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Critically discuss different Christian interpretations of what heaven is like. [40]

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All Christians believe in heaven.  The belief is affirmed in the last line of the Nicene Creed “We believe also in… the resurrection of the dead, in the everlasting judgement of souls and bodies, in the Kingdom of Heaven and in the everlasting life.” Yet Christians have different interpretations of what heaven is like, ranging from belief that heaven is a place much like earth, but perfected and everlasting, through to belief that heaven is a spiritual state or even entirely symbolic. Overall, it is the first of these interpretations, that heaven is a perfected, eternal place, that is most consistent with Christian doctrine.

Firstly, the Roman Catholic Church affirms that while human beings have a soul and a body, these form a single human nature, and according to Catechism 366 “[the soul] will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.” This suggests that our eternal life in heaven will be much like our life on earth, so that each person will have a soul and a body, but our life in heaven will be eternal and we will be with God, much as Adam and Eve were with God in Eden.  This view of heaven is consistent with Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels and with the fact that Jesus ascended into heaven, where he remains “at the right hand of the father”, which suggests that heaven is a place.  In the Parable of the Sheep and Goats in Matthew 25 Jesus describes a final judgement where people are judged and then sent off for an eternal life in heaven or eternal punishment in hell.  This confirms that there will be a final resurrection and judgement, as the Catechism says, and that heaven will be eternal life. Also, the Parable of Dives and Lazarus in Luke 16 describes heaven being separated from hell by a chasm, with those in hell being able to see and call to those in heaven.  Again, this suggests that heaven and hell are eternal places, of reward and punishment respectively.  Nevertheless, it is true that the two parables give different impressions of when people will go to heaven.  The Parable of the Sheep and Goats suggests that there will be a final judgement, followed by eternal heaven or hell, whereas Dives and Lazarus suggests immediate judgement and entry into heaven and hell while life on earth continues.  Despite this, Roman Catholic teaching makes sense of this through its teaching about purgatory, whereby the soul separates from the body and is reclothed in a heavenly body for purification in purgatory, a temporary hell, the gates of which will then be opened at the final judgement so that souls can be released and reunited with their risen bodies for final judgement and eternal reward in heaven, as appropriate. While purgatory is not supported by clear Biblical evidence, the Church was given authority to “bind and loose” by Jesus in Matthew 16:19 so the authority of the Church to add to Biblical revelation such as regarding purgatory is consistent with the Bible. Further, purgatory makes sense of how sinners can still hope for eternal life given what Revelation 21:27 says about heaven namely that “nothing impure will ever enter it”, and how God’s goodness and justice are compatible.  It follows that the Roman Catholic view of heaven as a place is most consistent with the Bible and Christian doctrine. 

Secondly, the idea that heaven is a spiritual state has always been popular because there is no physical evidence supporting the belief in heaven as a place while heaven as a spiritual state would not require such evidence.  Belief in heaven as a spiritual state is also compatible with Platonic Dualism; heaven would be like the world outside the cave in Plato’s famous allegory, illuminated by the sun and filled with the “forms” of things we only encounter as shadowy particulars in the body. Naturally, St Augustine’s view of heaven was influenced by neo-Platonism; he spoke of heaven as the eternal contemplation of God in Confessions Book XII.  Patly because of St Augustine, Platonic Dualism dominated the Classical and then Medieval worldviews, with philosophers such as Descartes seeing the soul and heaven saw as purely spiritual, with death being a liberation from the mechanistic snares of the physical body. There is some Biblical support for the view that heaven is spiritual; for St Augustine and later for Descartes, the ultimate reward was to see God face to face and have a perfect understanding of reality, as was promised in 1 Corinthians 13:12 and also in 1 John 3:2.  This might explain why Pope John Paul II seemed to imply that heaven and hell are spiritual states more than places in some remarks he made in 1999.  He spoke most particularly of hell, describing it as the absence of God in a way that is consistent with 2 Thessalonians 1:9 “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might”.  But the Pope also said “Heaven “is neither an abstraction not a physical place in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity. It is our meeting with the Father which takes place in the risen Christ through the communion of the Holy Spirit…” this seems to suggest that the Pope supported the view that heaven is a spiritual state and not a place, contradicting his own Catechism.  Yet this is a misunderstanding of the Pope’s meaning. The Catechism affirms that through the sacraments we participate in Christ, who is in heaven at the right hand of the father, so through the sacraments Catholics have a “living personal relationship with the Holy Trinity” in heaven while they are still alive, tasting the heavenly reward they will one day enter each time they partake of the sacraments.  The Pope in his remarks was telling Catholics to focus on what heaven is to them now rather than speculating about what it might be like in the future in a way that cannot be accurate.  After all, the “Kingdom of Heaven” – at least as it will be after the end of time and judgment – does not exist yet. Also, neither the Bible nor Pope John Paul II’s remarks exclude the view that the Kingdom of heaven will ultimately be a place.  It could be that people are shut out from God’s presence while in a place that is Hell, or that they see God face to face and know God as he is while in the place that is heaven, described in other Biblical references.  Seeing heaven as a spiritual place casts doubt on the numerous references which suggest that heaven is a place.   Further, if heaven is a spiritual state only, this suggests that only our soul goes to heaven.  This implies that “I” am my soul and that my body is less important, which might encourage me to denigrate the body and/or see its actions as less important than those of the soul, as Gnostic heretics did during the first centuries of Christianity, and as Cathar heretics later did.  Because of the practical implications of these heretical positions, such as for sexual ethics, the Roman Catholic Catechism 362-368 specifically rejects these ideas, affirming that the body and the soul are a unity and are both necessary for eternal life.  The Roman Catholic theology of the body is consistent both with the doctrine of the incarnation, which shows the importance of the human body in that God chose to become incarnate in one, and with St Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honour God with your bodies.” So, it follows that the idea that heaven is a spiritual state is less consistent with the Bible and Christian Doctrine than the idea that heaven is a place.

Thirdly, the idea that heaven is a symbol of a person’s spiritual and moral life on Earth and not either a place or a spiritual state has grown in popularity through the later 20th and early 21st Centuries amongst ordinary believers, seeking to reconcile their faith with a scientific worldview. Amongst philosophers, Paul Tillich is most often associated with the argument that words used to describe heaven are symbolic.  However, by Tillich’s understanding of symbolic language, this does not suggest that heaven is not a place or spiritual state, because for Tillich symbolic language is cognitive and symbolic words participate in the objective reality to which they refer.  For Tillich, just as God is not a thing but is the “ground of our being”, ‘immortality does not mean a continuation of eternal life after death, but it means a quality which transcends temporality’ (Tillich 1963: 410 [vol. 3]).  This suggests that it is mistaken to imagine that heaven is a place like earth, because it will be timeless as God is timeless.  Nevertheless, Tillich did not suggest that “heaven is a symbol of a person’s spiritual and moral life on earth and not either a place or spiritual state.”  This idea might instead be associated with anti-realism and the belief that religious language takes its meaning not from correspondence and reference but from coherence within a religious form of life.  By this view, when a believer speaks of heaven, they would not be referring to a specific place or state after death, but to their hope for reward in union with God more generally.  It is fair to say that this position is neither compatible with the Bible nor with mainstream Christian doctrine.  The Bible speaks of what is “True” and not of what is “true for us” and so does Christian doctrine. Also, it is difficult to find scholars who really accept this anti-realist position.  While John Hick had some unconventional views about the afterlife and went so far as to describe the incarnation as a metaphor, he never suggested that talk of heaven is only symbolic.  In his earlier writings he implied that heaven was a place, populated by people in replica heavenly bodies, while in his later writings he spoke of some form of re-incarnation, whereby the energy of one life is reused in and influences future lives.  Hick was not an anti-realist and neither did he see heaven as a symbol.  Some textbooks suggest that DZ Phillips is a good example of a Christian who saw heaven as a symbol and not as a place or a spiritual state, and yet Patrick Horn describes this as a “caricature” of Phillips position, and is supported by others including Mikel Burley, who reject the basic claim that Phillips is a non-realist. While Phillips did claim that much religious discourse is “not fact stating”, he did not mean that it is non-cognitive but rather that it refers not to the worldly reality in which there can be facts, but to a different kind of reality.  For Tillich, Hick and Phillips, as for many other Philosophers of Religion through history, God’s existence is not like our existence.  God does not exist in the way that a cat exists, but that does not mean to say that he does not exist either.  As Aquinas put it, there is no-thing that is God… but God is not nothing.  Extending this to heaven, if heaven exists it would not be a place quite like earth but that doesn’t mean that it is not a place, so Tillich, Hick and Phillips is right to point out that religious language about heaven is neither like ordinary language nor only an expression of our own beliefs and hopes. This shows that the view that heaven is only a symbol is not compatible with the Bible, with mainstream Christian doctrines or indeed, even with the philosophy of those claimed to share this view.

In conclusion, the Roman Catholic view of heaven as a place is most consistent with the Bible and Christian doctrine.  While the view that heaven is a spiritual state is supported by some Biblical references and by parts of Catholic doctrine, both in the Catechism and in Pope John Paul II’s 1999 remarks, the view that heaven is ONLY a spiritual state is not compatible with the Bible or Christian doctrine as a whole. It could be that heaven is a spiritual state AND a place therefore.  Further, while some Philosophers have explored the nature of language that refers to heaven and have shown that claims are not ordinary fact-stating claims, the view that heaven is only a symbol is not found in scholarly works, probably because it is not compatible with either the Bible or with Christian doctrine.

Assess the claim that love (agape) is sufficient as the only source of Christian Ethics. [40]

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In John Chapter 13 Jesus taught his disciples “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  The Greek word translated “love” in this passage is agape, which refers to the non-preferential humanitarian love that Jesus showed to people rather than the erotic eros or the friendly philos.  This is why some Christians regard agape-love as the only source of Christian ethics, because it was Jesus’ single new commandment and, of course, Jesus was God. Nevertheless, today few Christians agree with this, given that Roman Catholics follow heteronomous ethics and most Protestants a broader Divine Command ethic based on the whole Bible.  It follows that agape is not sufficient as the only source of Christian ethics.

Firstly, while John 13 does state that agape-love is the one commandment by which Christians will be known as Jesus’ disciples, Jesus said this in context.  In Jeremiah 31:33 God promised that “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” This suggests that Jesus was referring to the new covenant when he gave the commandment of agape-love, and meaning that Christians would follow all God’s law automatically in both letter and spirit, rather than that they would abandon the rest of the commandments and do whatever they felt was loving instead.  This interpretation is consistent with Matthew 5:18 “For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished…” and with the rest of Jesus ethical teaching, which is more demanding than the Law of Moses and not less.  For example, in Matthew 5 teaches that Jesus equated anger with murder and lustful looks with adultery.  While Jesus was demanding that Christians should act with agape – treating others as they would wish to be treated and not only following the letter of the law – there is no sense that agape is an alternative source of ethics to the rest of God’s commandments.   The point is that a person acting with agape would neither be angry with somebody nor murder them, neither look lustfully at a woman nor commit adultery with her.  In this way it would be wrong to say that agape is sufficient as the only source of Christian Ethics.

Secondly, for Roman Catholics seeing agape-love as a sufficient basis for Christian Ethics ignores the importance of a well-formed conscience as well as of Scripture, Tradition and Reason (Natural Law) in shaping Christian teaching. Following St Thomas Aquinas’ reasoning, the Catechism affirms that the primary source of Christian ethics is the conscience.  When we face a difficult choice, it is a moral duty to follow conscience.  Our conscientia is that part of our practical reason that applies the general principles of Christian Ethics that we know through synderesis (principles which are consistent with Scripture, Tradition and Natural Law) to the specific situation at hand.  Nevertheless, because consciences can err, leading us to pursue apparent and not real goods, and because synderesis is a habit that needs to be developed, we must take care that consciences are properly formed through a Catholic education.  Church teachings, which underpin Catholic education, provide a short-cut to the decisions that a well-formed conscience would make and when the conscience diverges from Catholic teachings it is a good indication that the conscience is erring.  Pope Pius XII rejected situation ethics in 1952, even before its more agapeistic versions were developed by Joseph Fletcher and JAT Robinson, because while it is consistent with the Roman Catholic understanding of Christian ethics in encouraging Christians to act in conscience, because it ignores the need to form consciences or ensure that their decisions are consistent with Scripture, Tradition and Reason, it leaves individuals vulnerable and without proper moral guidance when they face difficult situations. Fletcher’s claim that there should be no absolutes in Christian ethics, no always and no nevers, conflicts with the Bible’s long list of prescriptive commandments and suggests that agape is instead of the law rather than a fulfilment of it, as Jesus taught.  It is also difficult to define agape-love.  For example, Immanuel Kant argued that human beings are “pathologically loving” and that an action motivated by this love always treat human beings as ends in themselves and never as mere means.  By contrast, Fletcher defends what he calls the agapeic calculus, the greatest amount of neighbour-welfare for the largest number of neighbours possible, making agapeistic ethics seem much like utilitarianism.  While by Kant’s definition, agape could never justify involuntary abortion, suicide or adultery… but Fletcher freely discusses situations in which these would, he implies, be the most loving course of action. Because of this central confusion, it is difficult for people not to confuse a genuinely agapeistic motivation with a more preferential or even selfish motivation. All this shows that it is wrong to say that agape is sufficient as the only source of Christian Ethics.

On the other hand, it is true that Jesus sometimes seemed to break the laws of Moses situationally, for the benefit of people. According to Mark’s Gospel, He healed on the Sabbath and allowed his disciples to pluck ears of corn on the Sabbath, neither of which in life-threatening situations. It seems that Jesus was maximising peoples’ welfare and putting this ahead of obedience to the law, as Fletcher suggested.  Nevertheless, the laws concerning the Sabbath were, Jesus reasoned, there to serve man and therefore could and should be broken when they harm peoples’ welfare.  The same might not be true of other laws, such as the prohibition on murder in Exodus 20:13.  In Genesis 4 God says that Abel’s blood cries out to him from the ground and in Genesis 9 God demands an accounting for any human blood that is shed.  This might suggest that the law against murder is not only to serve humans, but also to serve God because God has an interest in human blood.  As St Paul confirms in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your bodies.” Which implies that human life is sacred and owned by God, so murder offends against God and not only human beings.  If this is true, then it would be impossible to act out of agape-love and kill a human being, even in situations as extreme as outlined by Fletcher, because agape puts love of God first and ahead of love of neighbour, according to Mark 12:28-32. Kant would be right that agape always treats humanity as an end and never as a means to an end, even of maximising human welfare. This suggests that agape-love is not sufficient as a source of Christian ethics, unless one specifies that it includes love of God as well as and ahead of love of neighbour, which would bring following all of God’s commandments into the scope of agape, rather than accepting God’s laws only selectively. This interpretation would be consistent with a more mainstream Protestant Ethic, which aims to follow all those Divine Commands in spirit at least. 

In conclusion, it is wrong to say that agape is sufficient as the only source of Christian Ethic unless one is very specific in defining agape, stipulating that it includes love of God as well as and ahead of love of neighbour, so leads to a broader biblical ethic which always upholds the sanctity of human life.  Certainly, it is wrong to say that situation ethics is the only or even an acceptable Christian Ethic.

In meta-ethics, the term “good” has an objective factual basis. Discuss [40]

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In meta-ethics, in the past most scholars have held that the term “good” has an objective factual basis. Moral realists include ethical monotheists, who see the term good referring to God and God’s commands, as well as ethical naturalists, who see the term good referring to some quality that can be observed, and ethical non-naturalists, who see the term good referring to a rational intuition. On the other hand, since the early part of the 20th Century moral non-realism has come to dominate.  For example, non-realists like AJ Ayer and JL Mackie argue that the term “good” has no objective factual basis because it does not refer to a verifiable point of reference but rather expresses subjective feelings and emotions.  Overall, today the claim that the term “good” has an objective factual basis is not persuasive.

Firstly, ethical monotheists claim that the term “good” has an objective factual basis in God and God’s commands.  The Bible claims that “only God is truly good” Mark 10:18 and this is supported by both Classical Theism and Theistic Personalism, which have in different ways established that God is the omnibenevolent creator and the source of goodness in human actions. Further, at least for Protestant Christians, faith is Sola Scriptura and the Bible is a comprehensive moral guide, which suggests that what is good depends on God’s commands, which can be checked against the Bible, objectively.  Nevertheless, ethical monotheism is not credible.  Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma shows that if God is the source of moral standards, as ethical monotheism suggests, then God cannot be good but is an arbitrary tyrant.  On the other hand, if in fact there are objective moral standards that God follows, he can be good but is not the origin of goodness as ethical monotheists suggest, and neither is He all-powerful.  Bertrand Russell found the Euthyphro Dilemma so persuasive that he used it as the basis for a disproof of God. Further, centuries of Church history demonstrate the problems with the ethical monotheist claim that the term “good” has an objective factual basis, when Christians so rarely agree on what it is or involves. Biblical Criticism shows that God’s commandments are not clear from the Bible, existing in different sometimes contradictory lists, being obviously influenced by the contexts of the biblical authors and being wide open to interpretation.  For example, the ten commandments are detailed in Exodus 20 and Exodus 34 and again in Deuteronomy 5.  The versions are phrased and organized differently, and the order of the coveting commandments is different between Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5.  Further, Jesus said that the two greatest commandments were love God and love of neighbour in Mark 12 and also that love was the only commandment in John 13.  Which commandments should a Christian follow and with what priority?  Further, the Commandments have always been interpreted differently by different Christians.  For example, Catholics and Lutherans combine the first two commandments, “no other gods” and “no graven images” while other Protestant Christians separate the first two commandments, making “no graven images” a separate commandment and leading to radically different attitudes to art and architecture even within Protestantism.  These examples show how ethical monotheism and its claim that the term “good” has an objective factual basis is not credible.

Secondly, ethical naturalists claim that the term “good” has an objective factual basis which can be observed.  For example, the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham argued that “nature has placed mankind under two sovereign masters; the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain”, reasoning that “good” refers to actions which produce the maximum amount of pleasure, which can be observed and measured using the seven criteria of extent, duration, intensity, certainty, propinquity, purity and fecundity, as well as the minimum amount of pain.  However, ethical naturalism is undermined by the is-ought gap, which Hume explained thus “in every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it’s necessary that it should be observed and explained; and while a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”  Hume’s point was that we can observe nature and what is, but we can’t observe any basis for ought claims at all.  Ethical naturalism is based on assertion and not argument and has no observable factual basis for what it claims to be good. Further and despite being a moral realist and thinking that the term “good” has an objective factual basis, G.E Moore claimed that ethical naturalism relies on the “naturalistic fallacy”, the incorrect assumption that something is good because it occurs in nature or is considered normal in society.  For Moore, just because something is natural or normal does not make it good.  For example, misogyny and sexual violence have been endemic through history and still are across the world today… this does not make these good or right.  This shows that the claim that the term good has an objective factual basis cannot b supported through ethical naturalism either.

On the other hand, G.E Moore and other ethical non-naturalists have conceded that what is good depends neither on the commands of God nor on anything that can be observed in nature.  Instead, drawing on Plato, they have argued that we know what is good as a rational intuition.  This explains why people find some actions which go against laws and don’t maximise happiness are good… such as a soldier disobeying orders and getting himself killed while trying to save a comrade.  Nevertheless, ethical non-naturalism is no more persuasive a basis for the claim that the term “good” has an objective factual basis than ethical monotheism or ethical naturalism.  The claim that we all know what goodness is as a rational intuition ignores the fact that people have widely different concepts of what is good.  Actions like that of the soldier are controversial… yes, some people would see him as a hero and say that his actions were “good” despite breaking the rules and compounding suffering… but many would reject this and argue that he should have obeyed orders and lived. Further, AJ Ayer was right to point out that claims about good, bad, right and wrong are better seen as expressions of subjective feelings and emotions, having no objective factual basis, than as having an objective basis in a rational intuition that we can’t observe or prove. Ayer’s argument develops that of Hume, that while we can observe what is, claims about what we ought to do are pure assertion and not verifiable.  Further, JL Mackie later agreed with Ayer, pointing out that ethical claims are based on an error and that moral judgments in fact “reflect adherence to and participation in different ways of life.”  Here Mackie was influenced by Wittgenstein, who had cast doubt on the ability of any term to have an “objective factual basis” arguing that meaning in language comes from usage and not reference so that it is not objective or factual. All these points suggest that ethical non-naturalism fails to provide any better defence of the claim that terms like “good” have an objective factual basis than ethical monotheism and ethical naturalism and that in fact ethical non-realism is more persuasive in its suggestion that terms like “good” have only a subjective basis.

In conclusion, the term “good” has no objective factual basis but is rather subjective and best understood as an expression of personal or communal feelings and emotions.  Today, ethical realism lacks credibility, so attention should be focused on refining ethical non-realism to provide the best possible explanation for how and why people use ethical language.

To what extent is the cosmological argument a sufficient explanation for the existence of God? [40]

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The cosmological argument has its roots in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, but is most associated with Aquinas’ first, second and third ways to demonstrate God’s existence and today with William Lane Craig’s Kalam argument.  While cosmological arguments see God as the “sufficient reason” for the universe, overall, they do not provide a sufficient explanation for the existence of God.

Firstly, Leibniz’ version of the cosmological argument saw God as the “sufficient reason” for the universe. God is needed, he reasoned, to explain why there is anything at all. In “The Existence of God” Richard Swinburne writes how this is the most basic and persuasive argument for God’s existence.  Leibniz’ reasoning built on Aquinas’ third way, which started with the premises that everything in the universe is contingent and that something cannot come from nothing, concluding that there must be a necessary being – a being which exists because of itself and cannot not exist – to explain the existence of everything else. Yet Kant rejected this line of argument in the introduction to his “Critique of Pure Reason”, pointing out that as everything that we experience exists contingently, necessary existence is not something we can posit or discuss.  For Kant, to exist is to exist contingently and to be capable of non-existence… the idea of necessary existence is contradictory and impossible. While there are those who reject Kant’s argument and indeed his whole worldview, such as Willard Quine and Charles Hartshorne, it remains the dominant position in philosophy. While Kant may not have shown that necessary existence is impossible, his observation that it falls outside the scope of our experience strongly supports that conclusion.  This shows that God is not needed to be the necessary explanation for the universe we experience.

Secondly, as David Hume observed through his character Philo in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, despite being presented as deductive proofs for God’s existence cosmological arguments fail because there is no way to show that their premises are true. For example, Aquinas starts his first way with the premises that everything in the universe is moved and that things can’t move themselves, concluding that there must therefore be a Prime Mover and that this is what everybody calls God. As Hume pointed out, there is no way to know if everything in the universe is moved or that no thing can move itself because our experience of the universe is too limited to support such sweeping claims.  It is possible that while things in the universe are moved and must be moved by other things, the universe itself could be unmoving and/or self-moving.  As Bertrand Russell later asked, why should not the universe itself be considered a “brute fact”?  Although Big Bang theory seems to have falsified the idea that the Universe could be considered a “brute fact,” in other ways science supports Hume’s scepticism, finding that sub-atomic particles like Quarks do not follow standard laws of causation and logic and forcing William Lane Craig to use more limited premises in his Kalam argument than Aquinas did in his Cosmological Argument.  Craig reasons that since “everything that begins to exist must have a cause” and “the universe began to exist” it follows that “the universe must have a cause”.  Although it strategically stops short of concluding that the cause of the universe is “what everybody calls God” – leaving this for people to infer – Craig’s argument seems persuasive in the context of a layman’s understanding of the standard model of Physics. Yet, Stephen Hawking criticised his argument for assuming that causation must or even could apply where there is no time or space at and before the Big Bang. This shows that the cosmological argument fails to demonstrate God’s existence

On the other hand, other versions of the cosmological argument have been presented as inductive or even abductive arguments, suggesting that God is the most probable explanation for many observations of movement, causation, contingency and other forms of order in the universe.  This approach acknowledges that science could provide natural explanations for these phenomena, but dismisses these as less probable than the simple, elegant explanation provided in God. Yet, while the prime mover, uncaused cause or necessary being supported by Aquinas’ ways seems   to be a simpler explanation than the complex natural accounts presented by science, as Hume pointed out, the prime mover, if such there is, would be very far from being “what everybody calls God.”  In terms of prime movers, uncaused causes or necessary beings, there could be several for all we know and it/they would hardly need to be personal, immanent or good.  Also, the God of the Bible is nothing if not a complex character, being possessed of many characteristics outside the scope of those possessed by the prime mover, so that Richard Dawkins was right to reject the claim that “God” could ever be a simpler explanation in “The God Delusion”.  While Aquinas did attempt to show how the prime mover, uncaused cause and necessary being demonstrated by the cosmological argument was really the God of Christianity, these explanations were outside the scope of the cosmological arguments and unconvincing.  For example, Aquinas claimed that because God is the prime mover, uncaused cause and necessary being He must be timeless-eternal and outside the universe.  It follows that divine attributes like power, knowledge or goodness must be understood as analogies when describing God. Yet Aquinas’ classical theism is unconvincing because although it attempts to provide a philosophical justification for believing that “God” exists – not least through the cosmological argument – this justification is flawed and comes at the price of undermining both the Bible and Christian Doctrine as sources of knowledge about God.  This shows that inductive or abductive versions of the cosmological argument are no more useful as explanations for God’s existence than deductive versions.

Further, all versions of the cosmological argument are part of Natural Theology, the attempt to explain that and how God exists using reason. Natural Theology has long been controversial within Christianity, because it assumes that human beings can discover God and potentially salvation for themselves without God’s grace, which idea was dismissed by St Paul (e.g. Ephesians 2:8) and later made a heresy because of St Augustine’s theological arguments.  It follows that for most Christians Natural Theology cannot provide sufficient knowledge of God’s existence or concerning God’s nature for human beings to attain salvation apart from God’s grace.  Instead, Christians must rely on Revealed Theology, such as through Scripture, Jesus and/or personal religious experience, to demonstrate God’s existence, nature and will.  In one way, this makes sense of the cosmological arguments’ failure to show that God is the necessary or even the most probable explanation of the universe and of the disjunct between the attributes of the prime mover and the God of the Bible.  It could be that the cosmological argument, and wider Natural Theology, provides only an indication that God exists, showing that faith is rational and that atheists are as St Paul put it “without excuse”, while maintaining the necessity of revelation and grace for salvation. Yet it seems terribly convenient that Christian doctrine should so cover for the failure of Natural Theology and the cosmological argument. St Paul and St Augustine would both have been aware of versions of the cosmological argument in the work of Plato and Aristotle and that these arguments are not sufficient explanations for the God of Christianity.  Could their theological arguments have been pragmatic rather than principled in their attempt to sideline reason in favour of revelation?

In conclusion, the cosmological argument does not provide a sufficient explanation for the existence of God. None of the versions of the argument succeed in demonstrating God’s existence. Deductive versions rely on uncertain premises and don’t contain the full conclusion of the Christian God’s existence. Inductive and abductive versions fail to establish that “God” is a simpler explanation of the universe than natural explanations provided by science.  Also, theological attempts to explain why Natural Theology should fail are unconvincing.

Aquinas successfully demonstrates that religious language should be understood in terms of analogy. Discuss. [40]

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As the Summa Theologica makes clear, St Thomas Aquinas’ approach to religious language emerged from his concept of God.  As a Classical Theist, Aquinas saw God as timeless eternal, meaning that words applied to God cannot be understood univocally, to mean the same as they would when applied to created things. While the Bible, the Creeds and Christian doctrines use language univocally in ways that make God seem like a person, subject to limitation and change, for Aquinas God is timelessly other and should not be so anthropomorphised and limited by language.  He saw some merits in the apophatic approach to language, which speaks of God by negation if at all seeing direct religious language as equivocal, but wanted to preserve the possibility of affirming some things about God in a meaningful way, recognising that an equivocal approach to language undermines philosophy and doctrine in a way that must eventually be fatal to organised religion.  The result was Aquinas’ argument that words applied to God should be understood as analogies which is successful in avoiding both the pitfalls of univocalism and giving in to equivocalism, although it depends heavily on his concept of God and so may not be useful to all Christians.

Firstly, Aquinas claimed that claims such as “God is good” should not be taken to imply that God is morally good, such as would imply choice and the existence of independent values but should instead be understood as analogies of proportion. When we say that something is good, we mean that it largely fulfils its nature.  Human nature is to be free and moral, but if God is the origin of our freedom and of moral values it makes little sense to anthropomorphise him by assuming his nature is like ours.  Nothing in this world is perfect; because of time and space nothing can fulfil 100% of its nature.  For example, a person has the potential to be a baby and an adult.  However good they are, they can only fulfil part of their potential at one time, such as by being a good adult.  Nevertheless, God is outside the time and space that holds us back from actualising our full potential and being perfect. When we say that God is good, we mean that God fulfils 100% of his timeless divine nature, being changelessly perfect; what it is for God to fulfil God’s nature is not what it means for us to fulfil our more limited nature.  John Hick used the example of a man and his dog, both of which might be said to be faithful. What it is for a man to be faithful and for a dog to be faithful are not quite the same, but by saying they are faithful we mean that both do a large proportion of what we expect of a faithful member of their species. It follows that our goodness is not the same as God’s goodness… the word good is not used univocally when applied to God… but there is a connection between our goodness and God’s goodness which means that words applied to God are not equivocal either.   In this way, Aquinas’ analogy of proportion is successful in avoiding both the pitfalls of univocalism and giving into equivocalism.

Secondly, Aquinas claimed that attributes like goodness exist primarily in God as the creator and only secondarily in created things, so that what we say about God and created things is connected while still having different meanings and preserving the otherness of God. To explain his analogy of attribution, Aquinas used the example of a bull and its urine… the health of the bull is primary and the health of the urine it produces is secondary… the health of the bull and its urine consist in different things, but the health of the one is the source of the health of the other, so there is a connection.  Simon Oliver uses the example of me and my breakfast yoghurt… both might be said to be healthy, but the healthiness of the yoghurt is secondary and depends on my healthiness, which is primary.  My health might consist in having clear skin, energy and a habit of going jogging… but the health of the yoghurt does not consist in any of these things.  In the same way, the goodness, power or wisdom of God is primary, and the goodness, power or wisdom of created things is secondary.  What it is for God to be good, powerful or wise might be radically different from what it means for a person to be these things, and not only by degree, avoiding limiting God through a univocal use of language.  Yet, there is a clear connection between the goodness, power and wisdom of God and of created creatures, which avoids an equivocal approach to religious language also. 

On the other hand, as Anthony Kenny pointed out the analogical meaning of God’s attributes preserved by Aquinas is extremely limited, making this approach to religious language unsuccessful when it comes to sustaining religion in a practical way.  Kenny suggested that the idea of timeless attributes such as goodness, power or wisdom seems “radically incoherent”, which is a fair criticism, as is the related point that many believers do not understand language analogically, even those who lead or have led the Church.  While Ian Ramsey was right to point out how people often use “qualifiers” like “timelessly” to signify that their use of words to describe God should not be taken as “ordinary language” but as religious language which is “logically odd”, in practice many people do not use such qualifiers or seem to understand that there should be any difficulty in using language univocally at all. Further, as Nelson Pike observed, the God of the Bible is “unavoidably tensed”.  It makes little sense to see God as timeless when that would make the creation, the fall and the resurrection simultaneous in God’s timeless vision. This is why Protestant philosophers look for other ways of understanding religious language, seeing Aquinas analogical approach as bound up in a concept of God which is fundamentally unchristian. John MacQuarrie lamented the adoption of the Greek concept of God into the Christian tradition, seeing this as the cause of multiple avoidable philosophical problems that have beset the faith through the best part of two millennia.  In this context, Richard Swinburne and Nicholas Wolterstorff approach religious language in a more straightforward univocal way.  Further, some Classical Theists support a more univocal approach to religious language than Aquinas.  For examples, St Anselm and John Duns Scotus reasoned that God as creator must have created the concepts through which we understand and speak of Him, meaning that we can speak confidently about God using a far wider range of words and meanings than Aquinas would allow.  All of this suggests that the success of Aquinas’ analogical approach to religious language is limited to those who share his concept of God and does not extend even to all of those.

In conclusion, Aquinas’ analogical approach to understanding religious language is coherent and persuasive if one shares his concept of God, although it is possibly too limited to support religious practice.  Nevertheless, many Christians do not accept either Aquinas’ concept of God or his analogical approach to understanding religious language because they choose to focus on revealed rather than on natural theology as the primary source of their knowledge of God.

Assess the view that Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy enables us to speak significantly about God (40)

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Aquinas doctrine of analogy was intended to reconcile a philosophically credible concept of God, a God who is wholly “other”, with the human ability to speak about Him in meaningful terms.  Aquinas, who based his worldview on that of Aristotle, saw that God’s existence is best demonstrated a posteriori, from experience.  Four of his famous five ways show that God is what Aristotle called the “Prime Mover”, the originating and sustaining cause of everything which also defines the final cause of the universe and explains its teleological character.  This suggests that for Aquinas’ God, like Aristotle’s prime mover, is eternal outside time and space, impersonal and transcendent.  As Maimonides pointed out, this means that claims about God should not be understood univocally, because the edge of time and space – and thus possible experience – is like a “veil and partition” between God and us.  What it means for God to be good cannot be the same as what it means for a human being to be good… There is no time or choice for God, after all.  Nevertheless, Aquinas disagreed with Maimonides about the apophatic way being the only way to speak concerning God.  Aquinas saw that religion cannot be well supported by negative language, also pointing out that one has to have a clear concept of what God is to be able to decide what God is not.  Therefore, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy attempted to define what can be said about God in positive terms, steering people away from univocicity whilst preventing claims from being seen as equivocal either.  Nevertheless, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy does not enable us to speak significantly enough about God.

Firstly, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy is too limited to support the meaningfulness of morality.  For Aquinas, I can say that God is good meaningfully.  Through analogy of proportion, by saying that God is good I know that God is 100% actual and has no potential, because the meaning of goodness is that something fulfils its nature and God, being atemporal, can do nothing other than 100% fulfil his nature.  Further, through analogy of attribution, I know that God’s goodness is unlike human goodness and yet it has a causative relationship with human goodness in the way that the goodness of the baker or the bull has a causative relationship with the goodness of the bread or the urine.  Relatedly though more broadly, through Aquinas’ analogy of being, I know that the being of created contingent things is secondary to the primary being of God.  In the way that the healthiness of a yoghurt is secondary and the healthiness of the person who eats the yogurt is primary, so the being of God is primary and supports the being of all other things, although what it means for God to be and created things to be is not the same.  Nevertheless, knowing that God is 100% whatever God is and that his goodness and being enables things in the world to be good and be does not really tell me anything significant about God’s nature, other than perhaps that he intends things to fulfil their various natures as He fulfils His timelessly.  Aquinas built his theory of natural law on this analogical understanding of God’s nature and tried to extrapolate moral norms from it, suggesting that it is God’s will that human beings fulfil their common nature and that actions which contribute to this end are good.  Yet Natural Law struggles because there is no clear and consistent account of what the common human nature, that God wants us to fulfil in order to be good, is.  For one example, while Aquinas saw procreation as a necessary part of this human nature and thus essential to human goodness, Chappell and originally Finnis disagreed, not seeing procreation as a necessary part of human nature or essential to goodness at all.  Their position is strengthened by Aquinas own argument that some goods pertain to certain men more than others, hence a priest may be celibate because he is pursuing the good of praising God which conflicts with the good of having children in practice.  The fact that people can’t agree on what a common human nature entails, despite being able to experience and observe this, emphasizes how little content there can be within the claim “god is good” – or any other claim about God’s nature – when understood analogically. Further, having so little idea of what God’s goodness entails forces us to rely heavily on a contested definition of human nature, meaning that an analogical approach to religious language fails to support morality.  This shows that Aquinas doctrine of analogy does not enable us to speak significantly enough about God, because it only serves to emphasis how little we can know about God’s goodness and fails to support morality. 

Secondly, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy does not support the meaningfulness of the Bible or central documents such as the Nicene Creed.  From the Bible we know that God spoke on numerous occasions, appeared in visions and had relationships with Prophets and with Jesus, and yet again, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy emphasizes the “otherness” of God, which undermines these essentially Christian beliefs.  At least Maimonides admitted that Scripture should be read as myths and legends, yet Aquinas never went this far. According to Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy, we can only speak analogically of God because God is outside time and space and what Tillich later called “the ground of our being”, yet this is not the impression that (most of) the Bible gives.  As Nelson Pike pointed out, the Bible’s God acts in a way that is “unavoidably tensed” and apparently at odds with an analogical interpretation of religious language.  For example, Aquinas would suggest that a claim that “God created the heavens and the earth” should not be understood univocally.  God’s creative act cannot be like a creative act of say a potter.  Rather, God’s creative act must be simple and single, as befits his timeless-eternal nature.  This means that all parts of God’s creative action are concurrent, just as all God’s various attributes are different ways of understanding God’s wholly simple nature.  There can be no division between parts of God’s act in creation, just as there can be no division between God’s goodness and power, his power and knowledge for examples.  How then can we make sense of the Biblical salvation narrative?  Analogically, Aquinas would have us believe that God’s act in creation is not like a human act, having no time before, during or after and no alternative possibilities.  How though can the creation be concurrent with the fall and with the incarnation and final judgement?  This makes no sense of central Christian doctrines.  Also, the doctrine of the Trinity is problematic, because it suggests that God is best understood through the three distinct persons of God.  Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy suggests otherwise… indeed we must focus on the very oneness of God to make sense of what we can say and mean analogically through proportion, attribution and being more generally.  This inability to support claims made in the Bible and creeds also shows that Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy is too limited to enable Christians to speak significantly of God. 

Of course, Aquinas’ theory of analogy has its supporters and indeed enables us to speak more significantly about God than does the via negativa.  Aquinas’ theory of analogy is highly influential within modern Roman Catholicism and has been developed by thinkers ranging from Ian Ramsey to Austin Farrar and Gerard Hughes.  Even John Hick praised Aquinas analogical approach to religious language.  Ramsey noted how people naturally see claims made about God as “logically odd.” When we use words like power or love in relation to God, we know that we don’t intend people to interpret them in the same way as they would in ordinary language.  Words are in a sense “models” of what we mean about God; just as a model of an atom in a science lab isn’t adequate to express the structure of the atom or the concept of the light-wave to express how light works, so the word “power” isn’t entirely adequate to express that attribute of God, but it is the best means of expression that we have.  Further, Ramsey noted that we use “qualifiers” such as “Holy” to indicate that we are using a “model”, that our claim is “logically odd” and that our intended meaning relative to God is not the same as the common meaning of words such as power or knowledge.  Hick praised this aspect of analogy noting that it allows us to speak significantly about God while also preserving the essential mystery and ineffability of the divine. Hughes suggested that the qualifier “timeless” is most appropriate to signify that words are being used analogically, drawing the mind to that part of a common meaning that makes sense in relation to the timeless nature of God.  Thus for the Thomist, when I say “God is good” I should say “God is timelessly good”, ruling out a moral interpretation of the claim which would be incompatible with God’s eternal nature.  This shows that an analogical approach to language fits in with modern Roman Catholic beliefs and usage, supporting the significance of some important things that Catholics say about God.  Yet Aquinas’ analogical approach to religious language still fails to enable us to speak significantly about God for two reasons. 

  • Firstly because some Roman Catholic writers were critical of Aquinas’ analogical theory of religious language straight away.  For example, John Duns Scotus preferred the Cataphatic approach of St Anselm and St Bonaventure.  An analogical approach to language is, for Scotus, too limited to support significant religious beliefs and utterances.  Instead, Scotus argued that we should be able to speak univocally of God since the very concepts we use to describe and affirm his characteristics were created by God as part of his simple, single act of creation.  His approach owes more to Plato than it does to Aristotle, suggesting that God is more like the Form of the Good, giving definition to the concepts through which we experience reality and so knowable through reason and describable in ordinary language.
  • Secondly, because while analogy does seem intuitive to those whose worldview includes a timeless-eternal God, it is less so for those whose worldview includes a personal, immanent God.  How is the claim that God is timelessly wise, as Hughes might have it, compatible with the claim that God knows “the inmost secrets of our hearts” as the Psalmist affirms, let alone with the claim that God hears and answers prayers?  God’s wisdom should not be understood univocally, and should only be taken to mean that God has 100% of the knowledge appropriate to God, being timeless, and that God’s knowledge and our knowledge have a causative relationship of some sort, God’s wisdom being primary and ours secondary in the way that the health of a person is primary and of a yoghurt is secondary.  Neither of those understandings support the significance of my belief that God knows what is in my heart right now, or is capable of understanding and answering me personally.   

Of course, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy is still better than Maimonides via negativa.  The via negativa wouldn’t let me say anything positive about God’s wisdom or knowledge at all, supporting only the claim that “God is not ignorant” for example.  Yet in practice the content supported by the doctrine of analogy is only a little more significant than that supported by the via negativa, and as has already been argued, is certainly not sufficient to do justice to the range of Christian beliefs or documents such as the Bible or the Creed.  This shows that Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy does not enable us to speak significantly enough about God.

In conclusion, while Aquinas doctrine of analogy supports us in speaking more significantly than does the via negativa, it still does not enable us to speak significantly enough about God to support Christian faith.  Being Christian demands that God is and can be said to be personal, immanent, active through the Bible and in the world today, not to mention incarnate in Jesus who was fully God as well as fully man.  Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy is far too limited to enable Christians to articulate these significant beliefs.  Better understandings of religious language from this point of view include symbol and metaphor, both of which allow a greater variety of things to be said meaningfully than does analogy.

Critically compare Plato’s Form of the Good with Aristotle’s Prime Mover. [40]

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While Plato and Aristotle had contrasting approaches to philosophy in many ways, there are some similarities between their worldviews. One of these is that both Plato and Aristotle argued that a metaphysical entity provides the ultimate explanation for our physical reality. In Plato’s case this is the Form of the Good (FOG), which is the form of the forms – which themselves give definition and identity to the things we experience – and perhaps the only true form. For Aristotle this is the Prime Mover, which is the origin of movement and efficient causation as well as the necessary being which sustains our universe of contingencies. Through the centuries theists have seen in both the FOG and PM possible rational support for the existence of God, but in the end the Prime Mover is a more persuasive concept than the Form of the Good and is more useful to theists in this relation.

Aristotle’s arguments for the Prime Mover are rooted in observations, so accessible to anybody.  In the Metaphysics Book IV Aristotle defines metaphysics as “a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature.” For any of the “special sciences” – Physics, Chemistry etc. – to proceed in discovering the causes of specific classes of existing things, we must first identify the causes of existence itself by engaging in metaphysics. As with the special sciences, metaphysics starts with observations and from these uses reason to identify the causes of what is observed. In the case of any thing that is observed, Aristotle reasons that its existence is caused by four types of cause:

  • material causes (i.e. physical ingredients such as the bronze of a statue)
  • formal causes (i.e. the concept according to which the material causes are arranged, such as the idea of the statue in the mind of the sculptor)
  • efficient causes (i.e. the agents which bring the material causes together according to the formal cause)
  • a final cause (i.e. the end or telos for which the thing exists, ultimately flourishing).

Nevertheless, as Aristotle states towards the end of Book IV of the Metaphysics, identifying the causes of existing things raises the question of what caused the causes. For examples, what is the formal cause of formal causes, which explains their existence? What is the uncaused efficient cause which started the series of agents that leads to what we observe? Aristotle hypothesises the existence of a “Prime Mover” which exists necessarily, outside time and space, and which sustains contingent existence, being the unmoved mover and uncaused causer of all things. Clearly, this reasoning has been adopted and adapted by many other philosophers since Aristotle’s time and has become the many versions of the Cosmological Argument for God’s existence. William Lane Craig is just one example of a contemporary philosopher who would support Aristotle in reasoning that this contingent universe must have a cause outside itself. Craig would also agree with Aristotle in limiting speculation about the nature of this cause, because its existence is necessarily beyond our conceptual framework. While the classical cosmological argument for God’s existence, such as was presented by Aquinas, has been roundly rejected by David Hume, Immanuel Kant and later Bertrand Russell, Craig points out that modern science and Big Bang Theory demolishes some of those criticisms, while others of them can be overcome by stopping short of claiming that the necessary being sustaining the universe is “what everybody calls God”… which Aristotle recognized 2400 years ago. As we now know, the universe is not what Russell called “a brute fact” which makes Aristotle’s concept of the Prime Mover persuasive.

In addition, Aristotle’s Prime Mover is more persuasive than Plato’s Form of the Good because Plato’s “argument” for the forms – and thus for the Form of the Good – is unclear and inconsistent. Plato is unclear about precisely which forms exist metaphysically.  As Julia Annas observes, “Plato never offers an argument for Forms that would establish them as entities suitable for a theory”[1] In Book X of the Republic, Plato implies that there are separate forms for tables, beds etc.  Socrates says to Glaucon: “Whenever a number of individuals have a common name we assume them to also have a corresponding idea or form.  Do you understand me? [I do]  Let us take any common instance; there are beds and tables in the world – plenty of them – are there not? [Yes] But there are only two ideas or forms of them – one of the idea of the bed, the other of a table.”[2] Yet, in Book VI of the Republic, through his Allegory of the Sun, Plato implies that only one form ultimately exists – the Form of the Good – and that our impression that a diversity of things exist is a belief rather than actual knowledge, a result of our ideas being clouded by sense-experiences and so not being clear or distinct.  Here, as Julia Annas explains, “Plato contrasted Forms, which are objects of knowledge, with particular instances of Forms (things that ‘partake in’ Forms), which are objects of belief…” [3] The lack of any explicit argument for the forms and the inconsistency of Plato’s position make Plato’s theory of the forms unconvincing. In addition, where Aristotle’s Prime Mover is supported by observable evidence and persuasive argument, it is not possible to support Plato’s theory of the forms, however it is presented, through either evidence or persuasive argument.  Nothing we can observe supports the existence of “forms” whether separately of beds and tables or indeed of the good.  Plato’s position – and that of modern Platonists who accept his theory of the forms – depends on reason alone.  Plato – through the character of Socrates – argues that the existence of the forms is known a priori, before and even without experience, because their necessary existence is contained within our understanding of all other things.  Yet what is the difference between this sort of rational argument for ultimate reality in the world of the forms… and speculation?  Even if the need to verify the forms is discounted, what could possibly falsify or count against Plato’s argument for the forms, especially if all experience is discounted?  It follows that Plato’s concept of the Form of the Good is less persuasive than the concept of Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

Further, Aristotle’s Prime Mover is more useful in supporting the existence of God than the Form of the Good. The concept of the Form of the Good might seem to have more in common with the Christian concept of God than the concept of the Prime Mover. While both the concept of the Form of the Good and the concept of the Prime Mover are of beings which exist metaphysically, eternally and immutably, only the concept of the Form of the Good is conceivably “the creator” or identified with truth and moral goodness. The goodness of the Form of the Good is the same as the goodness we experience in things and more conceivably the moral goodness Christians associate with God, while the goodness of the Prime Mover only relates to the Prime Mover necessarily fulfilling its nature and sustaining good things in existence. Yet, identifying God with the Form of the Good encourages univocal predication – assuming that attributes affirmed of God mean the same as when they are affirmed of other things – which leads to problems. If God’s power, knowledge and goodness are the same as our power, knowledge and goodness then God is limited by the laws of logic and possibility and therefore not supreme. Further, univocal predication quickly leads to confusion and the anthropomorphisation of God, pulling God away from what the rational demonstrations of God’s existence support so that faith becomes fideism and divorced from the Philosophy of Religion.Yet, as Aquinas showed in the Summa Theologica (1264), the concept of the Prime Mover is consistent with the Christian concept of God. Isaiah 55 confirms “For 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 higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Because of this, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy is successful in showing that all of the classical attributes affirmed of God [when identified with the concept of the Prime Mover] convey some (if very limited) positive meaning. It follows that Aristotle’s Prime Mover is more useful in supporting the existence of God than the Form of the Good, because identifying God with the Prime Mover forces believers to confront the otherness of God and thus to avoid limiting or anthropomorphising God in a way that is as dangerous as it is enticing.

Clearly neo-platonists such as GE Moore, Iris Murdoch etc. would disagree with this argument, suggesting that the existence of a universal concept of goodness known through rational intuition is a persuasive argument for the existence of the Form of the Good.  They might draw on Kant’s so-called “moral argument” which suggests that the existence of the Moral Law, which presents itself synthetic a priori, makes it a duty to postulate the existence of a “God”… although “within the boundaries of reason alone”, as Plato would surely have agreed! CS Lewis’ moral argument also supports this view, suggesting that it is the rational concept of fairness, which so often causes atheists to reject God, which provides the best evidence for His existence. The concept of fairness cannot have its origins in experience after all, and yet even 2 year old children appeal to it. Nevertheless, intuitionism is not widely accepted today. Firstly, despite the big claims of Kant, Moore, Murdoch and Lewis, not everybody shares the same concept of goodness. While it is probably fair to say that the occasional sociopath does not disprove the existence of near-universal moral laws, these are better explained through psychology (Freud) and/or evolution (Trivers, Dawkins) than through a metaphysical Form of the Good today. This is partly because the Form of the Good relies on the wider Platonic world-view, where ultimate reality is metaphysical and reason a better guide to it than the evidence of the senses, when this is not widely shared in the modern – let alone the postmodern – world. It follows that Plato’s Form of the Good is not a persuasive or useful concept today.

In conclusion, the Prime Mover is a more persuasive and useful concept than the Form of the Good.  The Prime Mover is supported by more persuasive arguments than Plato’s Form of the Good, arguments which are consistent with modern science. The Prime Mover also presupposes a worldview which was widely accepted through the 19th and early 20th Centuries, while the Form of the Good depends on a worldview which has been out of favor since the Renaissance. The concept of the Prime Mover is also consistent with the Christian concept of God and, as Aquinas showed, identifying God with the Prime Mover helps Christians avoid some of the problems inherent in the univocal predication which identifying God with the Form of the Good encourages.