1.1 Introduction

In this introductory section, I review the limited God literature and identify the non-vitalist and vitalist traditions of the limitation thesis. I use the terms world and universe frequently in the section. I use them interchangeably to indicate the totality in which all things persist. Where a distinction is made between the two terms, I explain the specific way that the term involved is used. The section is divided into several subsections. Subsection 1.2 contextualises the limited God view in African philosophy of religion and contrasts this view with traditional African theism which presents God as a perfect being. Subsection 1.3 properly introduces the limitation thesis. Subsections 1.4 and 1.5 concisely explore the limited God literature in the non-vitalist and vitalist traditions respectively. Subsection 1.6 introduces the conception of God articulated in the philosophy of consolationism. Subsection 1.7 is the conclusion.

1.2 Two Conceptions of God in African Traditional Religion (ATR) and African Philosophy of Religion

African Traditional Religion (ATR) does not have a written holy book.Footnote ¹ Its sources include myths, proverbs, wise sayings, and the world views of traditional African societies. African Traditional Religion furnishes two broad conceptions of God that African philosophers of religion have relied on in the construction of theories about God’s nature and his relation with the world. In this Element, I will label the two dominant conceptions of God ‘traditional African theism’ and ‘the limited God view’. African Traditional Religion itself is a term widely used in African religious studies literature to refer to the religious belief system of traditional African societies, their worship practices and cosmogonies. It is characterised by belief in the existence of God, deities, ancestors, and cosmic forces and principles that human beings can manipulate for good or ill (see, for example, Parrinder Reference Parrinder1954; Mbiti Reference Mbiti1969, Reference Mbiti1975; Idowu Reference Idowu1973).

Traditional African theism reflects belief in God as the supreme being and personal creator of the world who possesses the superlative properties of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. Early defenders of traditional African theism like Joseph Boakye Danquah (Reference Danquah1944), E. Bolaji Idowu (Reference Idowu1962), John S. Mbiti (Reference Mbiti1969), Joseph Omosade Awolalu and P. Adelumo Dopamu (Reference Awolalu and Dopamu1979), and E. Ikenga-Metuh (Reference Ikenga-Metuh1981) argue from a decolonisation perspective that traditional African societies developed autochthonous conceptions of God as the supreme being who possesses the omni-properties. In its early form, the decolonisation project in African religious studies marks a defensive reaction against long-established Western racist prejudices (see, for example, Hume Reference Hume and Eugene1987; Njoku Reference Njoku2002; p’Bitek Reference p’Bitek2011; Agada Reference Agada2022a). In the nineteenth century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel noted that Africans lack not only the capacity for rational thinking but also conscious awareness of the existence of a transcendent supernatural entity – that is, God (see Hegel Reference Hegel2001, 111–113).Footnote ² In Europe, Hegel promoted the view that ATR is not a religion in the sense that Christianity, for example, is a religion with a distinct object of worship that is considered a divine person separate from nature. Early decolonisation scholars set for themselves the goal of demonstrating that Africans have conceptions of God that correspond to the Christian conception of a perfect creator-God.

The early decolonisation scholars asserted that Western scholarship misinterprets and inferiorises ATR. They set out to formulate what they consider the correct African perspective on God. They claimed that traditional African societies hold views of God that are not inferior to the Christian view of God. African philosophers like Maduabuchi Dukor (Reference Dukor1990), Kwame Gyekye (Reference Gyekye1995), and Ebunoluwa O. Oduwole (Reference Oduwole2007) have endorsed the traditional theistic stance and presented the God of ATR as a perfect being. African theists like Gyekye, Oduwole, and Francis O. C. Njoku (Reference Njoku2002) have focused philosophical effort on demonstrating that traditional African societies have autochthonous conceptions of God as a perfect being. There is less interest in the project of proving the existence of God by force of argument (see Lougheed, Molefe, and Metz Reference Lougheed, Molefe and Metz2024).

Gyekye reaches the conclusion that the Akan God, Onyame, is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipresent after extensively analysing Akan proverbs, wise sayings, myths, and names and titles of God in the Akan language. Paving the way for the articulation of an African theodicy, Gyekye (Reference Gyekye1995, 70) affirms that:

But having arrived at the idea of a perfect being through the analysis of traditional Akan linguistic phenomena and world views, Gyekye (Reference Gyekye1995, 116) struggles to articulate a convincing theodicy to account for God permitting evil in the world. He suggests that moral evil arises from human misuse of free will while physical evil can be attributed to the influence of malevolent forces active in the world. However, the appeal to free will does not succeed because Gyekye accepts that God fixes a human being’s destiny before birth. He attempts a compatibilist balancing act with the claim that while God fixes the individual’s destiny, he does not rigidly condition minute details of the individual’s life. Destiny affects only key events and basic attributes of the individual. Underlining the Akan belief in theological determinism, Gyekye (Reference Gyekye1995, 113) quotes the proverb ‘God’s destiny cannot be altered (Onyame hyēbea yennae no).’ But realising that there is a problem reconciling free will and determinism, Gyekye (Reference Gyekye1995, 115) notes: ‘What these basic attributes are is of course difficult to say with certainty. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Akan notion of destiny is a general one, which implies that not everything that a person does or that happens to him or her represents a page from the “book of destiny”.’

According to Gyekye, the omnipotent God gives humans unalterable destinies from the beginning. Since he is all-good, the destiny he gives is a good one. He is an omniscient being who foresees future human actions. This perfect God would have ensured the actualisation of every (good) human destiny to prevent the suffering one finds in the world. Free will does not appear to be a great good that a perfect God must preserve at the cost of allowing evil in the world since he fixes destinies ab initio. Given his ability to do every logically possible thing (that is, things not contrary to reason or logic, like creating a world and not creating a world simultaneously), he ought to have suppressed the malevolent activities of malevolent spirits that he created. It can even be asserted that since the omnipotent God created lesser deities and spirits, he should have created evil-causing entities as good beings. Note that Gyekye’s God determines the future trajectory of the world from the very beginning. In this deterministic world, God must have given the lesser deities a good destiny at the time he created them, as was the case with humans. A good destiny involves not acting malevolently or perversely. Accordingly, a possible appeal to the free will of the lesser deities to explain God allowing them to choose to act malevolently does not succeed.

As suggested earlier, a free-will defence must fail because Gyekye does not succeed in reconciling theological determinism with free will. Merely saying that some things are determined while others lie outside the sway of determinism does not establish the truth of compatibilism. If determinism is true, then it may be that even the choices that human beings make are conditioned by ethical, social, legal, cultural, and aesthetic factors, with reason merely deferring to a particular causative factor rather than expressing the independent power of free will.

Oduwole appeals to the idea of the necessary complementary existence of both good and evil while grappling with the question of why an omnipotent God allows evil in the world. She uses complementary necessity with reference to the ordering of events in the world in a way that makes both good and evil complement each other (Oduwole Reference Oduwole2007). She regards this complementarity as a dialectical relationship of good and evil. God is a perfect being, but he does not intervene to eradicate or reduce all or some of the evils in the world because doing so will affect the content of the goods in the world, perhaps by causing a drop in their quantity and quality. For Oduwole, evil sometimes is instrumental to a greater good, or what she calls the greatest good. The usefulness of evil indicates its dialectical relationship with good. In her words: ‘The kola, though bitter to taste, has good medicinal qualities. Evil is thus necessary to the greatest good … These problems [evils in the world] are all the manifestations of the deities and the machinations of evil forces in Yoruba cosmogony. Evil experiences are experiences that are relevant to the fullness of one’s life’ (Oduwole Reference Oduwole2007, 12).

Oduwole does not clearly state what the greatest good is, but she seems to conflate it with the greater good, or a good compensatory state of affairs that follows from a connected evil state of affairs. Thus, she observes that a full life is made possible by the reality of evil in a world that offers many goods. However, the appeal to the necessity of a natural dialectical process does not cancel the reality of evil. Evil remains qualitatively different from good. The omnipotent and omniscient God that Oduwole presents in her discussion of traditional Yoruba religious thought is obliged to interfere with the good–evil dialectic in favour of the creation of, at least, more good than evil since he is also omnibenevolent. Indeed, the appeal to necessity and the dialectics of good and evil favours a metaphysical framework that argues for the existence of a limited God rather than a perfect God. Jonathan O. Chimakonam and Amara E. Chimakonam latch on to this intuition in their articulation of the idea of a harmony-God who sustains the balance of good and evil in the world, as I will show in Subsection 1.4.

The second conception of God in ATR presents God as limited in power, knowledge, and goodness. Early proponents of this view like Okot p’Bitek (Reference p’Bitek1971) and Kwasi Wiredu (Reference Wiredu1992) radicalise the decolonisation perspective of early theistic scholars and assert that the latter did not go far enough in eliminating Western conceptual schemes from African religious scholarship. The limited God view has been defended by scholars like p’Bitek (Reference p’Bitek1971, Reference p’Bitek2011), Chukwuemeka Nze (Reference Nze1981), Donatus Nwoga (Reference Nwoga1984), C. U. M. Ezekwugo (Reference Ezekwugo1987), and Kola Abimbola (Reference Abimbola2006). The majority of contemporary African philosophers of religion now favour the limited God view for reasons of its cultural rootedness and explanatory simplicity (see Sogolo Reference Sogolo1993; Aja Reference Aja1996; Bewaji Reference Bewaji1998; Wiredu Reference Wiredu1998, Reference Wiredu, Meister and Copan2013; Oladipo Reference Oladipo and Wiredu2004; Balogun Reference Balogun2009; Fayemi Reference Fayemi2012; Agada Reference Agada2022a, Reference Agada2022b, Reference Agada2023a; Chimakonam Reference Chimakonam2022; Cordeiro-Rodrigues and Agada Reference Cordeiro-Rodrigues and Agada2022; Mosima Reference Mosima2022; Ojimba and Chidubem Reference Ojimba and Chidubem2022; Attoe Reference Attoe2023; Chimakonam and Chimakonam Reference Chimakonam and Chimakonam2023).

1.3 Introducing the Limitation Thesis

The limitation thesis diametrically opposes the transcendental, or perfect God, thesis. It states plainly that God is limited in power, knowledge, and goodness. Proponents of the limitation thesis hold nuanced views of God. Some are nontraditional theists to the extent that they regard God as a creator-deity or designer-deity who brings the world into being from the pre-existing resources of the universe conceived panentheistically as a totality that embraces all entities and relations, including God.Footnote ³ Prominent limited God theists include Wiredu, John Ayotunde I. Bewaji, Oladele A. Balogun, Ada Agada, Jonathan O. Chimakonam, Ademola K. Fayemi, and Luis Cordeiro-Rodrigues. Philosophers who may be grouped into the category of limited God non-theists are a tiny minority. p’Bitek (Reference p’Bitek1971, Reference p’Bitek2011) and Attoe come readily to mind. The former presents a peculiar problem given that he sometimes presents the African God as a limited deity while consistently arguing that traditional African societies regard the limited God and other spiritual entities as not having objective existence, a stance that is undeniably atheistic. Attoe (Reference Attoe2022a, Reference Attoe2022b) is the one philosopher who can be uncontroversially called a limited God non-theist, without any accompanying classificatory complication since he unambiguously presents God as an unconscious, depersonalised material entity without intelligent agency.

Proponents of the limitation thesis argue that traditional African societies do not attribute omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence to God, as earlier noted. They, more or less, favour the view that ‘African peoples may describe their deities [including God] as “strong”, but not “omnipotent”; “wise”, but not “omniscient”; “old”, not “eternal”; “great”, not “omnipresent”’ (p’Bitek Reference p’Bitek2011, 42). While p’Bitek demotes God to the rank of the pantheon of deities and divinities, most limited God proponents regard God as a kind of high deity to whom lesser deities are subordinated.Footnote ⁴ Limited God proponents point to African myths, proverbs, and world views to buttress the claim that God lacks the omni-properties. Wiredu, for example, supports his claim about God not being outside the world series by invoking the myth of the old woman who compelled God to move away from his first abode somewhere above the heads of human beings and go higher up into the sky to avoid being hit by the butt of the pestle with which the old woman was pounding food in a mortar (Wiredu Reference Wiredu, Meister and Copan2013). He also references syntactic and semantic peculiarities of the Akan language to support his immanent conception of God. For him, the Akan language has no equivalent of the abstract existential English term ‘to be’ which implies that existence can be of an immaterial kind in addition to being of a material kind (Wiredu Reference Wiredu1996, 49). To say something exists means this thing persists in a particular place. Since the Akan understanding of existence is always in a spatio-temporal sense, God must be spatio-temporal if he exists, according to Wiredu.

Bewaji (Reference Bewaji1998) and Emmanuel Ofuasia (Reference Ofuasia2022a) rely on the orally transmitted narratives of the Ifa Corpus of the Yoruba people while defending the limitation thesis. They point out that God sometimes solicits help from lesser deities and even human beings to complete certain tasks and gain certain knowledge about the world. The limitation thesis favours the idea of an eternally existing universe in which God emerges as the primordial being, with the most power and the highest knowledge of the mechanism of the universe. Although a powerful and knowledgeable being, God is not perfect since he is limited by the eternally existing universe whose resources he relies on to create or design worlds inhabited by far more limited beings, comparatively.

African philosophers of religion do not attempt to demonstrate the existence of the limited God by force of argument. Instead, they focus on the characterisation of God’s relation with the world in ways that accommodate the reality of evil as a necessary dimension of an imperfect world. Such characterisation may be quasi-physicalist, as is the case with Wiredu, who conceives God as a spatio-temporally located entity who possesses unique powers of acting in ways not wholly explicable in the physicalist framework of current science. For example, God may behave like an immaterial entity not locatable in space and time, although he must be locatable in space and time if he must be deemed to actually exist. Philosophers like Agada, Motsamai Molefe (Reference Molefe2018), Molefe and Mutshidzi Maraganedzha (Reference Molefe and Maraganedzha2023), Chimakonam, Ofuasia, Cordeiro-Rodrigues, and Attoe conceive God in panpsychist, panentheistic, and materialistic terms. In the panpsychist perspective, God is regarded as a kind of cosmic mind, or the highest consciousness in the universe, who imparts his essence to all things in the universe without being himself a perfect being possessing the omni-properties. In the panentheistic perspective, God is regarded as an imperfect primordial being in an imperfect universe who is connected with entities in the universe in such a way that he is affected by modifications in the entities that he created. The materialistic understanding of God presents the primordial being as a mechanical cause of the world in the sense of being a necessary condition for the commencement of a mechanical interactive process that culminated in the emergence of diverse entities, some of which evolved consciousness and intelligence. The next section will explore the non-vitalist tradition of the limited God.

1.4 The Limited God in the Non-vitalist Tradition

The non-vitalist tradition avoids conceiving of God as a universal cosmic consciousness that animates entities in the universe with its essence or vital force. This tradition usually grants God creative agency and imbues him with sufficient power and knowledge that enable him to produce and order the world. In this section, I will provide concise outlines of the characterisation of God’s relation with the world in the works of Wiredu, Bewaji, Fayemi, Jonathan O. Chimakonam, Amara E. Chimakonam, and Attoe.

As a physicalist of the quasi-physicalist variety, Wiredu (Reference Wiredu1996, Reference Wiredu1998, Reference Wiredu, Meister and Copan2013) firmly believes that the universe is understandable within the framework of scientific knowledge, if not currently in a thorough manner, then at some future date when science must have advanced enough to fully account for quasi-physical phenomena like God that are believed to possess seemingly non-physical properties. Thus, quasi-physicalism proposes that while the universe is physical, some entities within it may behave in ways that current scientific knowledge cannot adequately account for (Wiredu Reference Wiredu1996, Reference Wiredu1998). With this postulation, Wiredu is able to account for traditional Akan belief in God, the soul, and spirits. For Wiredu, since the universe is physical, God is ultimately a physical entity.

However, Wiredu does not pursue the question of the material God’s locatability in space and time. When he writes that the Akan conceive existence in a fundamentally empirical and spatio-temporal way, he rules out any possible location of God in some undifferentiated metaphysical space. This stance raises the question of where exactly the material God is located. Attoe (Reference Attoe2022a) tries to respond to this question by vaguely identifying God with some physical constant like energy, as I will show later in this section. Nevertheless, Wiredu believes that the quasi-physical God is an imperfect entity in an imperfect world where physical evil exists necessarily and in which sentient and thinking beings like humans exhibit an inherent capacity for moral evil. God may be benevolent, but he cannot significantly tilt the good–evil balance in the world in favour of good because he is limited by the pre-existing physical stuff which he manipulates to design the world. Wiredu suggests that evil may have its origin in this primordial physical stuff given that it constitutes the foundation of entities in the universe. In his words:

Bewaji (Reference Bewaji1998) and Fayemi (Reference Fayemi2012) find support for the limitation thesis in the Ifa Corpus and the traditional Yoruba belief system. The Ifa Corpus frequently narrates events that suggest that God, or Olodumare, is limited in power, knowledge, and goodness. For example, God consults lesser deities and even human beings in his quest for eternal existence and the acquisition of knowledge of future events (Bewaji Reference Bewaji1998; Fayemi Reference Fayemi2012; see also Agada Reference Agada2022a; Ofuasia Reference Ofuasia2022a). The duo readily concede that God is the highest being in the universe, the creator of lesser deities and the world. His attributes are of a very high order, without reaching the level expected of a perfect being. For Bewaji:

Fayemi observes that:

In accordance with the limitation thesis, Bewaji and Fayemi regard evil as a necessary phenomenon of the universe which God himself is capable of inflicting on entities in the world. Since he is not omniscient, he could not have predicted the occurrence of some future evils at the time he created the world and, not being omnipotent, he could not eliminate the evil that he was aware of at the time of creation; not being omnibenevolent, he himself could contribute his share of the quantity and variety of evil in the world. However, since God possesses substantial power and knowledge and since he is overall good, he may be aware of his moral obligation to at least reduce some of the evils in the world, even if he cannot eliminate them. One may point out that the concept of limitation entails incapacity. If God is limited, then he is unable to reduce the evil in the world. However, limitation does not equate to absolute incapacity since God expresses his power in degrees even if this power is not of the order of omnipotence. Thus, the limited God may be aware of certain current evils and be able to carry out remedial actions that reduce the intensity of these evils. Fayemi (Reference Fayemi2012, 12) especially holds this view of a limited but morally responsible creator (cf. Agada Reference Agada2023a; Cordeiro-Rodrigues Reference Luis2023). For Fayemi, the limited God can be blamed for the existence of physical and spiritual evils that cannot be attributed to human moral agency (Fayemi Reference Fayemi2012, 12). He brings evils inflicted by invisible spiritual entities under the category of spiritual evil. If the limited God is conceived as an entity that creates ex materia, one must concede that he is indeed very powerful and should be able to eliminate some of the evils in the world.

Chimakonam and Chimakonam (Reference Chimakonam and Chimakonam2023) approach the question of a limited God from a complementaristic metaphysical framework that favours the view that the universe is an interconnected totality where seemingly opposing entities and variables complement each other. The positing of complementarity makes the existence of things necessary. A thing exists for itself and for other entities in such an interconnected way that it not existing will fundamentally alter the state of the universe. This is the case because the complementary universe maintains a harmonious balance of qualities and relations. In this interconnected, complementary universe, God becomes a harmony-God whose grandeur lies precisely in the fact that he is able to maintain the harmony in the universe. For the Chimakonams, as powerful and knowledgeable as the harmony-God is, he is not omnipotent and omniscient because his essence reflects the imperfect nature of the universe. Both good and evil necessarily coexist. The elimination of evil will mean the elimination of good. The most a harmony-God can do about the quantity and quality of evils in the world is reduce evils in such a way that the good–evil balance is sustained. Thus, if God does not (or cannot) prevent a devastating earthquake from occurring in Turkey, he averts an equally devastating wildfire in California or increases the seasonal harvests in Nigeria in a way that perfectly compensates for the human suffering in Turkey, in the cosmic context. In the Chimakonams’ words:

They add that:

They assert that in an imperfect universe, only a harmony-God can exist. A harmony-God ‘is one who has the capacity for the opposing values of good and evil, and represents a being in whom both polar values complement each other’ (334). While it can be argued that consciousness of an imperfect world would rather incline human beings to conceive a worship-worthy God as one who is perfect rather than limited, the Chimakonams make a significant point about the empirical correlation between an imperfect world and its imperfect creator, although they do not attempt to produce an elaborate teleological or cosmological argument for the existence of the limited God.

Attoe (Reference Attoe2022a) builds on Wiredu’s idea of a quasi-physical God and proposes the existence of a thoroughly material God who is a material first cause. His unconscious God is a material first cause in an interconnected universe in the sense of serving as the necessary condition for the commencement of a rigidly deterministic sequence of events that culminates in the emergence of a world such as ours. Attoe does not show clearly whether the unconscious God is contemporaneous with the universe, whether this God predates or post-dates it, or whether God or the universe is beginningless, but he firmly asserts that God lacks intelligent agency. Attoe’s conception of God indicates radical limitation since God does not act intentionally. The impotence of Attoe’s God renders his first material cause appellation for God an ironic one (cf. Chimakonam and Chimakonam Reference Chimakonam and Chimakonam2023). This is the case because Attoe’s God is not a conscious, rational agent but a mere mechanical principle of the world. Faced with the question of the location of the material God that Wiredu did not adequately answer, Attoe suggests that what we call God may simply be a dimension of a physical constant like energy. He notes:

Attoe’s response to the question of the material God’s location in space and time is a hesitant response. He hesitates because he is aware of the atheistic implication of connecting God’s existence with a physical constant which may have no objective reality, after all, outside the theoretical explanatory framework of science. In dodging the atheistic implication of his conception of God as an unconscious material principle, Attoe fares no better than Wiredu in accounting for the location of the material God. Unsurprisingly, Attoe’s God is neither responsible for the evil in the world nor obliged to reduce it. This God is, after all, an unconscious entity.Footnote ⁵

1.5 The Limited God in the Vitalist Tradition

The vitalist tradition typically conceives God in panpsychist and panentheistic ways. Panpsychism is broadly the view that mind or mind-stuff is fundamental and distributed throughout the world while panentheism is the view that God is interconnected with the world such that he affects the world and is affected by the world. God is represented either as a cosmic consciousness who distributes a vitalistic quality in the world (Molefe Reference Molefe2018; Agada Reference Agada2022b, Reference Agada2023a; Cordeiro-Rodrigues and Agada Reference Cordeiro-Rodrigues and Agada2022; Molefe and Maraganedzha Reference Molefe and Maraganedzha2023) or as the being who best exemplifies the vitalistic and creative essence that animates the universe (Agada Reference Agada2015, Reference Agada2022b; Ofuasia Reference Ofuasia2022a). Placide Tempels is regarded as the front runner of vitalism in African philosophy. I leave him out of the limited God vitalist tradition because his discussion of God as the source of vital force in the universe is consistent with the stance of traditional theism. Tempels’ idea of God as a maximal entity who perfectly embodies vital force and as the source of this quality presents God as the supreme being in the universe that he created (see Tempels Reference Tempels1959). While he does not argue this point, the traditional theistic perspective dominates Tempels’ interpretation of traditional Bantu thought.

Classifying Molefe as a limited God vitalist thinker or a traditional theistic vitalist proponent is not quite a straightforward exercise given that Molefe does not focus effort on the articulation of God’s nature. However, he is aware of the fact that his identification of God as the source and distributor of vital force, or vitality, may be amenable to either a traditional theistic or limited God characterisation. Reflecting on his conception of God as the supreme epitome of vitality, Molefe observes that:

Molefe’s non-endorsement of traditional theism tempts me to tentatively group him with the limited God theists of the vitalist tradition. Once one conceives vitality as an imperfect animating quality, it becomes much easier to lump Molefe with limited God theists. This vitalistic God may not be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, but he is powerful and knowledgeable enough to create the world and good enough to want to increase the vital force of human beings. Increasing human vital force will entail reducing the evils and suffering in the world. But can a limited God reduce the suffering in the world? Molefe’s promotion of moral living in terms of more life, or heightened liveliness, indicates that humans actually act in ways that reduce suffering in the world. If humans have the ability to reduce suffering, then God, who is more life-filled and lively than humans, can also work to reduce suffering in the world. Whether God can eliminate suffering is a different question. As long as one is interpreting Molefe as a limited God theist, his vitalistic God cannot eliminate evil from the world.

Ofuasia conceives God in a panentheistic way, drawing inspiration from traditional Yoruba religious thought and the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead (Reference Whitehead1978). From traditional Yoruba thought, Ofuasia (Reference Ofuasia2022a, Reference Ofuasia2022b) borrows the idea of the interconnection and interdependence of divinity and humanity and from Whitehead, he borrows the idea of a fundamental vitalistic principle that animates the universe and may well predate even God. Whitehead calls this fundamental principle creativity, in which inheres the metaphysical laws of the universe. It animates God and other entities although God better exemplifies it (Whitehead Reference Whitehead1978). It is as the highest exemplar of creativity that God can be understood as simultaneously a product of creativity and its condition. While God is constituted by creativity, he has the highest knowledge of this principle and can manipulate it in his capacity as an orderer in an evolutionary universe oriented towards novelty.

In applying the concept of creativity to African philosophical theology, Ofuasia (Reference Ofuasia2022a, 95) defines it as ‘that primordial ground on which all things, God included, thrive’. If God is preceded by creativity and bound by the metaphysical laws of the universe that are inherent in creativity, then God is limited. He can do a vast number of things but not everything. His knowledge is of a great order indeed but not in the range of omniscience. Ofuasia supports his view with evidence extracted from the Ifa Corpus, where it is clearly narrated that God the creator also depends on what he has created to reach a higher level of power and knowledge. God collaborates with lesser deities to govern the world and consults deities and humans when he is faced with great puzzles (Ofuasia Reference Ofuasia2022b). Consequently, God cannot eliminate evil. The evil that exists in the world will appear to be a necessary consequence of an imperfect universe that is continuing to evolve and whose final form cannot be predicted by any entity. Going by Ofuasia’s understanding of God, the deity can be deemed knowledgeable enough to know the truth value of most but not all propositions.

In the thought of Cordeiro-Rodrigues (Reference Cordeiro-Rodrigues2021), panentheism and panpsychism are presented as frameworks that best explain the nature of God in African thought. For him, God is the highest consciousness in the universe, the distributor of vital force. He is affected by changes in entities and the world, being the distributor of vital force that connects his essence with all things in the world. If the world is imperfect and modifications within it affect God, then God himself is imperfect, more or less. God, as conceived by Cordeiro-Rodrigues, is a relational entity. But his limitation does not follow merely from his mutability; instead, the crucial factor is the vital force itself. While Cordeiro-Rodrigues does not go far enough to argue that the vital force embodies imperfection, he yet suggests that this may be the case since vital force is the animating principle of a world that clearly exhibits moral and physical evil.

1.6 The Limited Consolation God

I have argued in a number of works that the limiting principle in the universe must be sought in the animating principle, what Wiredu calls the pre-existing stuff and what Ofuasia prefers to label creativity, following Whitehead (see Agada Reference Agada2015, Reference Agada2022a, Reference Agada2022b, Reference Agada2023a). African philosophers like Molefe and Martin Nkemnkia (Reference Nkemnkia1999) and Western scholars who work on African philosophy like Tempels and Cordeiro-Rodrigues label the animating principle vital force or life force, or simply vitality. I labelled the universal animating principle mood and offered for the first time in the literature an explanation of the limiting propensity of the animating principle (see Section 3.2). I observed elsewhere that: ‘Mood … is the yearning of eternity. The human mood is a reflection of the mood of the universe. The human mood exhibits the complexities of the constituents of existence which once apprehended we call feelings, precisely joy and sadness’ (Agada Reference Agada2015, 25). It is ‘the primordial mind-matter interface and the source of all intelligence and emotions in the universe’ (Agada Reference Agada2022b, 87).

Mood is the yearning of eternity in the sense that it is the essence of all things and is expressed in all things as yearning. In the human being, mood is readily grasped through our understanding of the emotions of joy and sadness, which provide a measure of the human mind’s optimistic and pessimistic states. The more joyful a sentient and rational being is, the more optimistic it becomes. The sadder this being is, the more pessimistic it becomes. Optimism and pessimism highlight the question of the worth of human existence and the point, or pointlessness, of the universe. Mood as an event, an animating principle, is neither wholly immaterial nor wholly material. It is yearning, and it expresses itself in all things as yearning. Given its yearning essence, mood is incomplete and imperfect. Whatever it animates exhibits incompleteness (see Section 3.2.1). Accordingly, God is imperfect, for he is animated by mood. He is a consolation God from the perspective of consolationism. Just as the universe yearns in perpetuity for completeness without ever reaching this state, so does God yearn for perfection without ever attaining the omni-properties. He is called a consolation God because, notwithstanding his lack of the omni-properties, he is sufficiently powerful and knowledgeable to create an imperfect world which he seeks to make better within the limit of imperfection (see Section 3.2.3).

The concept of mood is articulated in the context of the philosophy of consolationism. This philosophy acknowledges the fact that the world clearly exhibits characteristics of imperfection as prominently exemplified by the reality of moral and physical evil. Moral evil encompasses harm caused by the informed actions of sentient and intelligent entities like human beings while physical evil indicates harm brought about by events necessitated by the imperfect structure of the world which are either wholly or largely beyond human control (Agada Reference Agada2015, Reference Agada2022b). An example of moral evil is murder while a typical example of physical evil is a devastating earthquake. The harmful actions of a mentally challenged person that lead to the death of someone can also be regarded as a physical evil since the real culprit in this case is a natural phenomenon, a disability.

Consolationism asserts that an evolutionary universe such as ours produces both good and evil as mood actualises itself in the search for a more complete state of being. Accordingly, the essence of mood is yearning. But since yearning indicates being in a perpetual process of becoming, the motivating goal of perfection cannot be reached. Consolationism therefore describes an eternal universe with a tragic dimension given that the goal of perfection is indicated even as it is unachievable. Good and evil are products of the yearning essence, or mood. In the consolationist system, God is called the eternal mood of melancholy in the sense that he is a passible entity who has the most knowledge of the operation of mood and the most power to manipulate it. The invocation of the notion of melancholy immediately discloses the idea that God has emotions. Melancholy in the consolationist system refers to the sentient and thinking being’s condition as a yearning, imperfect entity in search of consolation, that which increases the state of joy and diminishes sadness. Consolation can also be understood as a state of mind in which emotional and intellectual satisfaction are derived from the knowledge of events that cause or can enhance the state of joy (Agada Reference Agada2022b, 63). Melancholy therefore is not a mere negative term understood in terms of great sadness but connotes the dialectic of joy and sadness. The idea of a passible God will be discussed in greater detail in Section 3 of this Element.

But God is not mood nor the source of mood although he represents the fullest development of mood and is indeed a being of great power and knowledge. I note elsewhere that mood is:

The yearning essence of mood and the perpetual transgressing of its mind–matter boundary makes possible the production of the novelty Ofuasia writes about. The emergence of worlds, entities, good, and evil are some of the novelties which yearning expresses. God is the highest expression of mood. He is, however, limited by this same principle that constitutes his being since limitation is the nature of yearning. That which yearns seeks the overcoming of an inherent lack. This lack is an active dimension of limitation. The limited mood expresses a limited God who creates the world from the resources of mood that are available in the universe. God creates precisely because he is sufficiently knowledgeable and powerful to accomplish the task of creation. But he is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. He is benevolent but not omnibenevolent (Agada Reference Agada2023a). In the consolationist system, evil is a real but negative dimension of yearning: negative in the sense of causing harm to entities that exist as necessary expressions of mood.

1.7 Conclusion

This section introduced the reader to the African philosophy of religion literature, with a focus on how African philosophers have characterised God’s relation with the world. I noted that there is a traditional theistic conception of God in the literature that presents God as a perfect being who possesses the omni-properties and contrasted this conception of God with the limited God view that denies God possession of the omni-properties. I explored the limited God literature and highlighted the vitalist and non-vitalist traditions of the limited God view. In the next section, I will critically discuss the implications of the limited God view for the problem of evil in continuation of the exploration of the literature.

2.1 Introduction

In this section, I focus on the characterisation of the relation between the limited God and evil in the literature. I explore the concepts of power, knowledge, and goodness and the extent of the limited God’s incapacity. I supply a global context for the limitation thesis and raise the question of the logical and evidential problem of evil from the perspective of African philosophy of religion. The section critically examines the positions of a number of limited God theists as well as the non-theist stance of Aribiah Attoe. The section concludes with the suggestion that while the limited God is not the cause of evil and cannot eliminate it, he can be deemed morally responsible for the evil in the world in his creative capacity. This suggestion sets the agenda for an in-depth discussion of the limited God’s moral responsibility in Section 3.

2.2 On the Categories of Power, Knowledge, and Goodness

Traditional theism in the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions presents God as a perfect being, for the most part. As a perfect being, God is not merely powerful but omnipotent, not just knowledgeable but omniscient, and not simply good but omnibenevolent. God’s possession of the omni-properties involves the question of capacity. God is able to do all (logically possible) things. He is able to know all things and able to love completely in a way that rules out deficiencies like malice and malevolence.

This understanding of God naturally inspires questions about why the perfect God allows the magnitude and varieties of evil in the world. Philosophers have reflected on omnipotence and evil for centuries. Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher, raised the problem of evil in the world in relation to the existence of a perfect God when he wondered whether God is indeed omnipotent and omnibenevolent (see Hume Reference Hume and Coleman[1777] 2007, 73). For Epicurus, if God is willing to prevent evil but cannot actually do so, he must be limited. If he is able but not willing, he is not benevolent. But if he is both able and willing to prevent evil, then we are faced with a puzzle. Theists in the Western tradition have attempted to solve the puzzle by constructing theodicies and defences of theism in the face of evil in the world. The free will and greater good argument, soul-making theodicy, and sceptical theism are some of the best-known defences of traditional theism (see, for example, Plantinga Reference Plantinga and Black1965; Wykstra Reference Wykstra1984; Stump Reference Stump1985; Alston Reference Alston1991; Swinburne Reference Swinburne1998; Bergmann Reference Bergmann, Flint and Rea2009; cf. Sterba Reference Sterba2019). While an in-depth discussion of Western theodicies is beyond the scope of this Element, I will briefly highlight problems with these theodicies in Section 2.3 to provide the broadest possible context for the African limited God thesis.

In contrast to the perfect God vision of the dominant conceptions of God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a dominant conception of God in ATR presents the deity as limited in power, knowledge, and goodness (see Section 1.2). The limited African God may lack the fullness of power, knowledge, and goodness, but he is by no means powerless (see Bewaji Reference Bewaji1998; Fayemi Reference Fayemi2012; Cordeiro-Rodrigues Reference Cordeiro-Rodrigues2021; Agada Reference Agada2022a, Reference Agada2022b; Chimakonam Reference Chimakonam2022; Cordeiro-Rodrigues and Agada Reference Cordeiro-Rodrigues and Agada2022; Gwara and Ogbonnaya Reference Joyline and Uchenna Ogbonnaya2022; Chimakonam and Chimakonam Reference Chimakonam and Chimakonam2023; Cordeiro-Rodrigues Reference Luis2023). The following representative quotes from a number of African philosophers of religion help in the task of delineating the scope of the limited God’s power.

Reflecting on traditional Akan religious thought, Wiredu observes:

Wiredu is saying that, in theory, there is the temptation to make sweeping statements about God’s excellence and attribute properties like omnipotence to him. Wiredu suggests that the Akan are guilty of making such imputations. He notes, however, that questions raised by practical issues such as the problem of evil compel further reflection on the magnitude of God’s excellence. Second thought persuades the Akan that not only is God not omnipotent, but also that his power may be better understood by drawing analogies with the power of a king. A human potentate may wield great power indeed, but they cannot do everything humanly possible, let alone all things logically possible.

While noting that the Yoruba regard God as limited in power and knowledge, Bewaji concedes that God is still the most powerful entity in the world. Bewaji notes thus:

Bewaji describes a limited God who is yet very powerful and knowledgeable. This God creates either directly through the immediate exercise of his powers or indirectly through lesser deities under his control.

Fayemi observes that:

Fayemi’s stance does not radically deviate from Bewaji’s view. However, Fayemi grants God less power. For Fayemi, the lesser deities play a more active role in the process of creation. They actively assist God as co-creators, even if in a subordinate capacity.

Jonathan O. Chimakonam and Amara E. Chimakonam assert that:

The maintenance of harmony in the world indicates the extent of the power wielded by the harmony-God described by the Chimakonams. In maintaining the good–evil balance, the harmony-God sustains the cosmic order. Only a very powerful and knowledgeable entity can perform the harmony-sustaining task. The Chimakonams introduce an interesting angle to the debate about the scope of the limited God’s power when they assert that the raison d’etre of God’s existence is the sustenance of the harmony in the world. Accordingly, God is properly the harmony-God. While not possessing the omni-properties, he is yet a very powerful being. For a being to so order the world that there is a perpetual balance of good and evil and other seemingly opposed variables means that this being is a very powerful entity, and no doubt the most powerful being in the specific world or universe where he operates. Yet this very powerful being is not omnipotent, according to the Chimakonams, because the world created by this being manifests imperfection. If God was perfect, he would have created a perfect world. They reject the subtlety of Western theodicies and assert that the imperfect character of the world provides an insurmountable conceptual obstacle for any kind of theodicy.

There are two possible objections to the Chimakonams’ account which I will briefly discuss. One may point out that there is no harmony in the world, only a semblance of order. One may also object to the claim that a limited being can sustain the harmony in the world if, for the sake of argument, it is granted that there is indeed harmony in the world. The first objection distinguishes between order and harmony. Order implies regularity while harmony implies both regularity and the perfection of regular phenomena. That is to say, while order indicates predictability and uniformity, harmony demands the perfection or completeness of the parts that work together to produce the quality of predictability and uniformity. The Chimakonams may respond by insisting that the objector is conceiving harmony in teleological terms, in terms of a grand cosmic purpose, while they understand harmony in horizontal terms that reference worldly projects that can be completed. The emphasis is not only on quality but also quantity, since the world is already acknowledged as imperfect. Thus one may say that harmony has been realised if the death of an old man in one country is balanced by the birth of a child in a different country. The second objection is a more stubborn one because it challenges the claim that a limited God can sustain harmony in the world.

According to the Chimakonams, evil exists necessarily in a complementary universe. The limited harmony-God can neither eliminate nor prevent evil, although he can do good and evil. Indeed, his task is not preventing evil but ensuring that the evil in the world does not outweigh the good in the world at a particular time.Footnote ⁶ If God cannot prevent evil in the world, it is difficult to see how he can sustain the good–evil balance in the world in a way that guarantees harmony given the variety and magnitude of good and evil events in the world. If he intervenes in location B to reduce or increase good or evil in order to restore balance that has been qualitatively and quantitatively disturbed in location A, he has not actually prevented evil. He has merely maintained the overall good–evil balance in the world. But it is not clear how his limited power can bring about a precise correspondence between all the kinds and degrees of good and evil in the world in all locations.

While acknowledging God’s limitation and the seemingly ubiquitous influence of lesser deities, Olusegun Oladipo stresses the great powers that God wields. Oladipo writes that traditional African societies often regard God as:

For Oladipo, God occupies a position of supremacy relative to other entities. He sustains and controls the world. His conception of God is similar to Bewaji’s and Fayemi’s conceptions of the deity. Bewaji, Fayemi, and Oladipo stress the fact that the limited God is not powerless when they call him a creator. He cannot do everything logically possible, but he can do a great many things that the lesser deities and humans cannot do.

While Emmanuel Ofuasia (Reference Ofuasia2022a, 89) admits that ‘reality is a product of the collaboration between Olodumare [God] and the divinities that in the end underscores creatio ex materia’, he stresses that the divinities are subordinate to God. For Ofuasia, God is the entity with the fullest measure of being and therefore the most powerful. However, the divine power is not of the order of omnipotence since God depends on the world as much as the world depends on him. Ofuasia supports his panentheistic conception of God with references to the Ifa Corpus of the Yoruba, which often narrates how God consults lesser deities and human heroes when he is puzzled over certain phenomena. Drawing on process metaphysics, Ofuasia asserts that God’s agency is of a passive kind, consistent with his limitedness. For him, passive agency involves God acting persuasively and in cooperation with creatures to actualise his plans for the world. For him, it is a being who possesses the attributes of omnipotence and omniscience who can act coercively, through the imposition of divine fiats on the world.

Attoe’s non-theistic stance, as noted in Section 1, denies God agency completely. Accordingly, God is not a being to which the categories of power, knowledge, and goodness apply. However, Attoe’s stance is unique. For the majority of limited God proponents, God possesses intelligence, will, and personality. Since the limited God cannot do everything logically possible, his knowledge and goodness are limited. He is knowledgeable enough to understand the best way to wield his power, but he is not omniscient. He is good enough to wish a measure of meaningful existence for entities like the human being whom he created, but, not being all-loving, he can overlook the suffering of human beings and focus on the improvement of his own condition. I will return to this matter in Section 3. In the next subsection, I will briefly discuss the problem of evil in the world as it features in Western analytic philosophy of religion with the goal of providing a broad context for the African engagement with the problem of evil.

2.3 The Problem of Evil

In this section, I will use the term evil to indicate harm and suffering as it exists in the world. I categorise evil into moral and physical evil. Moral evil indicates harm and suffering caused by creaturely wickedness. Human beings and deities are examples of entities with the capacity for creaturely wickedness. Physical evil is harm and suffering caused by natural phenomena such as earthquakes, hurricanes, epidemics, and torrential rainfall. Moral evil consists of premeditated actions like murder, theft, cruelty, torture, and so on.

Traditional theism, and Christian theism in particular, attributes perfection to God. The problem of evil follows from the basic premises of traditional theism, which claims that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent creator of the world. If this assertion is true, can there be a morally justifiable reason for God allowing the scale and variety of evil one encounters in the world? The problem is usually formulated in two ways, with both formulations interlocking since the reality of evil in the world is assumed in both cases. We have, on the one hand, the logical problem and, on the other hand, the evidential problem. The logical problem states that the idea of a perfect God seems incompatible with the reality of evil in the world. The evidential problem suggests that the variety, magnitude, and intensity of evil in the world raise the probability that the perfect God of the traditional theist does not exist.

Theistic philosophers like John Hick, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Eleonore Stump, and Stephen J. Wykstra have responded to the problem of evil by proposing and/or modifying the soul-making, free will, and sceptical theistic arguments in the face of sustained critique of traditional theism. According to the soul-making argument proposed by Hick (Reference Hick1966), suffering enables humans to acquire morally worthy virtues like courage, compassion, tolerance, and patience which prepare them for union with God in heaven, where evil does not exist. Accordingly, evil is not a pointless phenomenon; it is required for the actualisation of a greater good. One obvious criticism of the soul-making argument is that people can acquire the qualities Hick references without evil existing or occurring (see, for example, Kane Reference Kane1975, 2). One can acquire the virtues of patience and tolerance through having to deal with a troublesome toddler, for example. The time invested in caring, providing close supervision, enduring the incessant childish whims, and calming screaming sessions may very well instil patience in a parent in a manner that manifests positively in the parent’s wider social interactions. An emotionally or physically debilitating experience, which we call suffering, does not have to occur for the virtues of patience and tolerance to be gained.

Plantinga advances the free will defence in an attempt to invalidate the logical problem of evil, which emphasises the conceptual inconsistency of the proposition that a perfect God exists and is the creator of a world with plenty of evils. He accepts that humans have free will and that free will is a great good. This capacity enables humans to voluntarily choose to do good rather than evil. Therefore, it is a valuable good, the possession of which outweighs all the evil in the world (Plantinga Reference Plantinga and Black1965, 204–220). God is morally justified in permitting moral evil to safeguard the good of free will. But how does Plantinga approach physical evil? Like the African theist Kwame Gyekye, who attributes physical evil to the free actions of malevolent spirits (see Section 1.2), Plantinga suggests tentatively that natural evil may be accounted for by the free choices of Satan and his fallen angels which God safeguards at the cost of allowing evil. It is not within God’s power to create a world where there is a greater ‘balance of good over evil with respect to the actions of the nonhuman persons it contains’ (Plantinga Reference Plantinga1977, 58). He assumes that the phenomenon of evil is broadly a moral type, with narrowly moral and physical evils being species of the ‘broadly moral evil’ (59). The basic intuition is that evil enters the world through the free actions of intelligent agents, human or non-human. How suffering caused by an earthquake, for example, can be adequately accounted for in terms of Plantinga’s broad moral evil is, of course, a legitimate question. A discussion of the matter is, however, beyond the scope of this Element.

To meet the objection that an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God who values human free will as a great good can prevent evil by preventing situations under which evil occurs while preserving free will, Plantinga adds the idea of transworld depravity to his free will defence. It seems that the free-willing human being may will the commission of a crime and fail to actually commit the crime because God removes the exact condition necessary for the willed evil to occur. Plantinga imagines possible worlds where a person performs only morally worthy actions. He then observes that in every possible world, there is a morally significant action that will deviate from the norm (the performance of only moral actions) if the situation or circumstances of the action took place in the actual world. In every possible world, there is a segment of it that is neutral with regard to a person performing or not performing a morally significant action. According to Plantinga, if that segment was in the actual world, the person would fail the moral test – that is, they would do wrong (Plantinga Reference Plantinga1977, 48). Plantinga’s contention is that God cannot create a world with only good and no evil because persons suffer from transworld depravity. Obviously, the idea of transworld depravity will pose no problem for an African limited God theist since the limitation thesis asserts that all persons in all possible worlds suffer from transworld depravity because evil necessarily exists, such that even God does not escape the necessity.

For Plantinga, the idea of a perfect God who possesses the omni-properties is compatible with the reality of evil. However, the plausibility of the free will defence has been called into question. Steve Boer has noted that God granting the good of free will does not mean that humans will always be able to actualise the evil that they will, since God can intervene either naturally or miraculously to thwart evildoers and prevent the harm intended by the free-willed act (cited in Stump Reference Stump1985, 394). The point is that free will can be safeguarded without the actual occurrence of evil. It may be that the idea of transworld depravity adequately responds to Boer’s objection, but it is not clear that the thesis of transworld depravity is true (see Otte Reference Otte2009, 166). Recently, James P. Sterba (Reference Sterba2019) has denied that there is actually a free will defence, as far as one is talking about the kind of freedom that exists in the world. For him, the moral evil in the world cannot be explained away by invoking the freedom that the world provides to creatures. He deploys the concept of significant freedom, as distinct from Plantinga’s libertarian or absolute freedom, which he reinvents in the context of the political philosophy of the just state. In a just state, what should be safeguarded is not an absolute freedom but, rather, a significant freedom that guarantees the interests of all persons. A significant freedom is a basic right, the deprivation of which negatively affects the flourishing of the individual. A police officer acts morally when she restricts the less significant freedom of a man set to assault his partner in order to protect the more significant freedom of the partner. Going by libertarian freedom, the would-be attacker has the freedom to assault, but the partner has a more significant freedom not to be assaulted (Sterba Reference Sterba2019, 14). A God possessing the omni-properties ought to intervene or be sufficiently involved in the world to prevent evils that deprive victims of their significant freedom. The heart of the matter is not God creating creatures and giving them free will. In his words:

Swinburne builds on the stances of Hick and Plantinga in his own response to the problem of evil. Like Plantinga, he asserts that humans possess free will and like Hick, he links character formation to the evil in the world. However, he insists that it is not the bare fact of free will that matters but its significant exercise (see Swinburne Reference Swinburne1998).Footnote ⁷ He emphasises what he calls efficacious free will, rather than Plantinga’s libertarian free will, to underline the destiny-shaping effects of human choices, how people’s decisions instigate or prevent serious evils in the world (17). The free will that God gives us enables us to be useful. It is, therefore, a freedom more desirable than a toy freedom that God could have given us in a world with significantly less suffering than ours but also with significantly less freedom (248). Given that on balance, a person’s life is often a good one and death happens to ensure suffering does not become excessive, given that free will is a great good and in view of the reward that awaits one in the afterlife, God has a right to allow suffering in the world, according to Swinburne.

Today, many Western analytic philosophers of religion agree that Plantinga’s free will defence responds adequately to the logical problem of evil by showing that the concept of omnipotence and the notion of evil in the world are compatible. The free will defence, broadly construed, is less successful in addressing the evidential problem of evil, which presents the more immediate and practical issue of the variety and magnitude of evil in the world. According to William Rowe (Reference Rowe1979, 336), the world presents us with instances of great suffering that an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God could have prevented without, in the process, sacrificing a greater good or allowing an evil state just as bad or worse than the prevailing evil state. The evils implicated in this sort of suffering are gratuitous evils. The point is that it appears that if a perfect God exists, he ought not to permit evil to achieve his purpose if he can actualise this purpose without allowing the evil. Therefore, it seems improbable that the God of traditional theism exists.

Sceptical theism has been proposed as a good response to the evidential problem. It asserts that given the limited cognitive equipment of human beings, evil necessarily retains a mysterious aspect. God may have morally justifiable reasons for permitting evil in the world which we are, unfortunately, unable to access given our limited cognitive faculty (see, for example, Wykstra Reference Wykstra1984). Having provided a broad context for the problem of evil, I return, in the next subsection, to African philosophers’ engagement with the problem.

2.4 Limited God Theism and Evil in the World

What will probably strike the African reader about the previous section is the centrality of the concept of freedom to Western theodicies. The importance of freedom is captured by Plantinga when he notes that: ‘A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all’ (Plantinga Reference Plantinga1977, 30). The preoccupation with freedom is markedly absent in the thought of African philosophers of religion. Even when a theistic philosopher like Gyekye appeals to free will, he does not vigorously follow this line of thought. Instead of freedom, limited God theists like Wiredu, the Chimakonams, Bewaji, and Fayemi focus on responsibility and harmony in their characterisation of the relation between the limited God and the world.

2.5 Limited God Non-theism and Evil in the World

Attoe best represents the non-theistic strand of the limited God view. Like Wiredu, he approaches the question of God’s relation with the world from a materialistic perspective. The world is a rigidly determined space with God as its first cause. At first, the idea of a first cause gives the impression that Attoe is staking out a traditional theistic stance. But then he announces that the first cause is, in fact, only a mechanical principle and initial condition of the world. God is the initial condition that kick-started a chain of events that resulted in the unfolding of the world.Footnote ⁹ God is an It that lacks agency whatsoever. Attoe’s God is so severely limited that he is unconscious, a completely impersonal principle that may, in fact, be understood in terms of its connection with a physical constant like energy. Attoe’s choice of energy is influenced by his reading of the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed (Attoe Reference Attoe2022a, 30).

If God is an unconscious material entity, he cannot have any responsibility for the evil in the world, in Attoe’s view. Should evil then be deemed to exist necessarily as part of the structure of a material universe? Attoe responds by adopting a more radical view. He revisits Bewaji’s suggestion that nothing is intrinsically evil. According to Attoe:

The relativist stance depends in part on the assumption that our evaluation of the evilness of a thing is subjective or anthropocentric. But, then, suffering is a measure of the evil in the world, and it is not only human beings that suffer. Animals clearly suffer, given their capacity for sentience, with the intensity of their suffering proportional to the extent of the actualisation of sentience. Thus a dog may be said to suffer more than a trichoplax. A number of African philosophers and Western scholars who work on African philosophy have noted that traditional African ontology and ethics support not only anthropocentrism, but also biocentrism and ecocentrism (see, for example, Magesa Reference Magesa1997; Taringa Reference Taringa2006; Behrens Reference Behrens2010; Chuwa Reference Chuwa2014; Ikuenobe Reference Ikuenobe2014; Etieyibo Reference Etieyibo2017; Molefe Reference Molefe2018). While the African anthropocentric view privileges human beings and seems to set humans over against nature, the biocentric and ecocentric views grant animals, plants, and inanimate things moral status. This is the case because these entities possess vitality/vital force, the divine essence that God distributes throughout the world (see Etieyibo Reference Etieyibo2017; Molefe Reference Molefe2018; cf. Horsthemke Reference Kai.2017). The African biocentric view asserts that entities like animals have intrinsic value given that they share in the vitality/force that connects everything in the universe. Vital force is a measure of the life principle and has been equated with life by African philosophers like Molefe (Reference Molefe2018) and Laurenti Magesa (Reference Magesa1997). The higher the concentration of vitality, or life, in an entity, the more keenly it reacts to pain.

One way of accounting for cross-species application of the concept of suffering is regarding evil as something springing from an objective principle in the universe, a real capacity that different individuals and species identify as harm, an existential threat that manifests in diverse ways. In this sense, it can be argued that evil is a real phenomenon of the universe that brings about suffering. Whether the moral relativist agrees with this point of view or not, what is obvious is that the unconscious God Attoe describes cannot be blamed for the evil in the world. Attoe’s stance may as well be atheistic, although he denies that he is proposing an atheological viewpoint.

2.6 Why the Logical and Evidential Problem Does Not Arise in African Philosophy of Religion

The problem of evil is one of the fundamental questions of Western philosophy, as Section 2.3 makes apparent. The status of this problem is not fundamental in African philosophy. The problem does arise in the thought of theistic African philosophers like Gyekye and Oduwole. However, African theistic philosophers have not rigorously engaged the problem. For the limited God proponents, the problem of evil is either a moot point or a muted one. The logical and evidential problem of evil is a moot point to the extent that it can be asserted that the concept of limitation perfectly explains why God permits evil in the world. This view is held by philosophers like Wiredu, Bewaji, Oladele Balogun (Reference Balogun2009), the Chimakonams, and Attoe. The logical and evidential problem of evil is a muted point to the extent that the concept of limitation allows God to be a creator with the acknowledgement of the (moral) responsibility that goes with the title of creator. This view is held by philosophers like Agada, Fayemi, and Cordeiro-Rodrigues. This view submits that while it is true that the concept of limitation indicates degrees of incapacity, one must not understand the concept in an absolutist sense.

An absolutist sense of limitation presents God as an utterly powerless entity. Yet the description of God that one finds in much of the limited God literature presents the deity as a powerful and knowledgeable creator. The limitation of God is in the context of the applicability of the notions of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. Attoe is perhaps the only African philosopher who can legitimately espouse an absolutist understanding of limitation since he conceives God as completely lacking agency. Philosophers who think that the problem of evil is only muted in African philosophy believe that the limited God may have more responsibility than has been granted to him (see Fayemi Reference Fayemi2012; Agada Reference Agada2023a). God is, after all, a creator and could have refrained from creating an imperfect world. If he could create a world, he must have been knowledgeable enough to have foreseen many or some of the evils that would emerge in the created world.

The limited God cannot prevent the occurrence of evil in the world and could not have done a better job of creation. He reached his maximum creative capacity while creating the world which, accordingly, is the best possible world that a limited God could create. He cannot prevent or eliminate evil in the world because evil is a necessary component of the world. The material he employed at creation hour already contained the germs of evil. Indeed, God himself already contained in himself the germs of evil. Hence, some limited God proponents assert that God can do evil, at least sometimes.Footnote ¹⁰ The most that a limited God can do is reduce or ameliorate evil after it has occurred.

Thus the concept of limitation conclusively explains God’s inability to make the world better overall, his failure to create a better world than our actual world at creation hour. The Chimakonams can respond to the claim that the harmony-God can do better by pointing out his deficiency in the aspect of goodness. Since the harmony-God is limited in goodness, a moral outcome is not always his target. He may perpetrate evil just to please himself, consistent with his limitation in goodness. A legitimate criticism that arises unavoidably is whether there is truly a harmonious balance of good and evil in the world. A detailed discussion of this matter is, however, beyond the scope of this section.

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the limited God can be said to be blameworthy and morally responsible for the evil in the world even though evil exists necessarily. God being morally responsible does not mean that he could have made the world better. Rather, it indicates that God should have refrained from creating the world. He will be absolved of moral responsibility if it can be shown that an inherent necessity in God’s nature compels him to create an imperfect world against his own better judgement. That is, the limited God cannot help but create. To the best of my knowledge, no limited God proponent has argued convincingly that the limited God is under such necessity. I will revisit this theme in Section 3. This section will engage the problem of limitation and evil from the perspective of the philosophy of consolationism. In Section 3, I will develop the mood perspective of God and present it as a unique contribution to African and global philosophy of religion.

2.7 Conclusion

In this section, I explored the problem of evil in relation to the existence of the limited God and argued that the logical and evidential problem of evil does not arise in the context of the limitation thesis. The limited God cannot eliminate evil. Nevertheless, I pointed out that there is a sense in which the limited God, who is not the cause of evil, is morally responsible for the evil in the world, for the reason that he did not refrain from creating a world that he knew would be marred by evil from the beginning. In the next section, I will explore this matter and determine whether it can truly be said of God that he cannot help creating an imperfect world. It should be noted at this juncture that one cannot invoke ignorance to account for why the limited God creates a world with plenty of evils in it. This stance is only applicable to Attoe’s religious thought for obvious reasons.

3.1 Introduction

In the previous sections, I focused on the broad articulation of the limited God thesis with direct reference to the various stances of a number of leading African philosophers of religion. For proper context, I compared the limitation thesis with the African perfect God thesis in Section 1. In Section 2, I critically highlighted the limitation stances of philosophers like Kwasi Wiredu, Jonathan O. Chimakonam, Aribiah D. Attoe, Ademola K. Fayemi, and John Ayotunde I. Bewaji in relation to the logical and evidential problem of evil. In this section, I deepen the exploration of the capacity of the limited God with special focus on the consolationist standpoint.

While previous sections pay particular attention to the literature, this section will condense my own original contribution to the literature. I again revisit the question of the extent of the incapacity of the limited God with regard to the reality of evil in the world. I delineate the scope of the powers of the limited God who creates the world in search of consolation and raise the question of whether one can argue for an inherent necessity in the rational and emotional constitution of the consolation-seeking and consolation-giving God that compels him to create a world with evil even when he has sufficient knowledge to predict from the beginning the future course of the imperfect world he is creating for self-consolation. Within the framework of the consolationist system of speculative metaphysics, I raise and explore the questions of God’s passibility and the desirability of non-existence from the human standpoint. I argue that whether the limited God of consolation philosophy is conceived as being conditioned by mood to create imperfect worlds such as ours in the pursuit of self-consolation or he is conceived as freely creating an imperfect world, again in the pursuit of self-consolation, this God has a moral responsibility to ameliorate the evils in the world by reason of his possession of the considerable powers and knowledge required for world-creation and for not refraining from world-creation. I assert that the limited consolation God does not have to be omnipotent and omnibenevolent to seek to ameliorate the suffering in the world. In this section, I will often use the terms universe and world to indicate the totality of reality that exists eternally and a defined space created by God from materials available in the eternal universe, respectively. In this sense, the universe is an immense, formless totality while the world is a well-defined space and a product of divine creativity.

The reader will be tempted to raise the question of the existence of the limited consolation God. This is a legitimate question. However, a philosophical defence of the existence of the limited consolation God is beyond the scope of this Element. My task consists of exploring the emergent question of the relation between the limited God and a world that reveals evidence of evil and the extent to which the limited God, if he exists, is morally responsible for the suffering of creatures.

3.2 The Limited God in Consolationist Metaphysics

In this section, I provide a more detailed explanation of the concept of mood and unpack it in a concise manner that facilitates the demonstration of the objectives of the section. I have extensively discussed the concept of mood in other works (see Agada Reference Agada2015, Reference Agada2019, Reference Agada2020a, Reference Agada2023a). I will provide a clear summary in this section and connect the doctrine of mood to the concept of consolation before discussing the attributes of the limited God of consolation.

3.3 Creation, Evil, and the Limited God’s Moral Responsibility

African philosophers of religion who embrace the limited God view have written much about limitation without saying much about what limits God. In this section, I pay attention to mood as the God-limiting principle. Still focused on the framework of consolationist metaphysics, I argue that if the power and knowledge of the limited God are such that he could have predicted the occurrence of all, or most, evils at the time of creation, then he bears responsibility for the reality of evil in the world he created even if he is not the cause of evil. Even if it can be shown that the consolation God could not have predicted the occurrence of some evils, he would still bear moral responsibility for ever accomplishing the task of creation, knowing from the very beginning that the world he would create out of the resources of mood would be marred by the imperfection of moral and physical evil. I remind the reader that God himself is always aware of his own limitation and cannot be excused on the basis of divine ignorance. I conclude the section with the exploration of the question of a necessity to create beyond the control of the consolation-seeking God that may absolve him of responsibility for moral and physical evil.

3.4 On the Consolation God’s Passibility

It is obvious by now that the consolation God is passible. In the consolationist framework, God is the eternal mood of melancholy (see Section 1.6). I use the term melancholy to describe the experience of the emotions of joy and sadness in a world with a tragic dimension (Agada Reference Agada2015, chapters 3 and 11). The melancholy aspect of joy and sadness reflects the futility of yearning. Yearning can be expressed as either a joy state or a sadness state depending on what motivates it in the field of experience. I have already noted that mood constitutes God’s nature. God is capable of enjoying joy states and suffering sadness states. Since he is the primordial being who emerges spontaneously and will persist eternally, he is the eternal mood of melancholy. The term melancholy is a technical term in consolation philosophy that should not be confused with the medical term melancholia, which references a psychopathological condition, a depressive disorder (see Parker Reference Parker2013). Melancholy, as I employ the term, simply indicates the tragic dimension of the incomplete universe and the condition of sentient beings that yearn all through the duration of their persistence, a yearning immediately recognisable as joy and sadness. A being is said to be melancholy if this being contends with the feelings of joy and sadness in an imperfect world where existence itself is given as a consolation. The term melancholy captures the creature’s experience of hopefulness and hopelessness, meaningfulness and meaninglessness.

Divine impassibility is the view that God does not suffer or experience pleasure as a result of the actions of created entities like human beings. The doctrine of divine impassibility often goes together with the idea of divine aseity, the view that God is self-dependent and not affected by external conditions and entities (Chow Reference Chow2018). Western theologians who accept traditional theism defend God’s impassibility as a strategy that enables them to evade the conclusion that God is a limited entity (Kopel et al. Reference Kopel, Babb, Hasker, Webb, Gorga, Oommen, Brower and Coleman2022). The thinking of perfect-God theologians and philosophers of religion is that admitting that God suffers as a result of the suffering of humanity will mean that God does not possess the omni-properties and is in some sense deserving of pity. Divine passibility is the view that God is capable of suffering. He can only be indifferent to the suffering of his creatures if he is not a loving God. Christianity presents God as a loving deity. In recent years, the idea of divine passibility has been enlarged to include the belief that God has emotions (Scrutton Reference Scrutton2013). In Western thought, process thinkers and proponents of open theism, for example, endorse divine passibility. Process thinkers inspired by the thought of Alfred North Whitehead, in fact, hold what one may call a limited God view (see Chow Reference Chow2018). Open theism agrees with core traditional theistic views of God while conceding that God has emotions and relates intimately with human beings (Pinnock et al. Reference Pinnock, Rice, Sanders, Hasker and Basinger1994). Theologians and philosophers like Charles Hartshorne (Reference Hartshorne1948), John Macquarrie (Reference Macquarrie1978), and Jürgen Moltmann (Reference Moltmann1993) have argued that a God who does not share in human suffering is insensitive and incapable of love. African philosophers of religion have not paid close attention to the matter of God having emotions and sharing in human suffering. It is noteworthy that ATR conceives God as a remote deity (see, for example, Idowu Reference Idowu1973; Mbiti Reference Mbiti1975; Ukpong Reference Ukpong1983). God is believed to be too important to concern himself with details of human life. He is approached through intermediaries like the lesser deities and ancestors. Going by this understanding of God, one may conclude that God is somewhat indifferent to human suffering and has no emotions, at least in the way humans understand emotions. The harmony-God, for example, is more concerned about maintaining the good–evil balance in the world than reducing the amount of suffering in the world (see Section 2.3.2). He is not an emotional being. According to Jonathan O. Chimakonam and Amara E. Chimakonam:

While the harmony-God is capable of doing good, he appears indifferent to human suffering and to the suffering of animals. In the framework of the limited God view, the divine lack of emotion or the indifference to suffering can be attributed to divine limitation in the dimension of goodness. If doing some bad things can be motivated by emotion, then the harmony-God may have emotions after all, even if he always seeks to achieve a cosmic balancing act at the expense of creatures. Going by Bewaji’s account of God’s quest for immortality as detailed in the Yoruba Ifa Corpus, it is obvious that the limited God has emotions. According to Bewaji (Reference Bewaji1998, 9), God became anxious about his status, whether he is mortal or immortal, and went around asking ‘Wise men’ questions concerning his immortality, after which he was assured of his immortality.

The God of consolation is passible and has emotions. This assertion follows logically from the claim that mood animates the universe and expresses itself as yearning. This yearning manifests in emotional and intellectual behaviour in entities like human beings. An example of emotional behaviour is the joyful response to good fortune while an example of intellectual behaviour can be working hard as a scientist to find cures for several types of cancer with the goal of advancing one’s career and earning fame. The consolation God is not Attoe’s impersonal principle but a personal deity. He is a being of power and knowledge because he understands the secret or workings of mood better than any other entity and to a very large degree, such that he achieves knowledge of what is required to produce new forms out of mood. The divine creative impulse expresses the divine yearning for perfection, the desire to attain the omni-properties, as I have already noted. In the process of creating a world ex materia, God populates expanded spaces with entities and derives satisfaction from the exercise of his powers. Some creatures that God creates – for example, human beings – honour God with worship. This worship involves a human–divine relation of dependence. Hence African scholars widely acknowledge that the African universe is a relational type. A God who derives consolation from creating worshipping creatures is a passible God. Attoe has observed that humans exist to legitimise God’s existence. Attoe uses the term legitimisation in connection with the recognition and acknowledgement of a thing’s existence. Solitary existence is devoid of legitimisation. He writes:

Applied to the consolation God, legitimisation implies a desire for company and a loathing of solitude. A being that requires recognition and acknowledgement in the form of worship from creatures it created has emotions and understands the suffering of creatures and shares in the suffering, more or less. The consolation God shares in the suffering of creatures because he created them and understands their struggles with evil given that he also struggles to overcome the evil impulses inherent in mood. As a vastly powerful being, he substantially overcomes these impulses where human beings fail. But since the consolation God is not omnibenevolent, his own limitation and self-interest interfere with his empathetic capacity. He does the most he can to make the world better either through direct involvement (as in enhancing positive features of the world at the time of creation) or through human moral agency (by way of motivating humans who believe in him to do good in his name). As already asserted, God’s self-interest motivated him to create the world even when he had adequate knowledge of the consequences of creation for creatures. He created anyway because of his need for legitimisation. At this juncture, one may wonder if the consolation God changes. The reply is in the affirmative. The consolation God, as a being of yearning, continues to grow in power, knowledge, and goodness. Given that he comes into existence spontaneously in an eternally existing universe, he will continue to exist. The question of his going out of existence will only arise if he attains his goal of becoming a being with the omni-properties. This will mark the apotheosis of his consolation. But, then, it seems reasonable to assume that a being that attains perfection will exist eternally and can no longer experience moments of diminution of power, knowledge, and goodness. The consolation God becomes the perfect God of traditional theism. The tragedy of the universe consists in the impossibility of the consolation God attaining the omni-properties. The system of consolationist metaphysics proposes that the divine quest will go on forever. Accordingly, this primordial being will exist forever.

3.5 Objections and Replies

I have only demonstrated God’s causal responsibility, but not his moral responsibility.

It may be objected that the consolation God is not morally responsible for the evil in the world if he creates the world necessarily, and this seems the case since he is conditioned by mood to create an imperfect world. The consolation God is only causally responsible for the world, as Luis Cordeiro-Rodrigues (Reference Luis2023) argues. According to Cordeiro-Rodrigues, while it is obvious that the consolation God is causally responsible for the evil in the world as creator, it is not obvious that he is morally responsible for evil. The necessity, it may be argued, arises from God’s conditioning by mood, which compels him to create. The point is that the divine yearning for consolation involves a deterministic process that necessitates the work of creation. I respond that the consolationist universe is not rigidly conditioned. While entities indeed yearn and are so constituted that they cannot attain perfection, they yet actualise themselves in varying degrees in the process of striving towards the impossible goal. The consolationist universe is more tragic than determined. Indeed, one can say that tragedies are determined, but, in the consolationist perspective, events are not rigidly conditioned. The tragedy I am referring to is the condition of a universe that exists as yearning. The heart of the matter is the circumscription of potentials which limitation imposes on yearning entities, rather than the question of rigid determinism. While the consolation God cannot attain the omni-properties, being limited by mood, he is capable of carrying out a range of actions in accordance with his status as a very powerful and knowledgeable being. For example, he can intervene in the affairs of the world to reduce some evils. God’s moral responsibility follows from the possession of the knowledge required to determine the future trajectory of the world at the moment of its production or creation and the ability to have refrained from the creative exercise (see Section 3.3.2). The argument of necessity can hold only if God could not have refrained from creating a world that would be marred by evil. It is not necessary for God to be powerful and knowledgeable enough to eliminate or prevent most evils for him to be morally responsible. The limitation factor can be more effectively used to defend God’s moral responsibility than his not having moral responsibility for the evil in the world. Being limited in goodness, he goes on to create the world in search of his own consolation at the expense of the consolation of the creatures he is bringing into existence (see Section 3.3.2).

To be is better than non-existence. A world with both good and evil is better than no world at all. Accordingly, the argument that God should have refrained from creating the world is weak.

Following from the first objection, it may be argued that God need not have refrained from creating the world because existence is better than non-existence. More precisely put, a world that contains both good and evil is better than a world that does not exist at all. Thus God creating a world with many evils side by side with many goods is not a bad thing for which he should be blamed. The evils that arise in the world are just necessary features of this world. Now, the bone of contention is not whether existence is better than non-existence per se. The heart of the matter is whether creating a world marred by evil is a morally acceptable thing to do. There is no doubt that there are many things in the world that provide human beings with pleasure. Yet the pleasure that accompanies the possession of goods like long life and rewarding jobs is more than diluted by the persistence of evils in the world. Some of these evils include everyday dangers that menace our lives at every moment and right in our homes – constant wars, the development of weapons of mass destruction, human malice, murder, greed, harmful sexual behaviour, hunger, natural disasters, incurable diseases, loneliness and boredom, and the many inconveniences of old age. Our lives add up to one long song of lamentation. To demand fortitude in the face of the constant pain that accompanies living is indeed a test of courage. Yet stoicism does not obscure the tragic dimension of life. The consolation God should have refrained from a creative exercise that he knows, ab initio, will cause the proliferation of entities and the multiplication of suffering. A no-world is better than a world marred by evil such as ours. In a no-world, human consciousness, the repository of pain and suffering, would not exist. This non-existence would mean that there would be no tormented consciousness in the world. The point I am making should not be confused with anti-natalism, although it rings pessimistic just like anti-natalism. Anti-natalism is the view that the living have an obligation not to bring people into the world in view of the harm they will be exposed to (see Benatar Reference Benatar2006; Metz Reference 63Metz2012b; Singh Reference Singh2012) or that bringing more people into the world disadvantages those already in the world by, for example, heightening the problem of population explosion (see Ehrlich Reference Ehrlich1968). My view goes deeper into the heart of the problem of existence by shifting responsibility for the major prevailing state of affairs (the creation of the world) to the consolation God.

God has a right to create the world as it is by reason of being the most powerful being in the world.

This objection assumes that might is right and that the consolation God is not good. If possessing power alone justifies God creating a world like ours, then he is not good. The consolation God would have a right to create a world marred by physical and moral evil if he was powerful enough to eliminate or prevent all or most evils and good enough to overlook his own interest and adequately consider the interest of creatures. Adequate consideration of the interest of creatures would mean that the consolation God allowing some evils in the would indicates that a divine plan to bring about a compensatory and/or better state that would compensate for the evils suffered in a lifetime, either in this world or in another world. This divine plan would nudge creatures towards the goal of perfection or bring about perfection outright. But a God who could accomplish these tasks would be an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being. The consolation God will have to be the God of traditional Christian theism and not the God whose conception in the consolationist perspective is inspired by ATR intuitions of divine limitation. Thus, while defending traditional Christian theism, Richard Swinburne (Reference Swinburne1998) asserts that (the perfect) God has a right to allow evil in the world since doing so is necessary for a greater good like freedom. Evil, in particular moral evil, becomes the price to pay to enjoy the good of freedom. In his words:

Swinburne argues along this line because he works with the assumption that God possesses the omni-properties and can adequately compensate the sufferer in this life or in the hereafter. The consolation God lacks this capacity. His goodness and limited powers only allow him to empathise with creatures and to ameliorate their suffering where he is able to do so (being morally responsible). The freedom factor cannot be invoked because in a universe of yearning, diverse causes condition conduct, although creatures are ultimately responsible for their actions given the fact that they can distinguish between right and wrong. Recall that a universe animated by mood is not rigidly determined. From the foregoing, the consolationist God does not have the right to create a world marred by evil.

• If the consolationist account of a passible, empathetic God is true, how can humans know that God is ameliorating the suffering in the world?

Now, a God of consolation is one who can offer succour to creatures that suffer in varying degrees in an imperfect world that exhibits moral and physical evil. Lacking the omni-properties, the consolation God cannot do all (logically possible) things. But as a powerful, knowledgeable, and good creator, he can ameliorate at least some of the suffering in the world. The empirically minded objector may wonder how humans can know or discern that the consolation God indeed ameliorates the suffering in the world. The question now is not whether he exists, since we are working with the assumption that he exists. As I have observed elsewhere (Agada Reference Agada2023a), instead of appealing to miraculous interventions that the sceptic will always doubt, one can invoke the factor of belief which maintains logical coherence within the consolationist system. God ameliorates the suffering in the world using human moral agency. Being of a much more majestic order than humans, he cannot materialise and mingle with humans while overseeing palliative processes aimed at reducing the suffering in the world. At the point of creation, the consolation God manipulated mood in such a way that the idea of a morality-loving God is implanted in the consciousness of the human being, such that when this being thinks about goodness it also contemplates the idea of a good creator of the world who shares in human suffering. The idea of a good creator is such that it invites humans to try as much as possible to emulate the consolation God and strive towards perfection, impossible as this goal may be. Morality, when understood in terms of consolation, invites thinking and sentient beings to expand the sphere of goodness. Since God is the highest consolation, he motivates human moral behaviour. Those who believe in him consciously strive to emulate him, thereby reducing the suffering in the world. Those who do not believe in him may unwittingly emulate him, since he has planted the seed of the active striving after goodness in human consciousness, thereby reducing the evil in the world.

3.6 Conclusion

This section brings this Element to an end. In this section, I showed how consolationist metaphysics makes a contribution to contemporary African philosophy of religion. After reviewing the literature in the first two sections of this Element, I focused effort on delineating the powers of the consolation God in this section. Specifically, I showed in Section 1 that there are two broad conceptions of God in ATR and introduced the reader to the limitation thesis of African limited God proponents. The two conceptions are traditional African theism and the African limited God view. I focused effort on the exposition and analysis of the limited God stances of philosophers in the vitalist and non-vitalist traditions like Wiredu, Bewaji, the Chimakonams, Molefe, Attoe, and Ofuasia. In Section 2, I explored the implication of the various views held by African limited God philosophers for the problem of evil and concluded that the logical and evidential problem of evil does not arise in African philosophy of religion. Nevertheless, I pointed out that even a limited God has moral responsibility for the evil in the world in his capacity as the creator.

The question of how the limited God is morally responsible for the evil in the world is the dominant question of Section 3. I engaged the question from the perspective of the philosophy of consolationism that asserts that imperfection characterises a universe animated by mood. Making a unique contribution to the literature, I demonstrated in Section 3 that the mood-constituted God is properly a consolation God who can be deemed to be working towards the amelioration of the suffering in the world. I explored the question of the consolation God’s moral responsibility and denied that he has a right to create a world marred by evil. I argued that this God is a passible being who is obliged to ameliorate the suffering of his creatures. Future writings on the nature and capacities of the consolation God will more broadly focus on a comparison of the consolation God with the Christian God and the God of Hindu traditions in what will count as a contribution to global philosophy of religion just like the current Element.