feature God as (i) worthy of worship, (ii) perfect in power, (ii) the purposive creator of the world, (iv) perfectly good, (v) the source of moral norms, (vi) the ultimate guarantee for the meaningfulness of human life, and (vii) the trustworthy ground for hope in the ultimate victory of good over evil. As Griffin sees it, these seven features of God are crucial tests for truth concerning the nature of God in that “we cannot take seriously any ‘solution’ to the problem of evil that seems to deny one or more of these features.”⁴

In this essay, I will argue that Griffin’s process theodicy, with its delimited conception of divine power, is unable to uphold the last two features—that is, (vi) and (vii)—of the generic idea of God. I shall do so by (1) looking at three metaphysical necessities that are crucial to Griffin’s process theodicy, (2) looking at his proposed solutions to uphold the two attributes belonging to the generic idea of God—that is, God being (vi) the ultimate guarantee for the meaningfulness of human life and (vii) the trustworthy ground for hope in the ultimate victory of good over evil—and (3) assessing whether Griffin succeeds in adequately upholding the two attributes.

In light of the limited scope of the essay, I will not try to give full explication of Griffin’s process theodicy or to determine its rational cogency; I will simply note at the outset that Griffin’s theodicy seems to be a model of rational consistency. Furthermore, I will not be able to do justice to Griffin’s impressive arguments for the necessity of the three metaphysical necessities nor to a number of elements that are crucial to process theodicy; I will be content with simply showing the crucial roles they play in process theodicy and the implications these metaphysical principles have with regards to (vi) and (vii). My aim in this paper is to show that, given the process metaphysical necessities and other essential elements, Griffin’s process theodicy seems unable to uphold (vi) and (vii).

I. Process Theodicy and Metaphysical Necessities

We begin with the three metaphysical necessities that Griffin thinks are essential to process theodicy. The first metaphysical feature concerns the notion of divine omnipotence, that God’s power is necessarily persuasive rather than controlling. Following St. Anselm, Griffin sees God’s power to be the greatest conceivable or greatest possible. By this, Griffin means that God possesses “all the power...