Prime Matter: Is Richard Creel a Modern-Day Advocate?

The theist should say not, "In the beginning was God," but, "In the beginning was God and the plenum," because neither could exist without the other.[1]

"The plenum" is the name Richard Creel has given to the "absolutely formless" and immaterial thing, so to speak, that serves as the ground for all of God's creative potential.  It is, in his words, "the repository, so to say, of those possibilities [actualizable by God]" (p.68).  Creel's motivation for positing this plenum is due to his judgment of creation ex nihilo as incoherent, since it seems to violate the principle ex nihilo nihil fit ('from nothing nothing becomes').  Unwilling to trade creation ex nihilo for creation ex Deo ('out of God'), since the latter is pantheism, he sees no other solution than to God creating "out of something other than himself" (pp.66-7).

Here are the two primary problems with Creel's unorthodox belief.  Firstly, it renders God a dependent being.  Surprisingly, Creel explicitly admits this matter-of-factly.  He emphasizes this point: that God and the plenum are mutually dependent upon one another.  For apart from the existence of the plenum God would have nothing upon which to act, which would render God impotent--being unable to exercise his power.  So then if God were to exist apart from the plenum he would not be omnipotent, but in that case God would not be God.  It is hard to see how Creel's positing of the plenum does anything to remedy this problem since the existence of the plenum would in effect be the cause of God's having the attribute of omnipotence.  In other words, God is omnipotent but not essentially omnipotent.

The second important problem with Creel's belief is the incoherency of the concept of the plenum.  For he strongly emphasizes that the plenum is both immaterial and "absolutely formless."  But anything that lacks any form whatsoever is non-existent.  Not only is it an unactual object; it cannot possibly exist, since it has no essence to speak of and is fundamentally incoherent.  How positing an immaterial, formless entity could provide passive grounds for divine activity is beyond me.

This was a real disappointment in my reading of Creel's book on impassibility because he relied on this notion to make his case for his views in some other areas.  This in addition to his only-natural-knowledge view of omniscience, made it clear that Creel was not really attempting to articulate and defend a classical position of impassibility, which was what I was hoping to read.


1.  Richard Creel, Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 69.