Aquinas

Critically assess the belief that God is omnipotent. (40)

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Omnipotence is a central attribute of the Christian God; as the Nicene Creed affirms

“we believe in One God, the Father, the Almighty…”

Nevertheless, Christians struggle to agree on precisely what it means.  Broadly, there are two approaches to understanding God’s omnipotence.  Classical Theists, including many Roman Catholic scholars, argue that God exists eternally in the sense of being outside time and space and so wholly simple.  By this definition, God’s omnipotence means that he caused everything, even time and space, to exist but it does not necessarily mean that God can act directly in time, such as by performing a miracle in response to prayer.  By contrast, Theistic Personalists reject the timeless-eternal model of God because it makes God too remote for most Christian doctrines and practices to make sense.  If God is wholly simple, how can he also exist in three persons?  If God is beyond time and space, how can he know when He is being worshipped or understand the contents of peoples’ hearts, let alone speak to or appear to people through mystical experiences?  As Nelson Pike observed, the actions of the God of the Bible are “unavoidably tensed”. For Theistic Personalists, including many Protestant Christians, God must be everlasting but within time.  This means that God has the power to act responsively and directly to change aspects of creation, but this comes at the price of making God’s understanding of the world and his actions depend on time and space and events within them, seemingly making him less than supremely powerful.  It is clear, therefore, that both approaches to understanding God’s omnipotence entail God’s power being limited in some way.  Either God’s power to act responsively in time is limited by God’s timeless nature, or God’s power is not supreme because his actions are bounded by time and dependent on events outside of God.  In this way the belief that God is omnipotent is incoherent.

Controversially, Rene Descartes argued that God’s supreme perfection entails omnipotence to the point whereby God could make 2+2=5 if He so wished, suggesting that God can do the logically impossible, such as by creating a stone too heavy for him to lift… and then lifting it anyway.  Descartes wrote, “God could have brought it about … that it was not true that twice four make eight” (Descartes 1984-1991: 2:294).  Nevertheless, even Descartes had to accept that God’s power is limited in the respect that God cannot lie or will his own non-existence.  Tacitly accepting St Anselm’s argument, He wrote to a correspondent “God does not have the faculty of taking away from himself his own existence.”  Later proponents of the Ontological Argument Leibniz and Ross both developed this point, arguing that God exists necessarily in any possible world.  Further, as well as not supporting God’s omnipotence entailing unlimited power, Descartes position suggests that the laws of logic and nature are arbitrary, raising questions about God’s goodness.  As Plato pointed out in Euthyphro and as Bertrand Russell later argued, a God who decides what is good and bad arbitrarily, going on to reward and punish people eternally for jumping or failing to jump through a meaningless moral hoop, is no better than a tyrant and certainly not worthy of worship.  In this way, believing that God’s omnipotence means that he can do the logically impossible is both incompatible with the Christian belief that God is all-good and incompatible with God’s supreme perfection.  This demonstrates that the belief that God is omnipotence is incoherent when defined in this timeless-eternal sense.

St Thomas Aquinas argued that God is eternal in the sense of being wholly simple and outside time.  In this way, God’s creative action must be single, limiting God’s power to what is actually possible, logically possible and compatible with God’s timeless nature.   Much as Descartes later did, Aquinas argued that God could not act in a way that conflicts with his God-like nature, such as by doing what is evil.  For Aquinas, God’s actions are also limited by what is possible in this world, so it is not possible for God to create a square circle or make 2+2=5 within this world. Because his creative act is timeless and so single and simple, God cannot do x and not x in the same timeless act of creation.  Nevertheless, Of course, Thomist scholars like Gerry Hughes SJ have reasoned that God’s omnipotence means that He could have created another world in which different logical rules apply, but only if such a world was consistent with what Richard Swinburne has called the Best Possible World Type. It would not be actually possible (consistent with God’s nature) to create a substandard world, so God’s power to create a world with different logical laws in which 2+2 could =5 depends on that world being equivalent to this in terms of fulfilling God’s purpose for it.  Aquinas’ argument is problematic in this respect.  How could God create more than one world if He is indeed timeless and spaceless?  Multiple acts of creation imply a separation in time and space that is inconsistent with God’s timeless nature, making it not actually possible for God to have created any other world.  In the end, Aquinas’ argument is no better than Descartes when it comes to defending God’s unlimited power.  For both Descartes and Aquinas then, God’s power is significantly constrained by His own nature, making the belief in omnipotence, when understood to mean having timeless-eternally unlimited power, uncoherent. 

Theistic Personalists such as Richard Swinburne and William Lane Craig have sought to make sense of the belief that God is omnipotent by arguing that God is everlasting in time.  They reject the Classical Theist argument that God can be timelessly eternal on the basis that such a God is inconsistent with the Bible and tenets of Christian doctrine like God existing in three persons or becoming incarnate and because, as Sir Anthony Kenny argued, the idea of God existing or acting in a timeless way is “radically incoherent” given that the matrix which makes existence and action possible is time.  The idea that God is everlasting in time is supported by the Bible, in verses such as

“The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary” Isaiah 40:28

In this case, God’s omnipotence entails being able to do everything that it is logically possible to do from a point in time.  As Swinburne wrote in 1973

“[God] is omnipotent at time t = if  [God] is able at t to bring about any state of affairs p such that it is consistent with the facts about what happened before t that, after t, [God] should bring about p…”

By this analysis, given the facts the go before the present moment t, in this moment God could not create a square circle or create a rock too heavy for him to lift and nor could God do something evil or act so as to bring about a worse result.  Also, God cannot change the past or, arguably, know the future outcome of free actions. Despite this, both Swinburne and Leftow argue that God is omnipotent.  They reject the claim that not being able to do something logically impossible or inconsistent with one’s nature is a real limitation on power.  Nobody thinks Donald Trump is not powerful because he cannot fly, give birth or make square circles!  By this definition, God being omnipotent entails him having power in much the same way as human beings have power, only to a much greater degree.  Nevertheless, surely this univocal interpretation of God’s omnipotence is unsatisfactory.  Not only does it seem to anthropomorphise God and sell short the belief that he is supremely powerful, but it is also inconsistent with the Bible, as in Isaiah 55:8

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.

In this way as well, believing in an everlastingly omnipotent God is incoherent. 

Further, when it comes to an everlasting God in time, what evidence is there to support belief in the existence of a God who exists and acts like an invisible superman?  The arguments for God’s existence do nothing to support the existence of such a God and, if William James’ analysis of genuine mystical experience is to believed, neither do Religious Experiences.  It is true that the everlasting God of the Theistic Personalists makes far more sense of God’s actions as recorded in the Bible (if not all of God’s words) than does the eternal God of the Classical Theist tradition, but what is the rational basis for accepting the Bible as the primary, in fact almost the only, authority for the existence of such a God?   Given the insights of Biblical Criticism, it seems that having faith that God exists – and is omnipotent – on the basis of scripture alone (Sola Scriptura) cannot be rational.  Further, even if faith is “assurance about what we do not see.” Hebrews 11:1, the Bible is inconsistent in what it suggests about God’s omnipotence.  In Genesis 2 God searches for a helper for Adam, trying out each animal before settling on making woman out of Adam’s rib… not even very competent!  Yet, in Matthew 19:26 Jesus affirms that “with God all things are possible.”  It seems that believing that God exists and is omnipotent in a way that is everlasting in time on the strength of the Bible is incoherent. 

In conclusion, believing that God is omnipotent remains a central part of Christian doctrine and yet is it an incoherent belief.  This demonstrates the extent to which faith is not a rational position to hold.  Of course, this makes little difference to those believers who understand faith to be non-propositional, constituting…

“confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Hebrews 11:1

Yet, for those looking for propositional faith, faith that is well supported by evidence and argument, the incoherence of omnipotence as a key attribute of God and its lack of compatibility with either God’s goodness or the Bible will make it difficult to remain a Christian. 

Aquinas’ first cause argument successfully proves the existence of God. Discuss. (40)

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Aquinas’ first cause argument is the second of his three versions of the Cosmological Argument, which form the first of his three ways to God in the first part of the Summa Theologica.  As a Cosmological Argument, Aquinas’ first cause argument starts from the observation of order, in this case causation, in the universe.  The word “Cosmological” derives from the Greek “Kosmos” which means both “order” and “universe”.  As Anthony Kenny[CV1]  explains, Aquinas relies on Aristotle’s theory of causation, as outlined in the Metaphysics Book IV.  Aristotle argued that all things in the universe have four causes, which can by understood in terms of the material, efficient, formal and final.  Material causes are the physical ingredients of things, efficient causes the agents that cause them to exist as they do, formal causes the definitions of things which make them what they are and the final cause to which things aim is their goal or telos and ultimately flourishing.  Focusing on efficient causation, Aquinas’ second way to God argues that everything in the universe is caused by one or more agents outside itself and nothing causes itself to exist.  If this is so then there is a problem – what was the first efficient cause.  An infinite chain of efficient causes makes no sense, because without a first cause nothing would exist.  Something cannot come out of nothing.  There must be a first efficient cause, but this must itself be uncaused, which makes it unlike any other thing.  The uncaused cause of the universe could then be said to be “neither something nor nothing” and, Aquinas concludes, this is what everybody calls God. As an inductive argument the conclusion of the Cosmological Argument, that God exists, is supported by observed premises which are falsifiable.  Because of this, Aquinas’ first cause argument cannot be said to prove God’s existence.  The problem of induction ensures that the most that the argument can be said to achieve is a very high degree of probability that its conclusions are, in fact, true[CV2] . Leaving the problem of induction and the issue of proof to one side: Aquinas’ first cause argument is still a convincing argument for the existence of God and, as William Lane Craig continues to argue, it is a useful means of defending the rationality of faith[CV3] . 

An immediate criticism of Aquinas’ argument is that it assumes that EVERYTHING in the universe is caused.  Although this claim is supported by Aristotle, it may be fair to suggest – as indeed JL Mackie did in “The Miracle of Theism” (1982[CV4] ) – that there may be things in the universe that are uncaused.  Indeed, Quantum Physics has concluded that there are sub-atomic particles that are in a sense uncaused. It could be that Aquinas’ first premise – that everything in the universe is caused – is untrue and if that is the case then the argument would fail. Nevertheless, it would be going too far to suggest that Physics has proven the existence of uncaused things in the universe.  Quantum particles could well be caused, for all we know, even though they appear not to be.  The most that Mackie’s criticism achieves is to show that Aquinas’ first premise must remain uncertain.  Although it seems likely on the basis of present experience that all things are caused, as Hume observed it is always possible that there are things in the universe that are uncaused and that these could explain the universe without recourse to God[CV5] . In this way, although Aquinas’ first cause argument is not entirely successful as an argument for God’s existence from observation, it is able to survive an obvious line of criticism.

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) Hume went on to suggest that the universe itself could be the uncaused cause of itself.  Russell made a similar point in his debate with Frederick Copleston[CV6] , suggesting that the universe should be seen as a “brute fact”.  This is certainly possible; Aquinas’ might be guilty of committing the fallacy of composition in reasoning that just because things within the universe need causes that the universe as a whole needs a cause.  Russell gave the analogy of mothers – just because all men have mothers doesn’t mean that the human race has a mother.  While Hume and Russell could well be right and the universe might be the cause of itself, this goes well beyond our experience.  It is just as difficult to theorise about the universe being self-causing as it is to theorise that it has an uncaused cause.  Neither conclusion can be drawn with any degree of confidence.  What does seem certain is that Aquinas is correct to reason that the universe must be explained in terms of something that is uncaused, whether that is within the universe, the universe itself – or God.  William Lane Craig[CV7] , in adapting the Cosmological Argument for modern Christian Apologetics, chooses to leave the argument at its first conclusion – that there must exist an uncaused causer.  He leaves it to Theologians to convince people that the uncaused cause is in fact “what everybody calls God” and it seems that his caution is sensible. Neither Aquinas’ first cause argument nor any other version of the Cosmological Argument can conclusively prove the existence of God, but the argument can point to the rationality of faith given the necessity for a cause for the universe which is unlike anything within our normal experience[CV8] .

Immanuel Kant advised such caution when in the Critique of Pure Reason he argued that the Cosmological Argument, like other inductive arguments for God’s existence, goes beyond the boundaries of what we can claim to know.  It is reasonable to observe that all things are caused and that there is a tension implicit in this which demands explanation – but it is not reasonable to draw conclusions about that explanation when they go beyond possible experience.  Perhaps this is where faith comes in; the first cause argument cannot successfully PROVE the existence of God, but it can point towards a mystery which is evident in the observed universe, a mystery which is suggestive of the existence of something supernatural if not of the God of Classical Theism.  As Hume pointed out, the first cause argument cannot claim to lead to the God of Christianity – even to a single God in fact – but limited as it is, the argument provides a useful defence for the believer[CV9] . 

 [CV1]Precise relevant detail and range of scholarly views

 [CV2]Acknowledging & engaging with the precise wording of the title – This also works to show the LIMITATIONS of the argument.

 [CV3]THESIS

 [CV4]Using a range of scholarly views.  This paragraph also serves as the COUNTERCLAIM, as it does cede some of the point that Mackie makes.

 [CV5]Evaluating the “maybe not everything has a cause” criticism, linking to the THESIS, justified, developed…

 [CV6]Range of scholarly views – again a bit of counterargument (balance) here, allowing that Hume and Russell have a point.

 [CV7]Range of scholarly views

 [CV8]Evaluating the fallacy of composition criticism and linking to the THESIS – justified, developed, sustained…

 [CV9]Drawing in Kant’s criticism & another of Hume’s in drawing the final CONCLUSION, which restates the THESIS – successful argument.  Builds step by step and is therefore convincing.

Critically compare the cosmological and teleological arguments for God’s existence. [40]

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St Thomas Aquinas presents five ways of demonstrating God’s existence based on observation in his Summa Theologica (1,2,3).  The first four of these ways are Cosmological arguments, reasoning from observations of movement, efficient causation, contingency and grades of perfection in the universe a posteriori to the conclusion that God as a Prime Mover, uncaused cause, necessary being and supreme perfection must exist.  The fifth way is a teleological argument, reasoning from observation of order and purpose (teleology) in the universe a posteriori to the existence of an intelligent designer “which is what everybody calls God.”  Clearly, Aquinas saw both Cosmological and Teleological Arguments as persuasive arguments for God’s existence, however the Teleological Argument offers better support to the God of Christian worship than the Cosmological Argument does.

David Hume criticised cosmological arguments in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).  His character Philo pointed out that it is based on limited observations of the universe.  For all we know there might be uncaused things out there… as indeed Quantum Physics and Particle Physics has since shown to be the case.  Further, the argument is based on the fallacy of composition, the assumption that just because the parts of the universe have a cause that the whole universe must have a cause.  As Bertrand Russell later pointed out; just because all men have mothers doesn’t mean that the human race has a mother, it could be that the universe is a “brute fact”.  Hume’s criticisms of the cosmological argument are difficult to overcome.  While it is fair to say that Hume’s claims about the limitations of human observations as the basis for knowledge about natural laws are just as much of a problem for science as they are for religion, his other criticisms hit hard.  In truth, the universe might, for all we know, be uncaused or be its own cause.  It is fair to ask why what is true of the part should also have to be true of the whole.  Although William Lane Craig argues that the cosmological argument – at least in his own Kalam version, which stops short of concluding that the Prime Mover is “what everybody calls God” – is the best support for the reasonableness of faith, his claims about the impossibility of an actual infinite and about the Big Bang theory needing a cause have been shown to be mistaken by critics such as Erik Sotnak and Stephen Hawking.  While the cosmological argument might superficially seem to be supported by Big Bang theory, in reality Cosmology shows that the idea of causation cannot apply outside the space-time matrix of our universe.  While it seems incredible, as Terry Pratchett quipped, science proposes that “in the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.” It is clear, therefore, that the cosmological argument is not persuasive. 

Hume’s character Philo also attacked the teleological argument in the Dialogues, criticising the tendency to make the argument using inappropriate analogies and pointing out apparent imperfections in the design of the universe, which might undermine the idea that the designer would be perfect.  Later, both Charles Darwin and JS Mill pointed out the brutality in nature and reasoning that an Ichneumon wasp could not have been designed by the God of Christianity.

“Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s everyday performances.”  Mill: Three Essays on Religion

Nevertheless, these critics all failed to exclude the possibility that the universe could be designed to contain evil for some morally sufficient reason.  As St. Augustine argued, it could be that natural evil in the world is a just punishment for sin.  Moral evil could be the necessary bi-product of human freedom.  Evil does not necessarily undermine the claim that the universe was designed by God.  Alternatively, as John Hick argued, suffering could be positively created by God to afford the opportunity for “soul-making” with any injustices being accounted for through an afterlife.  Further, there are versions of the teleological argument which do not rely on spurious analogies – such as FR Tennant’s aesthetic argument and anthropic principle.  These are more persuasive than the cosmological argument.  Hume’s criticisms fall short of undermining Tennant’s claim that God is needed to explain beauty and human consciousness in the universe and evolution through natural selection fails to explain these aspects of the universe adequately either.  Modern Intelligent Design arguments – such as those proposed by Michael Behe from irreducible complexity and by William Dembski from specified complexity – show that evolution cannot provide the complete explanation that atheists like Richard Dawkins claim it can.  While Paley’s argument in Natural Theology can be rightly criticised for its use of the famous watchmaker analogy, its appeal to our incredulity at the scientific claim that all this could have arisen by chance is powerful.  To accept that evolution through natural selection can provide a complete explanation of the universe and that there is no intelligence guiding it is difficult to accept.  Take the Japanese puffer-fish… can evolution really account for the extent of the intricacy and beauty of its designs?  It is clear, therefore, that the teleological argument is more persuasive than the cosmological argument.

In addition, even if the cosmological argument was persuasive, it would only serve to demonstrate the existence of a Prime Mover, an uncaused cause, a necessary being outside time and space.  It is not easy to see how this being could be the God of Christian worship.  Aristotle stopped short of claiming that the Prime Mover could be a God in any normal sense, its power being limited to supporting the existence of all contingent things and its goodness being limited to being fully actualised and containing no potential. How could a God who is outside time and space act to create the universe when there could be no time before during or after his action and when there would be no space to differentiate the creation from the creator?  Both human understanding and the language which tries to communicate it struggles to cope with objects outside the space-time matrix which bounds our experience.  It might, of course, be fair to say that human understanding and language cannot expect to be able to comprehend or describe God.  Yet, without the ability to claim that God exists, that God is the all-powerful creator and that God is good with some content, it is difficult to see how Religion could prosper.  St. Thomas Aquinas attempted to show how human language could be used to describe God in positive terms as analogies, but even he admitted that he content of attributes such as goodness must needs be limited and cannot be understood in the same way as human goodness.  The teleological argument, by contrast, does not rely on locating God outside time and space.  As the intelligent designer, it seems likely that God would have defined the purpose of the universe from within the same logical framework which governs its operation today.  In this way, God’s power and goodness have real content, as they relate to how He created the complex order and purposiveness we can observe.  It follows that the teleological argument offers better support for the God of Christian worship than the cosmological argument does.

In conclusion, the teleological argument offers better support for the God of Christian worship than the cosmological argument does.  Clearly, the teleological argument relies on the possibility of defending God’s goodness and power against charges of creating or allowing evil and suffering, but it is still more persuasive than the cosmological argument.  Even Immanuel Kant, who rejected all the classical arguments for God’s existence in his Critique of Pure Reason, saw the age and persistence of the teleological argument as pointers to its status as the most powerful of the arguments for God’s existence.

“Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument proves that God exists.” Critically evaluate this statement.  [40] 

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Cosmological Arguments start with the existence of the universe (Greek = Kosmos) and conclude that God is the most logical explanation of it.  They are some of the oldest arguments for God’s existence and have an intuitive appeal.  As Richard Swinburne observed in “Is There a God?” (1996)

“The human quest for explanation inevitably and rightly seeks for the ultimate explanation of everything observable.”

Cosmological Arguments can be found in the work of Plato (Laws Book X) and Aristotle (Physics Book II, Metaphysics Book IV) and make up the first four of Aquinas’ five ways to God in the Summa Theologica (1.2.3).   While Aquinas’ Cosmological Arguments are all framed as a posteriori arguments – and so could never provide proof – they do provide strong support for the existence of a Prime Mover.  Nevertheless, Aquinas goes too far in his claim that this is what everybody calls God.

Aquinas’ first way draws on the Aristotelian concept of movement. In the Physics, Book V, Aristotle wrote, “all things that are in motion must be moved by something.”  Motion does not necessarily mean movement in the sense that things are is moving through space from location A to location B, but rather that they are moving from a state of potentiality to a state of actuality in multiple different respects. As Aristotle wrote, movement involves the… “actualizing of some potency. It is because things have real potencies that they are able to change.”  Aquinas later wrote, “for motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality.”  Whereas Plato’s argument, later refined by Muslim scholars of the 8th Century Kalam School and more recently by William Lane Craig, focuses on a temporal series of causes much like a domino-rally, pointing towards a beginning in time, an uncaused cause, which is what everybody calls God, for Aristotle and for Aquinas, even if the universe is as infinite as it appeared to be, there is still the need for a Prime Mover because everything depends on other things.  As Parmenides, Heraclitus and separately the Buddha observed, everything changes or moves and nothing stays the same, but nothing changes or moves without being moved by something else, even if that is just time itself.  As Aristotle wrote, “potential, precisely because it is potential, cannot make itself actual”.  Aristotle concluded that there must be a Prime Mover outside time and space, but stops short of claiming that this is God.  Aquinas went further, claiming that this Prime Mover is “what everybody calls God”, but in doing this he weakened the argument. It is true that the Prime Mover must be outside time and space and thus wholly simple and unchanging, pure actuality and with zero potentiality.  As Aquinas wrote,

“nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality… it is impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved…” 

It is also true that everything ultimately depends on the Prime Mover for its existence.  As Aquinas wrote, “therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other”  However, it is a step too far to claim that the Prime Mover could be seen as the “creator”, let alone act in the world, speak to human beings or be crucified and rise again. When Aquinas writes “and this everyone understands to be God”  He goes beyond the evidence and possible knowledge.  In his book “The Nature of God” Gerard J. Hughes describes the Prime Mover changing potentiality to actuality in terms of a bowl of milk causing a cat to cross a room.  The bowl of milk does nothing, in the way that the Prime Mover – being timelessly unchanging and impassive – does nothing, because it has no potential and is pure act. It follows that Aquinas’ first framing of the Cosmological Argument provides strong support for the existence of a Prime Mover, but not for the existence of the God that Christians worship, because the Prime Mover would be unable to say “let there be light”, work miracles or judge individuals on the final day… all of these require in God potential and the ability to act in time, which the Prime Mover cannot have.

Aquinas’ second way draws on the Aristotelian concept of efficient causation.  For Aristotle, all things have four causes – material, formal, efficient and final.  Efficient causes are agents which bring things into being, in the way that parents bring their children into being or the earth, sun and rain bring the oak tree out of the acorn.  If everything depends on efficient causes to bring them into being, again there is a chain of causation which requires explanation.  The chain cannot be infinite, because if there was no first efficient cause there would be no subsequent causes and the universe would not exist.  Something cannot come out of or be caused by nothing. Similarly, there cannot be a first efficient cause like other things in the universe, as if there were it would need efficient causes of its own and could not, therefore, be the first.  Aquinas concludes, “it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.” Again, Aquinas’ second Cosmological Argument provides strong support for the existence of an uncaused efficient cause and again, it is a step too far to claim that this must be the God of Christian worship.  This not least because efficient causes do not need to be sustaining causes in esse (as Frederick Copleston later called them) but could be a cause in fieri (again, to use Copleston’s terminology).   An uncaused cause which began the universe but has no further role in it is not the God of Christian theism; at most it supports deism.  Further, Aquinas admits that

“There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be PRIOR to itself, which is impossible.”

 This implies that as efficient cause the uncaused cause must be PRIOR to the universe, something which would be difficult to reconcile with Big Bang Theory as this suggests that as time itself was created at the Big Bang, it makes no sense to speak of anything being PRIOR to it or indeed, as Stephen Hawking observed, causing it.  In these ways, Aquinas goes beyond the evidence in claiming that the uncaused cause is that to “everyone gives the name of God”.

Aquinas’ third way develops the idea of the contingency of things in the universe, pointing out that everthing has the potential to be or not to be; “We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be”.  In an infinite universe, all potentials not to be might be expected to have been realized; as something can’t come out of nothing, nothing would then exist and I could not be writing this essay.  It follows, therefore, that EITHER the universe cannot be infinite – in which case there would have to be a first cause in time which would be what everybody calls God – or the universe is infinite and there exists a “necessary being”, a fully actual “neither something nor nothing” which contains its own explanation and has no potential not to exist.  This, Aquinas claims, is what “all men speak of as God.”  Aquinas’ third Cosmological Argument is just as problematic as an argument for the existence of the God of Christian worship as the first and second.  Not only as an a posteriori argument does it stop short of providing proof, it also goes well beyond the observable evidence in concluding that the necessary being is God as Christians would define Him.  Leibniz later recast the third Cosmological Argument as an a priori argument, writing:

“Why is there something rather than nothing? The sufficient reason […] is found in a substance which […] is a necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself.” 

For Leibniz, anything that exists has a cause for its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.  If the universe has an external cause for its existence, this cause must be God.  As the universe exists, it must have a cause for its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.  Because the universe exists contingently, not necessarily, the universe must have an external cause and this must be God.  Nevertheless, like Aquinas, Leibniz argument fails to prove the existence of the God of Christian worship.  Causing the universe is not enough to be called God; the Christian God does rather more than an abstract singularity or the Higgs Boson does.  Further, it doesn’t make sense to predicate much of what the Christian God does to the necessary cause of the universe supported by Aquinas and by Leibniz in his supposed improvement of Aquinas’ third cosmological argument.  Both the God of Aquinas and the God of Leibniz are timelessly impassive and it is inconceivable how such a being could act even once to create the world, given that this would involve a change in its being incompatible with being timeless and fully actual with no potential.  Further, as Immanuel Kant observed, we have no experience of necessary beings so it makes little sense to speculate about their possible existence.  Also, it is inconsistent to start an argument by claiming that all things are contingent and conclude by hypothesizing something that is not contingent.  Again, while Aquinas’ third Cosmological Argument strongly points towards the existence of a necessary being or beings in the universe, it is far from being conclusive proof of such, even when recast as an a priori argument and cannot in any case justifiably claim that the necessary being is what Christians worship as God.

While it is true that most of the classical criticisms of Aquinas presented by David Hume and Bertrand Russell fail to undermine his Cosmological Arguments, the point (which they all make) about the Cosmological Argument failing to support the God of Christian worship stands.

Firstly, Hume criticized a version of the Cosmological Argument presented by his character Demea in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) Book IX.  Cleanthes points out that there is no support for the claim that everything in the universe is moves and is moved, caused and is caused or is contingent.  We have a limited view of the universe and no sensible reason to believe that the universe is homogenous or that we see things the way they actually are, a principle known in science as isotropy.  For all we know, argues Cleanthes, there could be unmoved movers, uncaused causes or necessary beings within the universe which could explain its continued existence.  Nevertheless, accepting these criticisms of the Cosmological Argument entails abandoning Natural Science altogether.  Leibniz coined the term “Cosmological Principle” to refer to the principles of homogeneity and isotropy which all scientists must assume in order to reason inductively towards natural laws.  Without the Cosmological Principle, we could not make many scientific knowledge claims; Cosmology and Quantum Science, Medicine and Biochemistry would all be a waste of time.  In practice, laws of nature supported by inductive reasoning enable mobile phones and space shuttles to work, so it doesn’t make sense to doubt the authority of our observations as Hume, through Cleanthes, does.  These criticisms of Hume’s fail to undermine Aquinas’ Cosmological Arguments insofar as they point to a necessary cause for the universe.

Secondly, Cleanthes continues by criticizing the claim that just because the parts of the universe have causes, so must the universe as a whole.  Demea (and Aquinas) rely on the so-called fallacy of composition.   Further, Cleanthes asks why the universe cannot be the explanation of itself, why there must be an external cause for the universe.  Later, Bertrand Russell asked why the universe cannot be a “brute fact”.  Yet neither of these criticisms is conclusive.  As Leibniz points out, it is difficult to see how a universe of contingencies can itself exist necessarily.  Contingencies involve potential which cannot, by definition, exist within a necessary being.  Further, while characteristics of the parts do not necessarily have to be characteristics of the whole and while (as Russell argued) just because all men have mothers it doesn’t mean that the human race has a mother, it can sometimes follow.  Each strand of spaghetti has two ends, something which also applies to the whole packet of spaghetti.  In a sense and because it is made up of material in the way that things in the universe are, the universe is a thing.  Things exist contingently and need to be moved and caused by things other than themselves.  These criticisms of Hume’s fail to undermine Aquinas’ Cosmological Arguments insofar as they point to a necessary cause for the universe as well.

Nevertheless, Cleanthes’ criticism that the cause of the universe could not be said to have the attributes of the Christian God is, for reasons previously explored, is persuasive.  Again it is clear that while Aquinas’ Cosmological Arguments do offer support to the hypothesis that there is an uncaused, necessary cause for the universe, they are far from proving that the God of Christian worship exists. 

In conclusion, Aquinas’ Cosmological fail to prove that God exists, both because as a posteriori arguments they stop short of proving their conclusions and because even if they are reframed into a format which could provide proof, as Leibniz attempted, they demonstrate only the existence of an abstract necessary being far short of having the attributes of the God Christians worship. 

 

Bibliography

  • Class notes on the Cosmological Argument
  • Aristotle, Physics Book V
  • Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1, 2, 3
  • Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Book IX
  • Vardy & Vardy “God Matters” Chapters 4 & 5

Orthopraxy is more important than Orthodoxy! Discuss. [40]

/ vardycharlotte / 1 Comment

Orthopraxy is certainly important and should not be ignored in favour of a focus on Orthodoxy. As the 1965 encyclical Gaudiem et Spes confirms,

“… the Church has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel.”

Pope Paul VI might have been inspired by Jesus’ own example in admitting this.  The Gospels record how Jesus put the needs of the poor, the sick and outcasts and the spirit of agape ahead of following the letter of the law. For example, he was criticized for healing people on the Sabbath (Luke 13).  Although Jesus affirmed that he had not come to alter “one jot or iota” of the law (Matthew 5:18), and even required higher standards from His followers than the notoriously fastidious Pharisees did of theirs (Matthew 6-7).  Jesus clearly respected Orthodoxy, the Scriptures and particularly the Law of Moses.  Nevertheless, Jesus reminded His followers that the Law was created to serve man, not man to serve the Law; He put the immediate needs of people, love and compassion, first and ahead of following the letter of the Law as it was usually interpreted.  For examples, when Jesus was touched by the woman with a hemorrhage, he didn’t for a moment consider how her action in touching him had made him ritually impure (Mark 5:25-34) .  When Jesus was approached by the Centurion on behalf of his servant (Matthew 8), or on behalf of the Syro-Phonecian woman on behalf of her daughter (Mark 7), Jesus agreed to help people who were beyond the pale in Jewish society.  His parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10) underlines how Jesus put emphasis on orthopraxis.  Jesus forced his Jewish listeners to admit that the Samaritan’s good actions meant that he deserved praise, despite his identity, while by inference, the behavior of the Scribe and the Levite deserved no praise, despite the letter of the law and their exalted positions in Jewish society.  It is clear that both the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and the Bible confirm the importance of Orthopraxy, that it should not be ignored in favour of a focus on Orthodoxy.

Further, following Pope Paul VI’s teaching in Gaudiem et Spes, in “A Theology of Liberation” (1971) Gustavo Gutierrez argued that the process of Praxis and doing Theology must include both a critical reflection on Christian texts and interpretations (Orthodoxy) in the light of peoples’ lived experience and the needs of the poor (Orthopraxy).  It is not a case of either orthodoxy or orthopraxy, both are needed, both must be in dialogue – to risk using the Marxist language f historical materialism, in a dialectical relationship – if Christianity is to stay alive.

If Orthopraxy is given priority to the exclusion of Orthodoxy then there is nothing distinctively Christian about what is done to improve conditions for the poor.  The actions of feeding and clothing somebody, of visiting them and listening to them, are definitely right actions but any or all of these can be carried out for multiple reasons, including reasons which have nothing to do with Christianity or love.  For example, a political party might help the poor with the intention of buying votes or an overseas-aid project might help the poor with the intention of exerting political influence in another country; this might seem like Orthopraxy, but because it is not informed. guided and motivated by Orthodoxy it is not.  Without Orthodoxy, there is no clear line between Orthopraxy and basic social work and, as St Paul confirms in 1 Corinthians 13:3:

“If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

Marxists and indeed many other non-Christians who are concerned with social justice engage in first-act Praxis by visiting and/or living with the poor and acting in solidarity with them.  Yet without second-act Praxis and the mediations of seeing, judging (reflecting on what is needed in the light of the Gospel) and acting, there is nothing Theological, nothing distinctively Christian, about what is done.  Certainly “liberation theology leads to action” but, as Leonardo and Clodovis Boff affirm in “Introducing Liberation Theology” (1987, p.39) this is

“action for justice, the work of love, conversion, renewal of the Church and the transformation of society”

and is thus much more than just charity work.  It follows that both Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy are important, and that neither is more important than the other.

On the other hand, if Orthodoxy is given priority to the exclusion of Orthopraxy Christianity loses sight of what it is for.  Before the Second Vatican Council Pope John XXIII recognized that the Catholic Church had become obsessed with Orthodoxy and had turned inwards, focused on narrow issues in ecclesiology rather than on the social problems faced by most Christians.  This threatened to make the Church irrelevant in the lives of ordinary people, which would in turn lead to a decline in numbers, influence and strength.  Jesus’ great commission demands that Christians should “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19), not be satisfied with a diminishing pool of existing believers. Further, Jesus’ parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25 emphasizes that the eternal fate of each Christian depends on how they respond to people who are in need.  Jesus affirmed that “when you do this for the least of these brothers of mind, you do it for me…” (Matthew 25:40). In allowing itself to become irrelevant, the Church would have betrayed a disregard for people and for the poor in particular, who are most in need of its love and help.  Further, the Church would have demonstrated that it was ignoring both Jesus’ Great Commission and the consequences of ignoring those in need, falling well short of what it means to be disciples of Christ.  Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council to cause the Church to engage with social challenges and by confronting them and critically reflecting on its own teaching (Orthodoxy) devise a series of reforms designed to refocus the Church on holiness, each individual being responsible for doing Christ’s work (Orthopraxy). The Papacy of Pope Francis has resumed this drive for Holiness, with the encyclicals Laudato Si and Amoris Laeticia serving as powerful, if controversial, calls for Catholics to temper their zeal for ecclesiology and Orthodoxy with heartfelt consideration for the lived experience of other Catholics, particularly the poor. In Amoris Laeticia Pope Francis acknowledged

“Nor it is helpful to try to impose rules by sheer authority… We also need to be humble and realistic… We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them… Rather than offering the healing power of grace and the light of the Gospel message, some would “indoctrinate” that message, turning it into “dead stones to be hurled at others”

While it is clear that Pope Francis’ words are informed by concern for Orthodoxy, he is seeking to refocus the teaching and work of the Church in the lights of Orthopraxy.

Within the Protestant Reformed tradition, John Hick drew attention to the consequences of focusing on Orthodoxy in such doctrines as the Incarnation or Sin and Salvation. He argued that Religious traditions have much in common and can work together to the benefit of humanity. Inter-faith dialogue opens the way for reconciliation and peace-building in communities from India to Indonesia, from South Africa to South Armagh. The obstacle to meaningful dialogue lies in peoples’ attachment to doctrines like the Incarnation or Original Sin which either cannot be understood literally or are frankly incompatible with broader principles which all religions can agree on such as love and justice. For Hick, Orthopraxy is more important than Orthodoxy. It is not that Orthodoxy has no importance, just that what we accept as Orthodox doctrines on the strength of history, tradition and authority should be open to revision in the light of experience. When Orthodox doctrines conflict with reason and science and undermine the pursuit of the real and what is true, when they cause confusion and lead to disillusionment with faith and when they lead to division, conflict and injustice, then it is right that Orthodox doctrines should be reconsidered and even revised. Hick proposed that the Incarnation should be understood as a powerful metaphor rather than as a literal fact, that the Christian beliefs in Original Sin and Exclusivism should be revised to allow for non-Christians to be saved by a just God. In his arguments for Philosophical Pluralism Hick did not suggest that Christians should ignore Orthodoxy, just that it should be informed by Orthopraxy. Nevertheless, his ideas led to deep and lasting controversy, particularly following the publication of The Myth of God Incarnate in 1977. Hick was put on trial for heresy twice as leading Christians lined up to condemn the idea that Christianity should be guided by humanitarian love, should not be quick to judge and should be humble. The affair serves as an illustration of why Orthodoxy cannot be allowed to dominate and exclude considerations of Orthopraxy.

It is fair to say, therefore, that both Orthopraxy and Orthodoxy are important and not fair to say that Orthopraxy should override considerations of Orthodoxy altogether.

Despite this, some Liberation Theologians argue that Orthopraxy is more important than Orthodoxy when Orthodoxy means conforming to Church teachings which prevent good works because of points of doctrine or which intend to stifle Orthopraxy for political reasons.  For example, Leonardo Boff argues that the Papacy changed direction away from that set by Vatican II under Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI, largely because of pressure from the Americans, who found the activities of Liberation Theologians threatened their policy of creating dependency in South American states.  The Americans found both Liberation Theologians’ use of Marxist terminology and the willingness of some Priests to get involved in the Political struggle for workers’ rights and policies which would give the Poor a Preferential Option in a practical sense, incendiary and not conducive to the success of their ongoing war against Communism in Catholic countries such as South America.  It is true that CELAM was set up as a result of Pope Paul VI’s initiative and directed by Vatican II’s call for holiness.  It is also true that the language of Gaudiem et Spes (1965) and of Populorum Progressio (1967) is distinctively Marxist in flavor.  Gaudiem et Spes seems to accept a Historical Materialist account of history:

“the human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one. In consequence there has arisen a new series of problems, a series as numerous as can be, calling for efforts of analysis and synthesis.”

Populorum Progressio rejects:

“oppressive political structures resulting from the abuse of ownership or the improper exercise of power, from the exploitation of the worker or unjust transactions.”

The attempt to exert control over CELAM through the Puebla conference in 1979 did indeed coincide with the beginning of Pope John Paul II’s papacy and it is easy to see how his opening speech to the conference could have been interpreted as a radical change in direction by the Liberation Theologians – including Gutierrez – who were barred from attending CELAM for the first time.  The Papal condemnations of Liberation Theology, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1984 and again in 1986 seemed to reverse the focus on Social Justice that came out of Vatican II.  In claiming that…

“Liberation is first and foremost liberation from the radical slavery of sin… Faced with the urgency of certain problems, some are tempted to emphasize, unilaterally, the liberation from servitude of an earthly and temporal kind…”

there seems little doubt that Pope John Paul II (and Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI) were trying to assert the importance of Orthodoxy over Orthopraxy, and seemingly the importance of faith over works.  While they could legitimately claim support from St Paul and St Augustine for this argument, there is undeniable tension between the focus on spiritual liberation rather than practical liberation and the practical focus of Jesus, found in the Gospels and described above.  For this reason and because it does not seem to match the teaching found in documents emanating from Vatican II under John VI (or the more recent documents emanating from the Papacy of Francis I) the Orthodox position defined by Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI, with its inward-looking focus on spiritual salvation rather than practical liberation, cannot be taken as reflective of Christian Orthodoxy as a whole.  There is no denying that Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels, along with Gaudiem et Spes, Populorum Progressio and recent encyclicals like Laudato Si and Amoris Laeticia support a focus on Orthopraxy, right action and providing a preferential option for the poor in a practical sense.  Pope Francis beatified Oscar Romero and invited Gustavo Gutierrez to be the keynote speaker at a Vatican conference to underline this point.

In conclusion, there is no way that Christian Orthodoxy can be defined in terms of ignoring the practical needs of the poor and focusing on unity and political expediency over agape and what is right.  To define Christian Orthodoxy in these terms is to take the same path as the Papacy did during WWII in appeasing the Nazis.  While it is fair to criticize some Liberation Theologians for embracing Marxism too “uncritically“, being a Christian cannot and should not be apolitical.  While Jesus avoided confrontation with Rome over paying taxes, saying “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but give to God what belongs to God” (Mark 12:17), he also cleansed the Temple in a fearless political protest against the corruption of the Jewish authorities and showed no hesitation in either healing on the Sabbath or in helping Gentiles, in both cases putting himself on the wrong side of religious law in the interests of love and attending to the practical needs of people.  Further, Marx’ critique of institutional religion as peddling the “opium of the masses” was fair, given the practices of the Church during the 19th Century.  The fact that Marx and most Marxists were atheists and critics of religion does not detract from the truth of their analysis of Capitalism or the legitimacy of Christians learning from their work to further Christ’s mission.   While some of those influenced by Liberation Theology have undoubtedly gone too far in their pursuit of Orthopraxy, in effect excluding the hermeneutical mediation (reflection on the Bible and Christian doctrine in the light of the situation faced by the poor) from their second act praxis, it is not fair to reject Liberation Theology as a whole for its focus on Orthopraxy.  Seen in context, the focus on Orthopraxy that Gutierrez and Boff argued for offered necessary balance and was designed to pull Christians back from the Papal retreat into inward-looking politically expedient Orthodoxy during the 1980s and 1990s.  In the end, both Orthopraxy and Orthodoxy – in the sense of a focus on the Bible and central Christian principles – are important; they should exist in a dialectical relationship at the heart of all Christian Praxis and it is wrong to prioritize either one to the exclusion of the other.

 

 

 

 

Can God act in the world? [40]

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

This question is of huge significance for religious faith and goes to the heart of issues arising from the concept of God. If God can act in the world, this implies that He is in time, which raises questions about his perfection because acting in time suggests that God depends on the passage of time to frame His action. Further, if God can act in time and chooses not to, then can He be all good… and if God can and does act in time, can He justly hold people responsible for moral evil? On the other hand, if God cannot act in the world (either because He is outside time or because he is limited in His powers, by His own nature or by his decision to allow human free-will) then can God be understood to be omnipotent? Also, can a God who cannot act in time be the God of the Bible or the object of Christian worship? How could an inactive God answer prayers, be addressed by Jesus as “Abba”, care if people attend Church-services or be understood to work miracles and Religious Experiences? It seems that either answer to this question will cause problems for believers. Further, there is no way to know the answer definitively. Nevertheless, the claim that God cannot act directly in the world is easier to sustain philosophically than the claim that God can act in the world as this claim would usually be understood.

The rational arguments for God’s existence from observation – the cosmological and teleological arguments – point to a God who is eternal in the sense of being outside the space-time universe we inhabit. As St Thomas Aquinas argued, a God who is the Prime Mover, uncaused cause and necessary sustaining cause of the universe is “neither something nor nothing.” The God of Classical Theism is not a person or object and has no physical presence within space and time, yet God is the necessary creator and effects everything. If God is timeless and space-less, then God must be wholly simple and unchanging. This supports the idea that God is perfect and all-good in the sense that He must be 100% whatever it is to be God and containing no evil (understood as potential, falling short). If God is timeless and space-less, God cannot be other than He is. Yet if God is the wholly simple, timeless being that Aquinas’ arguments suggest and support, there are natural questions about His ability to act. Action implies time – a time before the action, a time during it and a time after it. Action might also imply some choice to act or not to act, or to act in different ways. Clearly, if God is timeless and unchanging, the degree to which “action” is compatible with the concept of God, God’s nature, is unclear. St Thomas Aquinas argued that the word “action”, when applied to God can only be understood analogically. What it means for God to act is not the same as what it means for a person to act. Certainly when a person acts, it implies time and choice, but these cannot be part of God’s action because they are excluded by God’s necessarily timeless, wholly simple nature. For Aquinas, God’s timeless action can be understood to mean only that God is the original cause of everything in the universe. As in the Cosmological Argument, God is the Prime Mover, the uncaused cause and the necessary sustainer of the universe and everything in it. For Aquinas, God can act in the world only by causing it through his single, simple creative act, and not by responding to events as they happen in time. Aquinas’ understanding of God’s action being timeless and limited to a single, simple creative act is consistent with his definition of God as eternal and wholly simple. This God, in turn, is relatively well-supported by rational arguments, in a way that an everlasting God-in-time – who might more reasonably be said to act in time – is not. It follows that strictly limiting God’s action in the world to his general providence in creation is easier to sustain philosophically than a claim that God can act in the world.

In addition, Aquinas argued that God can – and as the Scriptures reveal, did – create beings who can act directly in the world on God’s behalf. Firstly, God created angels, who repeatedly deliver God’s message to Prophets. In addition, God ordained that Saints can also work miracles and later respond to petitionary prayers. Further, as is affirmed in the Nicene Creed, Christians uphold that God became incarnate in the Virgin Mary and was made man. The Incarnation was part of God’s general creative action but made it possible for God to act very directly in the world for a time by self-limiting. John Macquarrie and later Peter Vardy argue that God’s omnipotence must include His ability to enter time and act in the world, even though that appears to compromise God’s perfection by making him and his actions depend on the passage of time. Remember, an eternal, timeless God created all natural laws, including the laws of logic. Our understanding of natural laws and logic depends on partial, subjective experience and can never be complete or 100% certain. It is, therefore, possible that God’s single, simple creative act included some occurrences “not commonly seen in nature” which appear to break the laws of nature and logic to us, but which are within these laws when seen from God’s point of view. One such unusual occurrence could have been the Incarnation, where God took temporary human form to act in the world, making sure to limit His own powers so that they did not cause too much disruption to the usual operation of nature and logic. Other such occurrences could include miracles, religious experiences and even instances of extreme beauty, all of which could have been built-in to God’s single, creative act with the intention that these would point people back towards the existence of God. In this way, maintaining a belief that God acts in the world only through general providence and not directly by “breaking” the laws of nature or logic, is consistent both with Christian precepts and with the concept of God as eternal and wholly simple. St Thomas Aquinas was careful NOT to argue (as Hume later did) that a miracle must breaks the rules of nature by particular volition of the deity. Not only did Hume’s definition of miracles block the possibility that any event could legitimately be called a miracle – because nobody has certain knowledge of the laws of nature and nobody can know of or observe God’s particular volition – but it also pushes believers to choose between believing that the existence of God is supported by the existence of natural laws and believing that God can act in the world. Aquinas’ definition allows for extremely uncommon events to be called miracles and does not demand that they result from a special act of God. Through Aquinas’ argument God can “act in the world” without responding to events in time or doing anything other than the simple, single original act of creation, so God can both be eternal and wholly simple – and so well supported by arguments – and be the object of Christian faith – able to act in the world. Aquinas showed that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It follows, therefore, that Aquinas’ position in limiting God’s direct actions to those ordained as part of the single, simple, creative act is easier to sustain philosophically than the claim that God acts directly in the world in a more spontaneous and responsive way.

Of course, Aquinas’ understanding of God as wholly-simple and eternal, limited to timeless action, is not without problems. As Nelson Pike observed, the Bible refers to God in language which is “unavoidably tensed”, so claiming that God cannot act in the world makes it impossible to use the Bible as evidence for his existence and nature and undermines using the Bible as the basis for other aspects of Religious faith and practice. Further, if God is eternally wholly simple and his actions – including the Incarnation, miracles and religious experiences – are limited to the single, simple act of creation, then the course of the world and of human lives seems determined and there can be little room for free will. Aquinas recognised this and sought other explanations for the existence of suffering than that it resulted from free human actions. He argued that evil is only a lack of goodness and that creation benefits from it, in the way that “the silent pause adds sweetness to the chant.” In addition, Aquinas saw no necessary contradiction between God’s goodness and his creating a world that included suffering, because God’s goodness is not moral goodness but only that goodness compatible with His wholly simple nature, the goodness that comes from God being eternally simple and unchanging, being 100% whatever it is to be God and not falling short in any way, and from God being the source of all good things in the universe, remembering that as evil is a lack and not a substance, a function of how we experience God’s creation through time and space and not a property necessary to the universe as seen from God’s timeless perspective, then God cannot reasonably be held to be the source of it. Nevertheless, Aquinas’ explanation of evil and suffering and the lack of room for genuine human freedom within his philosophical system is problematic. It leaves God choosing to send miracles and religious experiences to affect some people and situations but not others and God sending some people to hell for choices that were largely determined. Aquinas’ understanding of God’s goodness is a very long way from the understanding held by most Christians, so although his position might be easier to sustain philosophically than the position that God is everlasting in time and more directly active in the world, it is far from being the easiest position to sustain theologically, let alone pastorally. The sheer length of the Summa Theologica, which tries to reconcile Aquinas’ concept of God with the precepts of Christian Theology, is a good demonstration of this.

Nevertheless, even if God is not seen to be timeless and unchanging, but is understood to be everlasting in time in the way that Theistic Personalists such as Richard Swinburne have argued, there could be problems with claiming that God can act in the world.

Firstly, in the absence of sufficient rational arguments for the existence of an everlasting God in time, a lot depends on taking the Bible as evidence for both the existence and nature of an everlasting God. The Bible undeniably claims that God acts in the world but offers no clear or conclusive explanation of why God sometimes does not act and how God holds people eternally responsible for actions he could ultimately have prevented. Baruch Spinoza pointed out that if God CAN act, but CHOOSES NOT TO prevent the worst suffering, then it seems that God cannot be omnibenevolent. Surely it would be better for a Christian to believe that God is constrained and cannot act in the world than to believe that He chooses not to and consciously allowed the Holocaust to happen. Maurice Wiles, a leading Anglican Theologian, certainly thought so, along with many Protestant thinkers who have preferred to see God as limited in power than limited in goodness. Jurgen Moltmann is a classic example of this approach, arguing that God can act sometimes but cannot always do anything to stop suffering. Moltmann’s God expresses His perfect knowledge and love by suffering with people, although this raises fair questions about whether such a God, if also held to be the creator, would be worthy of worship. Would a teacher be praised for suffering along with her students even if she organised the trip down the mine which led to their suffering?

Secondly, if God CAN act and DOES act, then again the extent to which human beings are free and can justly be held responsible for moral evil must be in question. It is not a simple choice between Aquinas’ eternal God and determinism on one side and Augustine’s everlasting God and Free Will on the other; whether God is in time or outside it, it is impossible to reconcile God’s ability to act in the world – whether just through general providence or through direct interventions – with genuine human freedom and so with moral responsibility. St Augustine places God in time, if observing it from a great distance – as though from a mountaintop – and still struggles to explain how genuine human freedom is compatible with God’s absolute power and creative action and has to resort to calling how this works a mystery. Placing God in time and claiming that He can act directly in the world is incompatible with any idea of human free will or divine justice, so it remains easier to sustain Aquinas’ timeless God and very limited understanding of divine action.

Further, if God can act because he is in time and has the sort of knowledge that enables him to respond directly to events, then God’s detailed knowledge of events, even if God does not interfere in them, makes believing in human free will and the justice of human beings being held morally responsible difficult. Through the “Consolations of Philosophy” Book 5 Boethius attempted to dissolve the tension between God’s knowledge and human free will, suggesting that God’s knowledge of events is conditional on those events taking place, that God’s knowledge does not necessitate events happening as they do. However, suggesting that God is not only in time, but that his knowledge depends on events and thus changes continually is a long way from any idea of divine perfection or immutability. Is the object of Christian worship any more comfortably said to be contingent and ever-changing than He is said to be wholly simple and impassive? It seems that defining God as everlasting and placing Him in time fails to resolve either the philosophical or the theological problems raised with claiming that He acts in the world, so although Aquinas’ wholly simple eternal concept of God and limitation of God’s action to what can be considered timeless and part of His single, simple act of creation comes with significant theological problems, it is still easier to sustain than the claim that God is everlasting in time and able to act directly in the world.

In conclusion, the claim that God cannot act directly in the world is easier to sustain philosophically than the claim that God can act in the world, at least as this claim would usually be understood. Nevertheless, limiting God’s action to what is timeless and part of a single, simple, general act of creation is difficult to reconcile with the Bible and precepts of Christian faith as outlined in the Nicene Creed, let alone with apparent acts of special revelation like miracles and religious experiences. St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica is a masterful attempt at such a reconciliation and was rightly hailed as being every bit as good as a miracle at his beatification, however his explanation of how God can be both eternal timeless and have been Incarnate and Immanent through history remains contentious. Perhaps, in the end, Christians need to accept that both God’s nature and how God acts in the world must remain a mystery, however unsatisfactory this is for Philosophers of Religion.

 

 

“The arguments for the existence of God do nothing to support the God people actually worship” Critically evaluate this statement. [40]

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

It is fair to say that the arguments for the existence of God fail to prove the existence of God.  The ontological argument is the only one that sets out to deliver an a priori proof and as Immanuel Kant argued in his “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781) it is “so much labour and effort lost“.  It is equally fair to say that the inductive arguments for God’s existence, both Cosmological and Teleological, fail to demonstrate the existence of God conclusively.  Criticisms leveled at the arguments by David Hume, amongst many others, point out their several flaws and fallacies.  Nevertheless, to say that the arguments do nothing to support the God people worship is a big overstatement. [THESIS]

The ontological argument, for all it seems to rely on bad grammar by treating existence as a perfection and a predicate, remains a powerful thought-exercise for those who already believe.  For one example, Karl Barth – who utterly rejected Natural Theology – appreciated the spiritual depth of Anselm’s argument.  In “Faith Seeking Understanding” (1931), he suggested that Anselm was not trying to prove that God exists, but was rather meditating on how God exists.  For Barth “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” is a revealed name of God which contains something of God’s nature.  Reflecting on it and seeking deeper and deeper understanding is an essential faith-activity, which supports and enriches peoples’ relationship with the divine.  For another example, the mystic Thomas Merton was inspired by Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding” and exploration of how God necessarily exists as his starting point in opening his mind to insights about God from all religions [Faith Seeking Understanding: Theological Method in Thomas Merton’s inter-religious Dialogue by Ryan Scruggs, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 46:3 2011].  Both Barth and Merton used Anselm’s ontological argument to support their understanding of and enrich their faith in God, in their different ways.  It is wrong to say then that this argument for God’s existence does nothing to support the God that people worship. [REASON]

Cosmological arguments point to God as the Prime Mover, uncaused cause and Necessary sustainer of the universe.  For St. Thomas Aquinas, these arguments show a posteriori how God must be eternal in the sense of being outside time and space, which in turn distances God from creation and limits how He can be understood to know and intervene in what happens.  On one level, this suggests that the statement “the arguments for the existence of God do nothing to support the God people actually worship” is reasonable.  Omnipotence – in the sense of being able to work miracles – omniscience – in the sense of being able to respond to prayer – and benevolence – in the sense of understanding and having a personal relationship with worshipers – are all crucial to the Christian concept of God.  Aquinas’ God, although well-supported by the cosmological argument – is not obviously the God most Christians worship.  Nevertheless, Aquinas’ ways to God  only serve as a preamble to the substance of his argument in the Summa Theologica, which seeks to show why the necessary being supported by observational evidence must be the God Christians worship.  It is true that for Aquinas, the meaning of divine attributes like omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence has to be understood analogically and cannot be understood literally, univocally.  Yet he also maintains that there is real and positive meaning in claims such as “God is good”, which are central to Christian worship.  It is clear that Aquinas’ cosmological arguments establish the necessary existence of the God Christians worship, even if they do not by themselves explain how or why God must be as Christians worship Him. Therefore it is an overstatement to say that the arguments do nothing to support the God people worship.  [REASON]

Teleological arguments suggest a God who is more obviously involved in His creation than either ontological or cosmological arguments.  William Paley used the analogy of watch and watchmaker to describe the close relationship between creation and creator.  Even Aquinas’ fifth way suggests that God is the intelligence that directs inanimate things towards their ends (telos) “as an arrow is given flight by the archer.”  In “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” David Hume’s character Philo is right to point out that the observable evidence of creation includes things that seem poorly designed or even cruel and might more properly suggest an imperfect deity, or multiple deities, than the perfect God of Christian worship because in practice, most Christians are resigned to worshipping a God who at least allows evil and suffering, albeit for a morally sufficient reason.  For example, John Hick argued that God created human beings in His own image, with only the potential to grow into His likeness after passing through the “vale of soul-making” that is human life.  In “Evil and the God of Love” (1966) he argued that belief in a God who allows people to suffer for the spiritual benefit that they (or other people) may gain from that experience is compatible with Christian faith and worship.  After all, in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus called out to “Abba, Father…” asking that “this cup of suffering” be taken away by God’s will.  God did not act to prevent his suffering, even when Jesus called out “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, which means “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)  Christians do not worship a God who doesn’t know about or understand suffering and nor do they worship a God who even tried to create a world with no potential for horror… he placed the tree in the garden after all.  It follows that teleological arguments support the God Christians actually worship, “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” far more than they support the perfect “God of the philosophers”, to use Blaise Pascal’s distinction.  [REASON]

Pushing this line of reasoning might give more credence to the claim that “the arguments for the existence of God do nothing to support the God people actually worship.”  Certainly, ontological and cosmological arguments – if they are sound and cogent respectively – support the existence of a perfect God.  Anselm defined God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of,” Descartes defined God more straightforwardly as “Supreme Perfection” and Plantinga similarly defined God as a “maximally great being.”  Aquinas’ cosmological arguments support a God who is the Prime Mover, uncaused causer and de re necessary being sustaining the universe.  By definition, such a God is 100% actual and has no potential, is outside time and space and cannot change.  Aquinas successfully showed that this God must be all-good.  In the Aristotelian sense defining goodness in terms of fulfilling potential and evil in terms of falling short, a God whose nature is to unchangingly be 100% actual cannot be other than all-good.  Further, Aquinas successfully showed that this God must be all-powerful and all knowing in the sense of being the primary cause of everything that exists, what is responsible for things being as they are and no other way.  Nevertheless, Christians do not worship a God who is perfect in this abstract way.  The Bible casts God as the creator of everything, but a creator who has a defined purpose for each aspect of his creation (Genesis 1:27-31) and who can and does interact with and respond to people both in Eden (Genesis 2-3) and subsequently throughout Biblical History.  In Genesis God appears to Abraham – albeit in a mysterious way – then Jacob wrestles with God, mistaking him for a man.  In the New Testament God speaks to acknowledge Jesus as His son, Jesus calls God Abba (literally Daddy) and claims “the father and I are one” (John 10:30) before dying horribly on the cross.  It is difficult to claim that the God Christians worship is the abstract if all-powerful, all-good God supported by ontological and cosmological arguments.  [DISAGREE]  Nevertheless, the Nicene Creed affirms that the Christian God is the perfect God of the philosophers as well as being the God of Biblical history.  God is the creator both of what is “seen and unseen”, Jesus’ incarnation is part of the original creation, willed from the beginning of time rather than being a response to circumstance.  God speaks but through the prophets, acts but through the agency of the Holy Spirit.  It is fair to say that the Christian God, the God Christians actually worship, is paradoxical and mysterious but it is not fair to say that the God supported by the arguments is not the God people actually worship.  [EVALUATION]

In conclusion,  to say that the arguments do nothing to support the God people worship is a big overstatement. [THESIS] While it is true that the ontological argument and the cosmological argument point towards an abstract, perfect God which demands theological explanation to show as the God of Biblical history, it is unfair to say that the arguments do nothing to support the God people actually worship.  Certainly, as Karl Barth and Thomas Merton pointed out of the ontological argument, they are useful in enriching and sustaining faith by supporting deeper understanding of God’s nature.  Certainly, as Reformed Epistemologists like William Lane Craig have argued, cosmological arguments help believers to “defeat the defeaters” and show that faith – while not based on or dependent on arguments – is not irrational despite that.  In addition, as St Thomas Aquinas reasoned, a proper understanding of religious language shows that the attributes of the God supported by the arguments and the attributes of the God actually worshipped by Christians share meaning, even if that meaning is of a specific and limited type.  Finally, teleological arguments offer essential support for the God people actually worship, showing His creative care and causing people to reflect on the existence of evil and suffering in a way that is essential to Christian worship.  Without appreciating the reality of suffering – and rational reflection on God as designing intelligence encourages this – Christians could not understand the importance of the atonement or stake their lives on the hope for salvation, and in this case there would be little point in worship.  [Significance]

 

 

To what extent does Hume successfully argue that observation does NOT prove the existence of God? [40]

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David Hume criticized all the classical arguments for God’s existence through his book “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion“, which was published after his death in 1776.  The Dialogues take place between four characters, with the interaction between Demea, a deist, Cleanthes, a theist and Philo, a sceptic, being the focus.  Most scholars see Philo as a vehicle for Hume’s own views and arguments and because of this, A Level textbooks list simplified versions of Philo’s criticisms of the classical Cosmological and Teleological arguments from the Dialogues and credit them to Hume.  It is probably fair to say that if the textbook was the sum total of one’s reading it would be easy to conclude that Hume was unsuccessful in arguing that observation does not prove the existence of God, in every case other than the criticism that the arguments do not support belief in all the attributes of the Christian God, which Christians accept in any case.  Few believers suggest that arguments for God’s existence are sufficient support for Christian faith in themselves. For example, when the textbook suggests that Hume asks “and what caused God” in response to Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument, it would be natural to criticize Hume for missing the more subtle point that Aquinas is making about God’s necessary existence.  Nevertheless, if one reads “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” it becomes clear that the criticisms Hume places in the mouth of Philo are subtle and support the conclusion that Hume was indeed successful in arguing that observation does not prove the existence of God.

In Part VIII of the Dialogues, against a very basic form of the Cosmological Argument for a “voluntary agent or first mover” Philo points out that nobody can know whether all things in the universe have a cause, that it is fallacious to make the leap from all things in the universe being caused to proposing that the universe itself has a cause.  He points out that for all we know some things in the universe could exist or happen without a cause… why not some natural process rather than a supernatural, divine agent deciding to create.  He argues in favour of the Epicurean Hypothesis, the idea that the universe could be actually infinite, which was the commonly accepted scientific world-view at the time, rooted in Aristotle.

“But this presupposes, said Demea, that matter can come to move without any voluntary agent or first mover.  And where’s the difficulty in that? replied Philo“

Superficially, Philo’s criticisms appear ill-founded.  William Lane Craig and other Christian apologists argue that an actual infinity of causes is impossible and suggest that Big Bang theory supports them in the need for an absolute beginning for the universe as a whole and so in the need for an uncaused cause.  However in fact, modern Physics supports Philo’s reasoning.  Although it is true that the standard model suggests that time and space had a beginning – the Big Bang – no Cosmologist today sees the Big Bang as the absolute beginning in the sense of needing a divine cause to explain it.  Stephen Hawking responded to a question about whether the universe needed a cause by saying that the question makes no sense to ask.  True, causation applies within time and space, but within the singularity there is no sense in which it could apply.  Cause and effect imply time and space; without either it makes no sense to think in terms of causation.  Further, research confirms the hypothesis that (at least at the Planck scale) things in the universe exist and happen without a cause and it is possible that the natural action of sub-atomic particles could account for the Big Bang.  Whatever the apologists claim, it seems that modern science supports Hume’s criticism of the attempt to prove God from observation and does not support the existence of God as the necessary uncaused cause.

In addition, through parts 8 and 9 of the Dialogues Philo makes the important point that…

“I won’t even allow any one part to justify conclusions about another part”

This is a point that builds on one he made in relation to the teleological argument in Part II

“can it be proper to argue from parts to the whole? Doesn’t the great disproportion between part and whole bar all comparison and inference?”

While superficially flippant, Philo’s point is actually subtle and far-reaching and extends beyond the point that the arguments from observation depend on the Fallacy of Composition.  Although it what is true of parts is not necessarily true of the whole, it still could be so the most damage that the classic textbook criticism of the Cosmological Argument could do is to point out that the conclusion needs more support, not that the argument has no merit.  In fact, Philo’s criticism of the Cosmological Argument is more damaging than the technical point about relying on the Fallacy of Composition.  He points out that the argument makes the massive assumption that the part of the universe we can observe is a fair sample, that the whole universe behaves as this part behaves, and that the way we see the universe is the way it really is.  The Cosmological Principle was first spelt out by Isaac Newton and Astronomer William Keel states that it…

“amounts to the strongly philosophical statement that the part of the universe which we can see is a fair sample, and that the same physical laws apply throughout. In essence, this in a sense says that the universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists” [The Road to Galaxy Formation, 2006]

Following the discovery of Quantum Physics, science has had to abandon the Newtonian paradigm to the extent that today, the “Cosmological Principle”, the very principles of homogeneity and isotropy, are being questioned – even though that leads to the unwelcome conclusion that science is extremely limited in what it can claim to know about the universe.  Philosopher Karl Popper criticized the Cosmological Principle on the grounds that it makes

“our lack of knowledge a principle of knowing something”

concluding that

“the “cosmological principles” were, I fear, dogmas that should not have been proposed”

and since then some Physicists have come to similar conclusions, including Steven Weinberg.  Scientists might be as reluctant to accept the force of Philo’s argument as believers, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that there is no way to know that the way we perceive causation is actually what is happening or that the principle of causation that appears to apply here also applies everywhere in the universe, let alone to the universe as a whole.  Certainly, what is true of parts of the universe is not necessarily true of the whole of the universe – but further, it is not possible to say what is true of parts of the universe and let alone what might be true of the whole.  This argument of Philo’s alone shows that attempting to prove God from observation is impossible.

Further, also in Part 9 of the Dialogues, Philo attacks a version of the Cosmological Argument presented by Demea that echoes Jeremiah Clarke’s a priori argument. While not strictly an argument from observation, this version of the cosmological argument deduces God’s necessary existence and attributes from the contingent nature of other existences.  Nevertheless, unless one is an idealist, understanding what it means for other things to exist must depend on observation, so it is worth considering Hume’s refutation of this version of the argument here.  Although in 1996 Joseph K Campbell successfully argued that Philo fails to defeat this version of the Cosmological Argument – leaving open the possibility that God could be the necessary sustaining-cause of the universe – Philo’s point in asking why the cause of the universe would have to be intelligible renders Campbell’s argument in support of proving God from observation only a technical victory.  While it is true that there might be the necessary sustaining-cause of the universe, it is also true (as Philo contends) that it is not meaningful to claim that this sustaining cause has the attributes of the Christian God.  Jeremiah Clarke faced the same difficulties as Aquinas in trying to marry the attributes of a necessary being with those of the object of Christian faith.  Neither thinker manages to do more than imply that Christian faith is misplaced, because there is no way that the being indicated by contingent existence could create or act in the way that the God of Abraham and Isaac creates and acts, let alone provide hope for salvation and/or personal survival beyond death.  Nobody seriously claims that the Higgs Boson is omnipotent, let alone omniscient or omnibenevolent.  Nobody worships quarks.  Even if God might be whatever sustains the universe in being, there is no way to support religion on that basis.  Further, there is now a sensible natural explanation for the universe which obviates the need to call the necessary sustaining cause of the universe “God” and so muddy the waters of Cosmology with Theological assumptions and associations.  On this point also, despite Campbell’s work, Hume’s argument against proving God from observation has been vindicated.

Philo provides numerous other criticisms of the arguments from observation.  For example, through Parts II-V of the Dialogues, Philo criticizes versions of the Teleological Argument presented by Cleanthes, pointing out that the analogies Cleanthes employs are weak, that there is no way to establish that everything in the universe which appears to have order and purpose really has, and that (because like effects prove like causes) the universe suggests a cause or designer who is far from perfect, not necessarily single and either way a long way from being the God of the Christian religion.

“what shadow of an argument, continued Philo, can you produce, from your hypothesis, to prove that God is one being? A great many men join together to build a house or ship, to found and develop a city, to create a commonwealth” … “For all he knows, the world is very faulty and imperfect by certain higher standards… only the first rough attempt of some infant god, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his poor performance… the work of some dependent, inferior god, whose superiors hold it up for ridicule… produced by some god in his old age and near-senility, and ever since his death the world has continued without further guidance, activated by the first shove he gave to it and the active force that he built into it.” (Part V)

As JCA Gaskin has argued, Philo’s individual criticisms are compelling, highlighting one by one the flaws and leaps in reasoning in two distinct versions of the teleological argument.  They are far more serious than Philo’s flippant tone might suggest, as they demonstrate how far short of proving the existence of the Christian God classical arguments fall and how much believers must depend on revelations and authority. 

In addition, the broader criticism implicit in Philo’s line of argument is conclusive; despite the multi-layered theodicies of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, and the less complete but more pastorally satisfying Irenaean theodicy proposed by John Hick, there has as yet been no satisfactory explanation of why a perfect creator would create an imperfect world.  As JL Mackie observed in his essay “Evil and Omnipotence” (1955), St Augustine’s Free Will Defence fails to explain why an omnipotent God could not create free beings who always choose to do what is right.  Further, St Thomas Aquinas’ approach to redefining evil as a lack of good and God’s attributes as meaning that He can do only what is actually possible and compatible with His wholly simple nature fails to do justice to the reality of peoples’ faith.  The problem of evil and suffering remains the most persuasive objection to attempts to argue to the God of Christianity from observation.

In conclusion, Hume’s arguments – as proposed through the character Philo – successfully show that attempts to prove God from observation all fail.  The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion present a persuasive case against belief in any sort of God which goes well beyond the petty point-scoring that the genre and style of the piece suggests.  Nevertheless, while extremely persuasive, Philo’s line of argument is a skeptical one and there significant implications flow from accepting it.  Philo casts doubt not just on belief in God, but also on the human ability to know that what we observe is really what we observe and on the human ability to deduce natural laws of any kind on the basis of observation.  By this argument, people wouldn’t just have to drop their belief in God but also their belief in science, something which few people are willing to do.  This, perhaps, is the best objection to Philo’s arguments against the attempt to prove God from observation, that they surely and persuasively lead people into a pit of despair.  However, it is not reasonable to conclude from this that the arguments from observation prove God or that Hume’s criticisms, as presented through Philo, are less than successful.

The best approach to understanding Religious Language is through the Cataphatic Way. [40]

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The word “cataphatic” comes from the Greek “kataphasis” meaning affirmation.  To take the Cataphatic Way is to affirm things positively of God and to assume a univocal understanding of words and claims.  By this approach, if somebody says “God is good”, they mean much the same as if they said “St Anselm is good”.  The Cataphatic Way is sometimes called the Via Positiva; it uses language confidently and positively to describe God, as a painter might use paints confidently and positively to represent what is in front of them.

There is no doubt that the Cataphatic Way supports people in understanding what is said about God.  Insofar as people understand what is said generally, people can understand what is said about God through the Cataphatic Way.  For those believers and theologians working with an everlasting, personal model of God supported by religious experience and/or a priori faith in the revealed status of the Bible – arguably mostly for Protestants – the Cataphatic Way is the natural and therefore the best way to understand religious language.  In the same way as I might affirm things about any other thing that I experience or read about, I can affirm things about God.  Nevertheless, this model of God is philosophically unsatisfying.

  • Firstly, many believers have no personal experience of God to support their affirmations, and those who do often suggest that their experience was ineffable (James) and resisted normal description in any case.  It is difficult to confirm religious experiences as genuine, so there is no quality control when it comes to things affirmed of God on the basis of them.
  • Secondly, Biblical criticism makes believing in the revealed status of the whole Bible very difficult, both because it seems to have been compiled by multiple authors and editors over a very long period of time – before even considering the late and politically influenced development of the Canon – and because it seems to reflect several different models of God rather than one unified model.  The God of Genesis 2-3 walks in the Garden of Eden and has to look for Adam and Eve, whereas the God of Job 38 – who asks “where were you when I set the foundations of the earth” – seems beyond such anthropomorphic descriptions.

It seems fair to conclude that saying that the Cataphatic Way is the best way to understand Religious Language may be limited to Theistic Personalists.  It might be the best way of understanding what somebody already knows about God and/or religion on some other basis, but it might not be the best way of coming to understand something new about God and/or religion.

Certainly, for believers and theologians who are Classical Theists and believe in an eternal, timeless God, the Cataphatic Way raises questions about the meaning of what is said, whether what is said and understood about God refers credibly to actual attributes of God and whether a theologian taking the Cataphatic Way can mean what they say and so be understood.  For many Roman Catholics, but also for others whose faith relates to if not depends on reason, God cannot be a thing that we can experience and observe in any normal way.  Religious experiences, if any are genuine, are best understood to be non-sensuous (Stace) and noumenal (James), an experience of ultimate reality that goes well beyond normal sensory experience and normal description.  It is certainly fair to suggest that the Cataphatic theologian is not like a painter representing a normal subject on canvas; what is affirmed of God is much further removed from what it could mean than the 2D canvas is removed from the 3D subject.  For most theologians, God’s nature cannot properly or fully be conceived or understood.  As God said to Moses in Exodus 3 “I am what I am” and as He said through the Prophet Isaiah

“my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways.” Isaiah 55:8-9

When the cataphatic theologian affirms attributes of God univocally they seem to be going beyond possible experience and beyond what the human mind can possibly comprehend.  In this way, using language confidently and univocally to describe God seems like trying to represent a singularity in paint… it wouldn’t do to rely on the artists’ impression because in many ways the nature of what is being represented is beyond and even the opposite to the medium being used.  Because it is highly likely to lead to misunderstandings about God, it seems that the Cataphatic Way is not the best way to understand Religious Language.

Further, as Pseudo-Dionysus argued, affirming things positively of God seems to limit Him.  To say that God is good in the same way as Anselm is good implies that God’s goodness is changeable, moral, relative to other things, because goodness when referring to things in this world implies such conditions and limitations.  For Classical Theists, God’s nature cannot be understood in the way that we understand other things because God is necessarily unlimited, timelessly perfect.  Words cannot, therefore, be applied univocally to God and the Cataphatic Way fails to support any true understanding of God’s actual nature and attributes.  Because of this, in the 11th Century Moses Maimonides argued that the only credible approach to religious language was the very reverse of the cataphatic way, the apophatic way.  For Maimonides, human words refer to human experience and are inescapably tied to the spatio-temporal framework that encompasses human experience.  Applying human words to God can only lead to misunderstanding.  The changeable, contingent nature of things in the world which leads people to recognize God’s necessary existence and to understand that whatever we can experience, understand and say then God is not that.  For Maimonides, this leaves open the possibility of using language in a negative sense to leave an impression of what God is.  Like a sculptor chipping away what is unnecessary and leaving an impression of what they are trying to represent, Apophatic theology takes away what it is not possible to affirm of God.  For example, God cannot be evil, because to be evil is to fall short, something which a changeless, timeless, perfect God cannot do.  For another example, God cannot swim because to swim requires a body to move through water from position a to position b.  God is changeless, timeless and perfect, which precludes his acting or moving in time and space in any way, aquatic or otherwise.    For some Classical Theists, it is the Apophatic Way, not the Cataphatic Way, that is the best way to understand religious language.

Nevertheless, scholars such as St Anselm rejected this approach, arguing that God gave being to this world as it is, so it is reasonable to affirm of God attributes of the being He created.  In the Monologion St Anselm argued that we are able to understand the world through concepts that exist in our mind because our mind comprehends God as their ultimate form.  We judge things to be unjust, more or less just… and this suggests that we have something against which to measure justice in our minds.  God is that against which we grade perfections in other things that we encounter in the world that God created.  God is not a thing in the world, but God created those things and we understand their goodness, greatness, perfection in relation to God.  In a way, Anselm’s philosophy relates back to Plato’s.  For Anselm, the world of the forms – the metaphysical concepts of justice, beauty, truth – are more real than the partial, contingent world we experience through the senses.  For Anselm, human beings understand what they experience through the senses through the concepts that already exist in the mind.  Words are just signs, attached to concepts that are hard-wired into reason by God, our creator, so it follows that these signs can be traced back to and applied to God.  Anselm safeguards against the possibility that people affirm just anything of God by arguing that signs are in a sense controlled by what it is that they point towards, so it is not possible to say something about God which is not consistent with His nature.  Given that only “the fool says in his heart that there is no God” (Psalm 14:1, Proslogion 2) we all have the concept of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” in our minds (in intellectu) and would understand the impossibility of affirming attributes that are not consistent with God’s supremely perfect nature.  As Marcia Colish suggests, Anselm sees language like a mirror reflecting some of the being of God very precisely, but only when it is directed correctly.

Clearly, Anselm’s Cataphatic approach is much more sophisticated than the seemingly naive univocicity of believers who affirm things of God such as “God is so pleased to see you here this evening!”  Nevertheless, it assumes a world-view which is very much in the minority in the modern world.  Most people, and most Philosophers, tend towards the Aristotelian model of concepts being built out of experiences, which are primary, rather than experiences being understood through concepts which precede them as in the Platonic way. Although neuroscientists are now gathering in support of Chomsky’s nativist approach to language acquisition, which seems to support Plato’s world-view, the dominant framework remains empiricism and the idea that human beings start as tabula rasa (as Locke put it) and that concepts and reason itself is constructed out of experience and socialization.  In addition, Anselm’s argument makes the assumption that human beings have an idea of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” in intellectu, something which St Thomas Aquinas rejected.  Before moving on to his famous five ways, Aquinas dismissed the possibility of proving God’s existence a priori, as in Anselm’s Ontological Argument.  He wrote

“because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature — namely, by effects.” Summa Theologica 1, 2, 1

He continued, arguing that “univocal predication is impossible between God and creatures...” Summa Theologica 1, 13, 5 because the cause and effect relationship is too slight to support a single meaning for what is affirmed of the two.  For Aquinas, what can be affirmed of God and in what sense needs to be even more strictly controlled than Anselm suggests, to prevent the imprecision in the use of religious language that attends on Cataphatic theology and subsequent misunderstandings.  Aquinas was persuaded by Maimonides arguments for apophatic theology, saying

“The reason why God… is said to be above being named, is because His essence is above all that we understand about God, and signify in word… Because we know and name God from creatures, the names we attribute to God signify what belongs to material creatures… these kinds of names fail to express His mode of being, forasmuch as our intellect does not know Him in this life as He is.” Summa Theologica 1, 13, 1

For Aquinas, the most that can be affirmed of God is analogous, affirmed in a strictly limited “timeless” sense.  As John Milbank explains, words have primary and secondary usages which are connected but not the same.  A person is healthy in a primary sense and a yoghurt in a secondary sense… what it means for the two to be healthy is different but still linked.  Similarly, the primary sense of words like “good” belongs to God and only the secondary sense to things in this world.  The meaning of attributes affirmed of God is not to be understood univocally, although there is still some meaning.  For Aquinas, the Cataphatic way is not the best way to understand Religious Language because it depends on the flawed claim to know or understanding the nature of God and because it conflates the two distinct meanings of attributes affirmed of God into one misleading claim.  While Aquinas’ argument is compelling, it leaves religious believers with a very limited set of things that they can say about God which makes it difficult to hold on to the spirit of doctrines, if not the letter.   Analogy may be a philosophically better way to understand religious language than the Cataphatic way, but it is not in practice much more helpful to religion than the apophatic way.

In conclusion, religion demands a different approach to language, one which is neither cataphatic nor apophatic, nor yet as abstract and technical as analogy.  The Cataphatic Way, for all the possibilities that it seems to offer in terms of making religious language understandable, fails to support any true understanding of God’s actual nature and attributes and actually symbol offers a better balance between the need for religious people to affirm their beliefs about God and the need for theologians and philosophers to conduct quality control by testing the possible meaning of those affirmations.  Symbol has the advantage of requiring people to learn a new religious language rather than seeking to apply ordinary words positively, negatively or with the use of implied or stated qualifiers (Ramsey).  Symbolic language draws attention to its difference and its specific relation to theology and in both cases, what is affirmed of God invites discussion and interpretation and discourages people from taking things on face value.  Symbolic language has clear roots in the Bible and in how believers have sought to express their religious experiences, but it resists facile, superficial interpretations and the misunderstandings about the nature of God that attend upon Cataphatic univocicity.  As Tillich suggests, the symbol starts to participate in the meaning it refers to, so that in using it words become more than just pointers to meanings beyond themselves.  God becomes present in the use of symbols; symbols acknowledge the need to draw on as many means of communication as possible, indirect as well as direct, when trying to express ultimate reality.  As Randall argues, symbols also invite a response and so acknowledge that what people are doing when they affirm God’s attributes is not just inert description.  Religious language does not just describe a state of affairs more or less accurately, it calls people to action.  In these several ways symbol and not the Cataphatic way is the best way to understand religious language.

 

 

“Religious Language is Meaningless!” Discuss [40]

/ vardycharlotte / 2 Comments

For religious believers, the importance of arguing that religious language refers to something and is thus meaningful is obvious.  Without meaningful language, religion becomes difficult.  Faith may well be possible without formal, positive doctrine or liturgy – as the silent worship and commitment of members of the Society of Friends demonstrates – but without the ability to describe beliefs in religious doctrines it is difficult to hold a religious community – let alone a religious denomination – together for long.  The multiple splits in the Quaker community and the diversity that still characterizes it is evidence of this.   Plato and Aristotle understood words to be signs, pointing towards meaning beyond themselves.  For Plato, ultimate meaning was metaphysical in the forms, which we recognize through reason as reflections in the world around us.  For Aristotle, the forms exist within human reason itself, but they still exist for words to point towards.  The central problem with religious language is that if religious words are signs, they point towards something that we cannot see, hear, touch, smell or taste… nor even understand in a complete way.  Can a sign which points towards nothing determinate really be understood as a sign at all? If language is seen in this traditional way, then religious language must be meaningless, and yet this is not the only way of seeing language.  

For David Hume, human knowledge is much more limited than it first seems.  Knowledge based on sense-experience is more certain than that which is not, but even the senses can be misleading.  A red ball is not really red, but is just perceived as such by the rods and cones in our eyes, which are stimulated in a way that our brains usually interpret as red by the particular wavelength of light that the ball reflects. Yet Hume agreed with Locke that the only way that the philosopher can progress is to cut away the undergrowth of assumption and conjecture, identifying the few relatively certain propositions and concentrating on those.  This critical approach to philosophy inspired Immanuel Kant, who in the “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781) divided all claims into three categories

  1. synthetic claims which are supported by observation and provide new knowledge, albeit of a quite limited variety (this ball is red, geese honk loudly, crisps are salty)
  2. analytic claims which refer to logical relationships between terms and provide no new knowledge, although they clarify and support understanding (2+2=4, an unmarried man is a bachelor, a triangle has three sides)
  3. meaningless claims which refer neither to observable things nor to logical relationships between terms.

For Kant, it is impossible to speak meaningfully about God.  The arguments for God’s existence all fail because human knowledge is rooted in our phenomenal experience and claims about what lies beyond it in the noumenal realm, including about God, are just speculation.  The most human beings can do, argued Kant in “Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone” (1794) is to POSTULATE God’s existence as the best explanation of order and the necessary reason to trust in the fairness of the universe and carry on trying to do what it appears we cannot do… be good.

Kant’s critical approach to knowledge was highly influential, but it rests on some very big assumptions and (arguably) needs to stretch the limits of knowledge beyond breaking point by its own definitions in order to work.  Firstly, American logician WV Quine attacked Kant’s “Two Dogma’s of Empiricism” in 1951, pointing out both the difficulties in relying on sense-data (Descartes previously described these in the 17th century) and the fact that Kant and the later logical positivists accept logic as a form of knowledge and as a means of refining and interpreting sense-data without real argument.  What makes unquestioning faith in logic and assumptions about things being the way they appear to some people’s senses better than unquestioning faith and assumptions about other things?  Secondly, Kant’s system needs the postulates of God, freedom and immortality to work… none of which can be known to exist by Kant’s own categorization of knowledge and against how things appear to most people.

  • Human freedom seems to be constrained by everything from social norms to genetics, yet Kant has to suppose that people are free both in order to support the credibility of reason and the demand of the moral law.
  • The evil and chaos in the world speaks against the existence of God and yet Kant has to postulate God to explain the order he needs to believe exists in order that reason and morality retains credibility.
  • Finally, there is no observable or logical evidence for an afterlife, yet Kant has to suppose that one exists or he cannot hang on to order in the universe, on which reason and the credibility of the moral law depends.

In the end, Kant relies very heavily on things that can neither be proven nor even supported through experience in order for his critical system to work.  Although Kant raises serious questions about the possible meaningfulness of religious language, the force of these questions is taken away by the cracks in the foundations of Kant’s critical system.   

Nevertheless, despite the problems with Kant’s critical approach to knowledge and language, through the 19th Century philosophers were heavily influenced by it.  Gotlob Frege drew heavily on Kant in his work on Logic, which went on to inspire the work of Russell and Moore (and Russell’s protege Wittgenstein) in pre-war Cambridge, as well as Viennese philosopher-scientists Otto Neurath and Moritz Schlick and their “Vienna Circle”, which started to meet in 1921.  Seeking advance understanding, Schlick brought Mathematicians, Scientists, Psychologists and Philosophers together to follow on from work done by Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein in establishing the nature and limits of human knowledge. Starting with Kant’s distinction between synthetic, analytic and meaningless claims (and inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had argued that “of that which we cannot speak, we should be silent” at the end of his first work the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” (1921)), Schlick proposed that a “Verification Principle” should be used as a test of meaning – claims that are not in-principle verifiable through the senses (i.e. claims that cannot be physically checked) or which are not related to the logical relationships between terms should be labelled meaningless and excluded from academic discussion.  Because of this, during meetings of the Vienna Circle, discussions were strictly focused on what can be known… an adjudicator was even appointed to prevent discussions straying into speculative metaphysics by making claims about such matters as… God.

Partly because the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle were published in a Manifesto in 1929, and were of unusual political interest, Schlick’s ideas were influential.  In Oxford, following a visit to Vienna instigated by his tutor Gilbert Ryle, AJ Ayer developed and refined the Verification Principle in “Language Truth and Logic” (1936), the same year in which Schlick was murdered by a former student who claimed (at his show-trial) that Logical Positivism had “interfered with my moral restraint”.  The book was reprinted after the war and caught the mood of the times.  After the discovery of Hitler’s crimes and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima, it was difficult to hang on to any belief in God or moral absolutes!  Logical Positivism dominated Philosophy into the 1950s, with its exclusive focus on what can be known through science and mathematics and its relegation of topics outside these spheres – moral philosophy, aesthetics and religion – to junk-status. Nevertheless, despite the popularity of Verificationism it failed to show that religious language is meaningless. This is because…

  1. Verificationism rules out many areas of academic discussion along with theology and religion.  The consequences of not being able to discuss morality meaningfully were thrown into sharp relief when Schlick’s Nazi student Johann Nelbock shot him on the steps of the university.  Nelbock claimed that Schlick’s teaching had “interfered with his moral restraint” and maybe he had a point.  If Schlick (and Hume and Ayer) was right and morality depends only on sentiment, personal emotion and preferences, then it is difficult to argue that Schlick’s murder was wrong – especially on the eve of the Anschluss when Nazi ideology was incredibly popular in Vienna.
  2. Ayer was forced to accept that many fruitful forms of academic discussion are not even in-principle verifiable.  Historical events cannot be verified except through secondary sources.  Some scientific questions are not open to verification – for example, quantum events cannot be observed accurately because the act of observation affects the event.  In additio, as Thomas Kuhn and Norwood Hanson pointed out, no observation is ever entirely neutral, no matter how “scientific” it might appear.  We interpret what we see through an accepted paradigm… maybe we only actually see what we want to see…  As the great Art Critic John Berger argued in “Ways of Seeing”, seeing is avowedly political rather than scientific and neutral.
  3. As Verificationism cannot itself be verified it is a self-defeating theory that fails to mean its own standard of meaningfulness. 

Verificationism lacks credibility as well as practicality as an approach to defining meaning in language generally, so its attack on meaning in religious language must fail.  

Verificationism was definitely in decline by the 1950s, but it was replaced by the Falsificationism proposed initially by Karl Popper and rooted in scientific method.  Falsificationism suggests that the meaning of a claim depends on being able to define circumstances in which the claim could be falsified.  Scientific claims such as “all swans are white” are meaningful, not because they can be verified – and they cannot be, because even without black swans, the total population of swans through history is never going to be available to check – but rather because we can describe a situation in which the claim would be shown false… such as the discovery of black swans.  Falsificationism presents a more serious challenge to the meaningfulness of religious language than either Kant’s critical approach to knowledge or verificationism because it goes against the nature of faith to describe circumstances in which faith will be falsified.  John Wisdom’s parable of the gardener was used by atheist Anthony Flew to make this point.  Two people look at the same patch of land – one sees the weeds and claims that it is uncultivated land and another sees the shadows of paths and claims that it is a garden whose gardener is on holiday.  Assuming the gardener never shows up there is no way that either person will change their claims about what they see.  Flew claimed that Religious faith is like this – unfalsifiable and therefore meaningless.  A believer looks at the world and sees God’s fingerprints all over it… they will never accept that there is no God, even when they see a film about the Holocaust, when their pet dies in agony or when they themselves have a run of undeserved bad luck.  The believer will always explain away things that go against their belief rather than accept that the belief has been falsified.  In Psychology this would be called confirmation bias – people tend to see things that agree with their world-view and ignore or explain away things that challenge their worldview.  As Kuhn, Hanson and Berger said, no observation is neutral.  Flew definitely has a point.  Religious claims – at least those made by most ordinary believers – are often unfalsifiable.  Attempts by John Hick and Richard Swinburne to argue that religious claims are in principle verifiable and falsifiable with reference to the afterlife are unconvincing. 

Yet despite the fact that religious claims such as “God exists” or “Jesus loves me” are often unfalsifiable, it is possible that other forms of religious language retain meaning of a different sort.  Ludwig Wittgenstein rejected the traditional view of words as signs, pointing towards a meaning beyond themselves, and argued instead that meaning comes from the way in which words are used.  Language is like a game; you can only understand somebody if you understand the rules of the game they are playing.  What it means to score a goal in football and in netball are different – and knowing the rules to one game will not help you to understand a conversation about the other.  Similarly, understanding religious language depends on knowing the “rules” of the religion, denomination, community or even smaller group within which that language is being used.  For Wittgenstein, and later for Anti Realists like DZ Phillips and for some Postmodernists, meaning depends not on what words correspond to, but on what they cohere with.  It is possible for the same religious claim to be true within one form of life and yet false within another.  Jesus rose from the dead is true for Christians and false for Muslims at the same time, regardless of whether the resurrection actually happened or not.  Compare religion with the famous “Schrodinger’s Cat” experiment.  After 5 minutes, nobody knows whether the cat is alive or dead… for Wittgenstein it is as meaningful to say that the cat is alive as that the cat is dead – both are true just as surely as both are false or one is true and one is false.  For anti realists in religious language, words cannot be understood as simple signs, because they point towards a God who is “other, completely other” (St. Augustine), “radically other” (Karl Barth) and “neither something nor nothing (St. Thomas Aquinas).  The meaning of religious language cannot depend only on what it refers to; it also depends on the effects it has on human beings and their spiritual state. 

Maybe, as Paul Tillich suggested, religious language is symbolic rather than built up of simple signs.  Religious claims participate in the meaning they refer to rather than just point towards it.  In a very real sense repeating the words becomes and defines a world of faith rather than creating it.  Religious language is necessary to religion in the way that God is necessary to the universe – not just as a cause in fieri, the words giving rise to a belief that can continue with or without the words – but as a cause in esse, the words sustaining the belief and its object in being.  In a way, this is what Iris Murdoch gestured towards in her version of the Ontological Argument.  She used the analogy of a tooth, venerated for centuries as a relic.  It may have been a dog’s tooth, but in the light of sincere veneration it begins to glow.  As Murdoch and before her Karl Barth recognized, the success or failure of the Ontological Argument does not depend on whether it is valid or sound.  Its true value is as a spiritual exercise, forcing the believer to reflect on the nature of existence itself and in so doing growing closer to a spiritual understanding of God’s necessity if not to an analytical proof of it.  Reflecting on the nature and possible meaning of religious language is a similar exercise.  While it shines a light on the difficulties in taking religious claims at face value, it also exposes wider difficulties in human beings making any claims to knowledge… and so brings people closer to appreciating the necessity of God.