Limited Theism, Hybrid Theism and The Problem of Evil

Some Goff inspired thoughts

Recently, famous philosopher and popularizer of panpsychism Phillip Goff converted to what he refers to as a “heretical” form of Christianity. Now, Goff’s Christianity may be considered heretical in a variety of ways, but the one that concerns me for the purposes of this article derives from Goff’s conception of God. Unlike traditional theists, who conceive of God as all knowing, all good, and all powerful, Goff conceives of God as a being of infinite goodness and knowledge but limited power.

The motivation for Goff’s limited theism is fairly straightforward. On the one hand, there are certain facts about the universe, such as fine tuning and psychophysical harmony, that seem hard to explain if reality is fundamentally just blind, unguided matter in motion. On the other hand, if reality was created by a God who is both all powerful and all good, you run into the problem of evil. Perhaps, then, what we need is a middle ground- perhaps the universe was indeed created by a powerful conscious agent who is motivated to produce good things (hence fine tuning and psychophysical harmony), but whose ability to do so is limited (hence diseases, natural disasters, etc.)

Now, one common objection that people raise against this view is something like “how could God be powerful enough to fine tune the physical and psychophysical constants, but not powerful enough to cure cancer or prevent the holocaust? Surely, if anything, the latter would be easier than the former”. But this argument is simply confused. While it is surely the case that curing cancer requires less power than fine tuning the universe, it is not the case that curing cancer requires less power than fine tuning the universe and curing cancer.

Perhaps, then, God creates and fine tunes the universe so that conscious creatures can come about, but doing so uses up enough of his power that he doesn’t have enough leftover to then cure cancer, or at least not immediately. For analogy, imagine that I am trying to make as much money as possible. Among the possible things I could do to achieve this are to work all day at a full time job, or upload articles to my Substack hoping to gain subscribers. The latter option would certainly be easier, but would accomplish my goal less effectively. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time and energy to do both of these things, so I resign myself to doing only the former.

Now, if someone were to come to me and say “but Ethan, if you want money, and you have enough time and energy to work all day, why don’t you also publish more Substack articles? Surely doing so requires less effort than working all day, and you clearly like money, so if you do the former it makes no sense that you’re not also doing the latter”, this would obviously just be a basic confusion.

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I think then, that there clearly is some quantity of power such that a being who is good and possesses that amount of power would plausibly create and fine tune a universe without being able to constantly fiddle with it to wipe away any imperfections. But this leads us to a new, very real problem with the limited God hypothesis- what is the prior probability of there existing a being with exactly that quantity of power?

In a compelling paper, Callum Miller argues that a theistic hypothesis on which God possesses an infinite degree of power, knowledge, and goodness is vastly more intrinsically probable than one according to which God has some large finite degree of any or all of the above. According to Miller, a limitation on one of God’s attributes seems to “cry out for an explanation”. The reason for this is that a limitation on, say God’s power, represents a logically contingent exception to God’s power, and such exceptions introduce probabilistic tension.

By analogy, consider two hypothesis’ one might accept regarding the nature of the physical universe. The first hypothesis says ‘all protons have a charge of +1’, and the second says ‘all protons except one have a charge of +1’. Note, these hypothesis’ are roughly equally well supported by our empirical evidence- on either hypothesis, there is essentially no chance we would’ve ever encountered an electron that has a charge other than +1. Nonetheless, most of us would say that the former hypothesis is far more likely to be true in virtue of the fact that it’s more intrinsically probable.

Why do we consider the former hypothesis more intrinsically probable than the latter? Plausibly, because the latter hypothesis introduces a random exception to an otherwise universal nomological proposition, and such exceptions are, almost by definition, unexpected and thus improbable. The former hypothesis, by contrast, is a far simpler and more uniform hypothesis because it is exceptionless.

This is not a trivial advantage. For consider the fact that in addition to the hypothesis that ‘all protons except one have a charge of +1’, one could also accept a hypothesis according to which ‘all protons except two have a charge of +1’, or ‘all protons except three have a charge of +1’, and so on for a lot more numbers. And, remember, given the sheer amount of electrons in the universe, these hypothesis’ will all be roughly equally well empirically supported. It is not just that we think the exceptionless hypothesis is more probable than one particular exception-involving hypothesis- we think that the exceptionless hypothesis is more probable than the disjunction of all of the exception involving hypothesis’!

Also consider the fact that for any one of these exception involving hypothesis’, there are far more ways in which it could be true than for the exceptionless hypothesis. Take, for instance, the hypothesis that every proton except one has a charge of +1. That hypothesis could be true in a vast number of ways, as any one of a vast number of electrons could provide the exception in question. However, there is exactly one way in which it could be true that all electrons have a charge of +1. Even though the exceptionless hypothesis is far less modest (an advantage which Goff’s view doesn’t even really have over traditional theism, because he’s not just generically stipulating that God’s power has some finite quantity, but rather an extremely specific finite quantity), we prefer it for its simplicity.

What this shows is that Goff’s stipulation of some arbitrary, unexplained limit on God’s power drastically lowers the intrinsic probability of his theory. While Goff acknowledges that his view suffers from some hit to its elegance for the sort of reason I’ve been describing, I thought it worth articulating just how significant a hit this is.

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Still, there is no doubt that there is something appealing about the explanatory power of Goff’s hypothesis. When we look at the world and observe its beauty, the fine tuning for life and psychophysical harmony that it exhibits, but then also the evil, the imperfection, and the suffering, it seems natural to suppose that it was brought about by some conscious agent who has moral ends in mind, but who is limited in their ability to pursue those ends. So what are we to think?

Perhaps there is some way for Goff to have his cake and eat it too. I have said that Goff’s hypothesis of a limited God is drastically less simple than traditional theism, and that this is a very strong reason for disprefering it. The reason Goff’s theory is less simple, as I’ve said, is that it postulates arbitrary unexplained limits in God’s power. However, this plausibly only matters because, on Goff’s view, the limited God is taken to be explanatorily fundamental. For, as some have argued, it is really the complexity of explanatorily fundamental entities which should count against the simplicity of a theory.

Consider, to take an example from Pruss, the following two hypothesis:

Theory 1: A meteorite deposited some organic chemicals 4.1 billion years ago that combined to produce life.

Theory 2: A meteorite deposited some organic chemicals 3.9 billion years ago that combined to produce life.

Now, on one view of theoretical simplicity, theory 1 is drastically less simple than theory 2. The reason is that it commits us to much more overall complexity, namely an extra 200 million years' worth of organisms (as well as an extra 200 million years’ worth of kinds of organisms, given evolution). But it seems wrong to say that theory 1 has a much lower intrinsic probability than theory 2 in virtue of this fact. Why? Because, as Pruss puts it, “these added entities and kinds are easily explained by the theory in question”, whereas we should only be concerned with the addition of complexity which is unexplained by the theory in question.

The upshot of this is that Goff’s supposition that the universe was created by a deity of limited power need not drastically lower the simplicity of his theory so long as the limited deity in question isn’t taken to be explanatorily fundamental to his worldview. Perhaps, then, if Goff wanted to have his cake and eat it too, he could say that a deity of limited power created our world, but that this deity itself was created by a God of unlimited power (or perhaps by another limited God who was created by an unlimited God, etc.)

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There is an obvious worry here. Namely, if we reintroduce a God of infinite power into the picture, doesn’t the problem of evil re emerge? If God created a limited God, and that God created the best world that he could but the world in question contained all sorts of evils, why wouldn’t the all powerful God then step in and perfect the world for them?

Granted, this is a worry. But perhaps it is not a devastating one. Recall that one of the more popular responses to the problem of evil appeals to the value of free will. This response, for many, rests on a plausible enough value claim, but is lacking in explanatory power. Namely, the free will defense fails to account for evils that are products of the natural world, rather than the exercise of free will of a conscious agent.

Perhaps the limited God/traditional God hybrid view, then, is well positioned to employ the moral logic of a free will defense in order to account for all evils, including natural evils- the way that it does this is by supposing that all evils are fundamentally downstream of the free actions of the limited God. In other words, maybe conjoining the limited God hypothesis with the traditional God hypothesis offers a plausible option for a subsumption theodicy.

Of course, one might still be skeptical of why not interfering with the free will of the limited God is of such importance as to be worth allowing cancer, rape, genocide, etc. I, as a non theist, certainly share these concerns. It seems to me that theists are often too quick to say “God had to allow this for free will” without really defending the value claim that the particular exercise of free will in question was worth the outcome. Certainly in our everyday ethical dealings, we don’t consider it to be an inappropriate usurpation of freedom to put a serial killer in jail in order to prevent him from killing innocent victims.

But perhaps there are deeper stories the hybrid theist could tell here. It is certainly true that creative, conscious creatures (at least the ones we are familiar with) generally receive some substantial benefit from being able to create freely. A child is benefited by being able to paint on their own- if their parent were to come in and hold their hand as they did it to make sure that they didn’t make any mistakes, then much if not all of the value of the activity of painting goes away. Perhaps, then, the limited God receives such a robust benefit from being able to create freely that it’s best for God to not step in and interfere with the process. One might find this especially plausible given the fact that the limited God is much more advanced than we are, and thus presumably capable of deriving benefits from his activity that are much richer than anything we can empathize with or conceive of.

I should note that this explanation seems to cohere quite nicely with some of the existing proposals for a limited God. According to one view that has been held by a range of philosophers, the universe is the result of the activity of a self perfecting spirit, i.e. a spirit who is using the universe as a sort of medium through which they pursue self perfection. Hence, the universe itself is constantly undergoing a process of self perfection. As an aside, I should mention that this view does an especially good job of explaining evolutionary evil. If our world was created by a limited and self perfecting spirit, a process of gradual development on the part of species’ towards higher states of consciousness is perhaps precisely what we would expect.

In any case, the point here is just that an explanation of how a limited God derives benefit from being able to create a universe on his own seems more or less built into process theology. The experience of the process of perfecting/improving the universe is crucial to their journey towards self perfection. Perhaps it is by appeal to these or similar resources that a hybrid theist can get around the problem of evil.

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Of course, there’s much more to be said about all of this. This article is by no means a comprehensive defense of the sort of hybrid theism I’ve been talking about. I do not accept this view, and I am not even arguing that it is all things considered preferable to Goff’s. Perhaps hybrid theism struggles with the problem of evil to such a degree that limited theism comes out as the better hypothesis despite its massively lower prior probability after all. I could certainly mention several more potential problems with the view I’ve laid out, as well as potential solutions to many of those problems.

The purpose of this article, then, is just to express some modest thoughts and ideas I’ve been having about a perhaps underdiscussed option in philosophy of religion. This article is an attempt to perhaps get a discussion going about this topic, wherein the virtues and vices of this sort of theory can be considered more in depth than I’m capable of in a single article.