God’s Attributes

Assess Boethius’ view that divine eternity does not limit free will. [40 marks]

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

Boethius discusses the relationship between God’s eternity and human free will in his “consolations of philosophy” Book V.  Here, in dialogue with “Lady Philosophy” Boethius confronts the apparent problem caused by God’s omniscience, namely that it limits human free will.  He wrote: “if God foresees everything, and can in no wise be deceived, that which providence foresees to be about to happen must necessarily come to pass.”  It seems that if God knows what I will do and there are no alternate possibilities, then I am determined by God’s knowledge and cannot justly be held responsible for my actions.  This undermines God’s goodness, as Christians believe that human beings will be judged and rewarded or punished by God based on their free choices.  Boethius wrote, if God knows what we will do before we do it then “Vainly are rewards and punishments proposed for the good and bad, since no free and voluntary motion of the will has deserved either one or the other; nay, the punishment of the wicked and the reward of the righteous, which is now esteemed the perfection of justice, will seem the most flagrant injustice…” Nevertheless, Boethius argues – through Lady Philosophy’s responses – that God’s eternal omniscience is compatible with human free will, meaning that God’s omniscience does not undermine God’s omnibenevolence and justice.  Unfortunately, Boethius’ argument is unsuccessful in this respect.

Firstly, Boethius argues that because God is outside time and space, his knowledge of our choices is contingent and does not make what we choose necessary.  Boethius uses the analogy of a chariot; my knowledge that it passed me at a particular time does not make it travel faster or slower or take that route… my knowledge of its motion is contingent on its motion and does not make its motion logically or naturally necessary.  Similarly, God’s knowledge of my choices is contingent and does not determine what I choose.  St Anselm later developed Boethius’ argument, again emphasising that God’s knowledge of what I do does not make me do what I do.  However, despite Boethius’ attempt to “play the mystery card” and muddle the issue, writing “the movement of human reasoning cannot cope with the simplicity of the Divine foreknowledge”, his argument is unconvincing because if God is outside space and time then He must be wholly simple and His knowledge of creation cannot be separate from his single act of creation.  The things that God knows contingently, can’t be contingent on human choices or events in time – Boethius acknowledges that  “it is preposterous to speak of the occurrence of events in time as the cause of eternal foreknowledge” – so God knows what he knows about human choices contingently because he created us to act this way and because our choices are contingent on Him.  As St Thomas Aquinas reasoned, and more recently Gerry Hughes sj. explained, God’s knowledge is not like our knowledge… If God is wholly simple, as a timeless-eternal God must be, then God’s knowledge can only be causative and not reflective.  Boethius emphasises the difference between God’s knowledge, which comes from pure rational intuition and not from limited observation, but seemingly fails to appreciate that there can be no separation in God’s timelessly simple nature between God’s knowledge of what he creates and his action in creating it. If God’s knowledge of what we do depends on how He created us to act, then clearly Boethius view that divine eternity does not limit free will must be mistaken.

Secondly, Boethius argues that because God is outside time and space, his knowledge of events in no way precedes those events, so the use of the word “foreknowledge” to describe God’s knowledge of what is future to us is a misleading analogy.  If God’s knowledge is not really foreknowledge, but knowledge of what happens in an eternal present, then there is less sense that God’s knowledge determines choices and events.  Boethius was what Brian Leftow calls a Universal Presentist, seeing that past and future exist because they are eternally present to God.  St Anselm later developed Boethius’ argument, suggesting a four-dimensional view of time, whereby God’s knowledge of the time in which each event occurs is theoretical and part of the eternal present through which God sees creation.  Nevertheless, neither Boethius’ nor Anselm’s view of God’s eternity is compatible with human free will.  Just because every event is simultaneously present to God, there are no alternate possibilities, which is the very definition of determinism.  Further, Boethius’ view of God relating to creation in an “eternal present” only emphasises how Boethius’ Classical Theist God is incompatible with the Bible and thus Christian Theology and faith.  If God’s creation of the world, the fall, the incarnation and atonement, as well as the eschaton and final judgement occur concurrently to God then there can have been no other option for humanity but to have sinned and been saved… their choices were immaterial, and what God punished them for and then saved them from through Grace was always part of God’s design.  As Nelson Pike pointed out, the God of the Bible is “unavoidably tensed”, suggesting that Boethius’ view of divine eternity must be mistaken.  Further, as Anthony Kenny pointed out, the timeless-eternal view of God is “radically incoherent” and leads the divine attributes to be empty… a timeless-eternal God is incapable of acting in time, being morally good or responding to prayer or events.  What, then does it mean to call this being God, who is apparently impotent, amoral and unresponsive?  William Lane Craig likens the timeless eternal God to a granite block and rightly asks what the point of worshipping that would be!  Again, Boethius’ view that divine eternity does not limit human free will is mistaken because it contradicts its own claim that God’s knowledge must be the same as God’s creative action within God’s wholly simple nature, and because this whole concept of God is not compatible with Christian theology or faith. 

Of course, Boethius’ view has its defenders.  EL Mascall used string theory to suggest that God’s knowledge might have a temporal pole and an atemporal pole, yet while this is a helpful analogy in terms of understanding how God’s eternity might coexist with time and space, it does little to explain how God’s knowledge does not determine our actions.  On the contrary, if God’s knowledge of what I will do at any point in time depends on knowledge that is fixed at its other eternal pole there seems if anything less opportunity for me to act spontaneously.  Further, as already explained, St Anselm saw in Boethius’ view a way to reconcile God’s eternal omniscience with free will, and – according to Katherin A. Rogers in “Anselm and Freedom” (2009) his development of Boethius’ argument “offers a definition of freewill which involves a hierarchy of choice, prefiguring that recently proposed by Harry Frankfurt” p. 60  Like St Augustine, Frankfurt defines freedom as the ability to do what one wants to do.  Remember, St Augustine defines God’s omnipotence as His being able to do whatever He wants to do.  Similarly, for Frankfurt and – if Rogers is correct in her analysis – for Anselm, and perhaps for Boethius also, a person is free if they can do what they want to do. As Rogers reads him, Anselm argues that the human will is created by God with the twin desires for benefit and for justice… the will is created to want both, but able to decide which to pursue and how.  The will, created in the image of God, has aseity and decides freely and not because of preceding natural causes.  Here, Anselm was perhaps anticipated by Boethius, who wrote “that which hath the natural use of reason has the faculty of discriminative judgment, and of itself distinguishes what is to be shunned or desired…” [Consolation Book V.I] Which suggests that human freedom resides in the ability of the will to decide which desire to pursue.  This analysis suggests that Boethius and Anselm were at the least compatibilists on the issue of free will, and that their reasoning may have allowed for a greater measure of freedom. Nevertheless, Rogers’ analysis focuses on the work of St Anselm, which goes well beyond Boethius’ argument, so just because St Anselm’s view of divine eternity might be compatible with some very limited free will does not mean that Boethius view alone can do this.

In conclusion, Boethius’ view that divine eternity does not limit human free will is mistaken.  Boethius’ view of divine eternity is self-contradictory – reasoning that God’s knowledge can’t be prior knowledge because of God’s eternity, but then relying on God’s knowledge being separate from God’s action in creating what he knows.  Further, Boethius’ view of divine eternity only emphasizes the lack of any alternate possibilities, which shows that his view is inconsistent with Christian theology and faith.  While Boethius’ failure to reconcile divine eternity and human free will does not mean that Classical Theism will always lead to hard determinism, as Rogers’ argument regarding St Anselm’s development of Boethius’ position has shown, the possible success of later developments of his argument does not mean that Boethius’ own view was persuasive. 

‘Anselm’s four-dimensionalist approach successfully explains God’s action in time.’ Discuss. [40]

/ vardycharlotte / 1 Comment

St Anselm developed his understanding of how God relates to and acts in time on the basis of work already done by Boethius and before that by St Augustine. All these Classical Theists understood that God exists eternally, outside time and space. This means that Aristotle’s arguments for a Prime Mover, as well as Plato’s arguments for a Form of the Good, lend rational support for faith in God. Nevertheless, placing God outside time and space raises significant questions concerning if and how God can act within time, as well as what God’s knowledge of events within time is like and what God’s goodness can entail. If God is outside time and space then all of God’s actions – including every word that God says – must be concurrent within one simple, single act of creation. St Augustine, Boethius and St Anselm all attempted to resolve the particular problem of how God’s eternal foreknowledge seems to nullify human free will, and yet even St Anselm’s sophisticated understanding fails to explain for this, let alone how God could act in time, successfully.

Firstly, what Katherin A. Rogers claims to be St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism represents no real improvement over Boethius’ Universal Presentism in resolving the question of God’s relationship with time, whether regarding God’s knowledge or God’s actions. Whereas Presentism usually entails the belief that only the present moment really exists, the past and the future being illusory, in Boethius’ understanding because every moment is present to God, the future and past are as real as what we perceive to be the present. As Brian Leftow (in PRESENTISM, ATEMPORALITY, AND TIME’S WAY) explains, “Boethius is a temporal presentist… consider his classic simile: an atemporal God is as if on a mountain top, looking out on an entire future those lower down cannot see. It is part of the image that all the future is really there at once to be seen.” (p176) Yet this causes a problem for Boethius when it comes to God’s foreknowledge. If God sees the “future” in the same eternal moment as the “present”, how can any being be free? Because God knows what every being will do there are no alternate possibilities. Boethius argues that this problem results from out imperfect understanding of God’s eternal nature… “the reason of this obscurity is that the movement of human reasoning cannot cope with the simplicity of the Divine foreknowledge” Book V. Further, Boethius suggests that God’s knowledge does not make the outcomes of free actions logically necessary because God’s knowledge of them is contingent and dependent on those choices and outcomes occurring. “Boethius’s solution to the freedom-foreknowledge problem hinges on the claim that God’s knowledge is of all time at once and observational...” (Leftow, p176) Yet how can God’s knowledge of an event truly be conditional on that event taking place, such as to avoid making that event necessary, when God’s knowledge is eternal and identical with God’s power and goodness in God’s simple, single act of creation? Boethius’ analogy of the Chariot does nothing to help, because by his own admission, God’s knowledge is completely different to any knowledge we could have and because, as Boethius himself reminds us, there is no way that God could learn from us… as it seems He would have to if his knowledge of what we do depends on us. Further, St Anselm’s more developed position does little to resolve the problem. Like Boethius he contends that God’s knowledge, being of an eternal present, is not prior to events and so does not necessitate them. Whereas Boethius is what Leftow calls a “Universal Presentist”, St Anselm contends “but simply, you are, outside all time. For yesterday and to-day and to-morrow have no existence, except in time; but you, although nothing exists without you, nevertheless do not exist in space or time, but all things exist in you. For nothing contains you, but you contain all.” Proslogium XIX This suggests that every moment, whether we perceive it to be past, present or future, exist not only in God’s sight, but within God’s eternal being. Reflecting on what this might mean, St Anselm wrote in De Concordia 1.5 “although within eternity there is only a present, nonetheless it is not the temporal present, as is ours, but is an eternal present in which the whole of time is contained.” explaining that… “Eternity has its own simultaneity, in which exist all things that occur at the same time . . . and . . . at different times.” While Boethius position is so similar as to be identical in places, Katherin A. Rogers argues that this makes St Anselm the first true Four-Dimensionalist. She writes “Anselm, in a very clear and conscious way, adopts what I will call the “four-dimensionalist” theory of time, sometimes also called the “tenseless” theory. He is, to my knowledge, the first philosopher in history to do so.” She claims that St Anselm’s understanding of God’s relationship with time “does succeed in solving the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge,” which might imply that it would also resolve the question of God’s eternal action. Nevertheless, Rogers’ detailed argument concerning the differences between St Anselm, Boethius and St Augustine does little to advance St Anselm’s position. While it is true that when it comes to St Augustine and Boethius, “neither elaborates his views clearly enough to rule out other interpretations” (than four dimensionalism) it is fair to say that both philosophers positions suggest that every moment is present to God, and that God’s knowledge of events is not prior to those events occurring so can’t be understood to cause those events. Given this specific overlap between Boethius and Anselm, the technicalities of their positions as regards God and time seem largely irrelevant. Rogers ends by simply restating Anselm’s argument, that God’s knowledge of the outcomes of “free” actions does not make them happen, because although God’s knowledge of those outcomes removes any alternate possibilities God’s knowledge of what we perceive to be future events is knowledge of eternally present events to God. Yet, in all practically, this is the point already made by Boethius, that God’s knowledge of “future” events is conditional like our knowledge of a chariot passing, so not such as would influence or determine such events. Whether made by Anselm or Boethius, this argument is unsuccessful in resolving the problem of freedom and foreknowledge because by these Classical Theists’ own arguments, God’s knowledge is not like ours, being simple and identical with God’s power and being. My knowing that a chariot passes by does not make the chariot speed up or slow down, but God’s knowing is the same as his doing and his being… and his knowing, doing and being in what seems to be this moment to us is concurrent with his total knowledge, action and being because His nature is to be eternal and so wholly simple. It is difficult to accept that actions can be anything other than determined when they are part of God’s eternal necessity in this way. This shows that St Anselm’s four dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time, successfully.

Secondly, St Anselm’s so-called Four Dimensionalism is just as inadequate as Boethius’ or Augustine’s Universal Presentism in accounting for God’s actions in time. For example, the Bible’s Salvation Narrative is, as Nelson Pike once observed, “unavoidably tensed”. St Anselm’s four dimensionalist account of God’s relationship with time suggests that every moment is present in God, suggesting that the creation is a simple, single act. However, if the creation happened at the same moment as the Fall, if Moses received the Law from God at the same moment as the same Law was fulfilled in Jesus, if the incarnation, the resurrection and the second coming all really happened at once, then there seems precious little point in Christianity. Human free will and moral responsibility are null and God’s justice a joke. As St Augustine recognized in Book XII of his Confessions, if God is timeless-eternal and wholly simple, as rationally it seems that He must be, “what was spoken was not spoken successively, one thing concluded that the next might be spoken, but all things together and eternally. Else have we time and change; and not a true eternity nor true immortality…” When God said “let there be light” – as if in the same breath he said “I am what I am” and “this is my Son; listen to Him”… meaning either that all apparent “revelations” of God’s words which imply time and a sequence of events are effective fakes… or that God intended to deceive us into thinking his words and actions responded to events and individuals. Either interpretation is gravely problematic for Christians. So much of the Bible depends on God’s actions and words being sequential that accepting a timeless-eternal view of God could only result in abandoning the Bible as a meaningful source of authority. Further, suggesting that God intended to deceive us when he seemed to speak with and respond to the Prophets, or when he seems to respond to our prayers, is both incompatible with St Anselm’s own account of God’s omnipotence – which expressly excludes God’s ability to act from impotence, such as by lying or deceiving people (“Therefore, O Lord, our God, the more truly are you omnipotent, since you are capable of nothing through impotence” Proslogion Book VII) – and a fundamental assault on the Christian faith. What would Christianity be if God’s personal response to prayer and events can only be understood as the equivalent of an AI chatbot response, pre-programmed to give the appearance of personal service by some cynical cost-saving consultant! Again, it seems that St Anselm’s four dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time, successfully.

Of course, St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism would be defended by Katherin A. Rogers, who would suggest that it is successful in explaining how God can know all events without removing the possibility of free actions or the justice of holding free agents responsible for what they choose to do. She points out how St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism is an improvement over the work of other classical theists who suggest that God’s eternal knowledge is so different and abstract that God’s omniscience might entail him not knowing what day it is! Nevertheless, in making God’s knowledge of ever present knowledge a function of God’s perfect self-knowledge, St Anselm comes very close to suggesting that all of creation exists within God. This striking view implies that God’s knowledge is contingent and depends on events, rather than causing them. While this is useful in facilitating free will, because being eternal God’s knowledge is identical with God’s action and God’s being, it also implies that God’s being contains time and space, whose nature is dynamic and the precise opposite to how God’s necessary being is usually understood. How can God be immutable if God’s knowledge depends on contingent events and God’s being contains all contingencies? St Anselm can’t pick and choose, maintaining that God’s knowledge is of contingencies but God’s being is necessary and immutable… if God is eternal, He is wholly simple and, as St Anselm himself explains in Proslogium XVIII all His attributes are really one attribute. Again, it seems that St Anselm’s four dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time, successfully.

Further, the alternative explanations of the relationship between God’s eternity and his action offered by Richard Swinburne is scarcely more successful than that offered by St Anselm. Swinburne suggests that an everlasting-in-time God could do anything which is compatible with His own previous actions and his attributes of omnibenevolence and omniscience. As in, God’s omnipotence consists in His being able to do anything that He wills (as St Augustine originally contended), bearing in mind that an omniscient being would not will anything contrary to what He has previously willed or which does not bring about the best possible world. This is a coherent explanation of God’s omnipotence which is better than St Anselm’s explanation in making sense of the Bible, and in making sense of God’s tendency to act in some situations and not in others. If God, from his omniscient (although temporal) perspective, could see that X action would bring about a worse outcome than doing nothing, then He would do nothing. Nevertheless, God’s omniscience could not entail His ability to know the outcomes of free actions, because He in His omnipotence made them free, so God’s assessment of the situation must needs be dynamic and ever-changing. Despite this, Swinburne’s account of God’s relationship with time is unsuccessful in explaining how God’s actions could be omnipotent in an absolute sense… God cannot break the laws of logic (as JL Mackie demanded that an omnipotent being should be able to do) because those same laws depend on God’s previous actions in creating said laws. In this regard, Anselm’s four-dimensionalism is more persuasive than Swinburne’s understanding, because being in-time Swinburne’s God is constrained in the present moment by His own past actions, which seems more of a constraint than actions which appear to be at different times to us having to be consistent with each other within God’s single, timeless creative act. Further, while Swinburne’s God can’t know the outcomes of free actions, and while this facilitates libertarian free will and genuine moral responsibility, this also radically limits God’s knowledge of the future, as human actions affect so much, given climate-change even the existence of the Earth. In supporting God’s knowledge of how events would seem to us from any given point in time as well as maintaining God’s knowledge of every moment as present, Anselm’s four-dimensionalism makes more sense of God’s knowledge than traditional Presentism, which holds that God knows every moment as present, but not which moment is present to us. It also makes more sense than Swinburne’s account of God’s knowledge, whereby God’s knowledge is radically limited by His decision to self-limit when it comes to the outcomes of free actions. Overall, while Swinburne’s account of God’s eternity is much more useful for Christianity than St Anselm’s, it offers interpretations of God’s attributes which turn out to be almost as empty as those of the Classical Theists. It seems that while St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time successfully, so also other thinkers fail to resolve this problem.

In conclusion, St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time successfully. Yet, this problem remains without a resolution. Classical theism renders God’s attributes empty words and faith in His existence pointless and yet Theistic Personalism, such as presented by Richard Swinburne, renders God’s attributes almost equally empty and surrenders the classical arguments as direct support for their God’s existence along the way. Much as Theistic Personalists like to co-opt the classical arguments for God’s existence to serve in cumulative arguments for God’s existence, or to defend the “reasonableness” of faith… they ignore or evade the fact that these same arguments support a God who is timeless-eternal and not a God who is everlasting-in-time. In the end, they like St Anselm must make a choice… either accept all of the implications of a rationally defensible faith-position and abandon Christianity, or stop appealing to reason at all and accept that faith in an everlasting God with meaningful attributes can only be based on experience.

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

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

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. 

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.

 

 

“An omnipotent God could have created free beings who always choose what is right!” Discuss [40]

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

With this point atheist philosopher JL Mackie rejected the classical Free Will Defense theodicy, relied on by generations of Christians to defend God against charges of creating and/or allowing evil and suffering.  Going further, in his article “Evil and Omnipotence” (1955) Mackie argued that the absolute logical contradiction between believing that God is omnipotent and acknowledging the reality of evil in the world He created demonstrates that God cannot exist.  Considering a range of classical theodicies, Mackie notes how each limits the meaning of an essential divine attribute to the extent that faith becomes difficult.  For example, he argued that saying that evil is a necessary corollary of good limits what God’s “omnipotence” means to the extent that God is limited by the laws of logic and seems compelled to create anyway, despite the fact that what he creates will result in horrendous suffering.  It is difficult to reconcile this with faith based on God being the Father “almighty” and also benevolent, caring about human beings and seeking to minimize suffering.   Mackie’s article is persuasive.  His argument that an omnipotent God cannot be understood to be limited by the laws of logic while remaining true to what it is that theists believe in is difficult to deny.  Yet it is still possible to believe in the existence of an omnipotent, all-good God, in a way that is rational, despite the evil in the world. It is not necessarily correct to claim that God, though omnipotent, cannot do what is logically impossible and create free beings who always choose to do what is right .

Omnipotence means having the power to do anything. This seems straightforward, but it is important to appreciate that there are different ways of understanding what this entails precisely. Rene Descartes  is usually held up as the example of a Philosopher who claimed that God’s omnipotence involves His power to do what is impossible – create a square circle or a rock that is too heavy for Him to lift to use Avicenna’s famous example. He did write “God could have brought it about … that it was not true that twice four make eight”, but putting this claim in context reveals that Descartes’ position on Omnipotence was more sophisticated. For Descartes, ultimate reality is metaphysical, in the world of ideas.   He famously wrote “I think, therefore I am”, pointing out that there is no way to know that the world I experience through my senses is how it seems. The senses frequently lie and I could be dreaming after all. The only thing, Descartes claimed, that I can know with any certainty is that I am thinking and therefore that I must exist. From that tiny basis of certainty, Descartes extrapolated to the limits of possible knowledge using reason and mathematics. Clear and distinct ideas exist, confused and contradictory ideas do not. God necessarily exists because existence is a perfection and is an undeniable property of the supremely perfect being . Because God IS existence for Descartes, He doesn’t do the impossible as much as determine what is and what is not possible. Of course this means that God might make things possible that seem to us to be impossible, but not within this world. God exists through eternity while human understanding is bounded by a particular place and time and is limited. From our perspective now it seems that 4×2=8 is a clear and distinct idea, containing no contradiction, but for all we know God might have made 4×2=9 instead or in some other reality. Either way, this understanding of God’s omnipotence does not have to support Mackie’s conclusion that God cannot be all good. Human freedom and always choosing what is good are indeed contradictory, yet there is nothing contradictory about God being all-good in the sense of being supremely perfect as Descartes understood it and God’s including both freedom and the ability do evil in His plan. To reject the idea that a good God could wish human beings to be capable of evil and causing suffering is to interpret God’s goodness as moral goodness. This makes no sense if God is supremely perfect, because God causes moral laws to exist and cannot be bound by them. Of course, this raises its own questions about whether a God whose goodness is not moral and includes wishing human beings to be able to choose what is evil and cause suffering is worthy of worship, but it does not support Mackie’s conclusion that God cannot rationally be held to exist .

Secondarily, in his Summa Theologica (1264) St Thomas Aquinas took a different approach to establishing God’s necessary existence and supreme perfection. Aquinas reasoned inductively from observations of movement, causation, contingency, grades of perfection and teleology in the universe to the necessary existence of a being “which everybody calls God“.  Aquinas went on to reason that God must be the Prime Mover, absolutely uncaused and unchanged in Himself, outside even the framework of time and space, timelessly eternal.  In this way aquinas’ God – as the cause of everything – is omnipotent.  God is the originator of all movement and causation in the universe and what makes the existence of an infinite universe built entirely of contingencies possible. Further, Aquinas’ wholly simple God is pure act, 100% whatever it is to be God.  Outside of time (and space) God can have no potential and cannot fall short (be evil in the Aristotelian sense) in any way, so He is also all-good.  For Aquinas, God necessarily exists.  As the originating cause of everything, God’s omnipotence also contains His perfect goodness, since God caused the time and space required for evil and is not contained within it.  God’s attributes are in fact simple, single, indivisible. It is only because human language and comprehension is limited that we have to describe and try to understand God’s nature through multiple analogies. Mackie contends that God cannot be considered truly omnipotent if he cannot break the laws of logic in this world, but this seems to ignore Aquinas’ argument that God’s creative act was timeless and simple.  For Aquinas, God’s omnipotence extends only to what is actually possible.  God can do whatever is compatible with His nature and internally consistent within His single, simple creative act.  God cannot create a contradiction or create and not create simultaneously, because – as Richard Swinburne pointed out in “The Coherence of Theism” – that is not really possible and God’s omnipotence only means that he can do anything that is possible .

Certainly, Aquinas’ wholly simple God cannot sin.  Being 100% actual and timeless, God is whatever God is and necessarily cannot fall short of His nature or be considered evil.  Further, since God creates timelessly, his creation must fulfil his purpose for it and be timelessly complete, 100% whatever God intended it to be from His point of view and so good.  Yet despite not being able to sin, not being in any way evil and producing a completely good world in relation to his intentions for it, Aquinas’ understanding of God’s goodness does not necessarily conflict with His wanting freedom to involve the ability to choose what is evil, with all the consequences that flow from that. By Aquinas’ model, time and space are functions of our perception and are not objectively real properties of the universe.   From my point of view time has passed since I started to write this essay and it now takes up more space than it did, but my perception of reality is just a partial, subjective view of the case.  From God’s perspective all time and all space are as-one, fulfilled as the universe is fulfilled and complete.  As Boethius put it in the “Consolations of Philosophy” (Book V) God sees everything “all at once as present”. To use a modern analogy, it is as if God is writing the source-code for a computer program.  Being a perfect programmer, the code is simple and elegant – he can see it all at once.  He has total power over the program and total knowledge of its capabilities.  The program does 100% of what it was designed for.  This is not the same as God sitting on the shoulder of people using the program in different places and over time, watching them use it in different ways more or less well. This means that (as John Macquarrie pointed out in “The Principles of Christian Theology”) God’s power is very different from our power, God’s goodness is very different from our goodness.  God’s omnipotence does NOT include his ability to do the logically impossible, create a square circle, or a free being who can only choose what is right, but this does not mean that he is constrained by laws of logic that exist prior to or above God.  God’s actions are only limited within this world and in relation to other aspects of the same single, timeless act of creation.  God can do anything that is compatible with His perfect nature and internally coherent within a simple, single act of creation. He can do anything that is absolutely, actually possible and that does not include creating free beings who only choose what is right .

Of course, for all we know, God might have created a different world in which square circles and free beings who always choose what is right are possible, but we know from the existence of this world that he created this world. This world must, therefore, fulfil God’s intention for it and at least be of the Best Possible World type (to use Swinburne’s phrase) with respect to that intention. Remember, it is not a case of God creating things – or laws of logic – individually over time.  Creation must be simple, single and complete from God’s timeless perspective.  Mackie asks: Surely it would have been better to create a world with laws of logic which allow for both freedom and 100% good choices?  Yet what makes him hang on to the idea that God’s goodness precludes the possibility of evil being part of His design.  As for Descartes, for Aquinas, God’s goodness refers only to his pure timeless actuality and should not be understood to imply a moral dimension. It is perfectly rational to conclude that a timelessly omnipotent, timelessly good God exists, even if we object to evil and to the suffering it causes us.  Mackie’s argument fails to demonstrate that belief in an omnipotent, all-good God is irrational in the light of evil in the world, although it does highlight the limited content attributes like “omnipotent” and “all-good” can have in relation to a timeless, wholly simple being .

To be fair, Mackie makes just this point.  “Evil and Omnipotence” concludes… “there is no valid solution of the problem [of evil] which does not modify at least one of the constituent propositions [i.e. God’s attributes] in a way which would seriously affect the essential core of the theistic position” Mackie is right to point out that Aquinas’ wholly simple God may be rationally satisfying, but it falls far short of the God most people worship.  The Bible records God acting directly in history and the lives of individuals; people claim to have experienced visions, voices and miracles directly from God.  When believers pray they hope that God can and will respond and when people are in trouble believers hope that God understands their plight and can act to help them.  Certainly, Aquinas tries to explain how these beliefs can still have content in relation to a wholly simple God, but his explanations are less than convincing.

  • Firstly, the idea that God’s actions are part of general, not special providence – that God always planned to bring the Israelites through the Red Sea, that God always planned that the Babylonians would take the people into captivity, that God always planned that Jesus should die on the cross – raises enormous questions about human freedom and resultantly, about God’s goodness.  If Adam and Eve being banished from the garden was factored into the single, simple act of creation, to what extent can they – and all human beings – rightly be held responsible for their original sin, be in need of Salvation or have the power to accept it?
  • Secondly, if creation is complete from God’s perspective, the end has already happened and it is difficult to see how anybody has any meaningful choice at all.  Small actions have big consequences, so every tiny decision we make might seem to have the potential to change the outcomes of creation… it follows, therefore, that human freedom must be, or be very close to, an illusion for Aquinas.  In this case, how can people be held morally responsible in this world?  How can an all-good God justly reward or punish people on the basis of choices that He Himself determined?  It is difficult to conceive of satisfactory answers to these questions.
  • Thirdly, Aquinas’ wholly simple God – although omnipotent – cannot be understood to act directly in response to events within the world, or even to have reflective knowledge of how his creation is perceived from within through the spatio-temporal framework.  This is not a God who can respond to prayers, as most theists hope that He can.  The idea that some of God’s actions are actually effected by intermediaries such as angels or saints is more convincing, but it is still hard for believers to pray to, worship or even respect an omnipotent God knowing that he cannot understand their plight or respond Himself.

 

Aquinas’ God is necessarily distant; His timeless omnipotence and His perfect goodness actually stands in the way of God being the God most Christians worship.  It follows that Aquinas’ wholly simple model of God does not definitively resolve the paradox of omnipotence highlighted by Mackie or defend faith against the possibility of having to accept that God caused or allowed evil and suffering, unless the Doctrine of the Trinity works as a means of explaining how God can be BOTH wholly simple and timeless AND active in the world and the lives of individuals, something it can never do on a purely rational basis .

Mackie’s argument boils down to the claim that if God is omnipotent, He must be responsible for evil and cannot therefore be all-good.  Either an omnipotent God knew about the horrendous consequences of creating free beings who can choose evil and chose to create anyway or God did not know, had to create or was otherwise constrained by the laws of logic and was not omnipotent.  Mackie presents omnipotence as a paradox; neither definition supports theism because few people would worship a God who is limited in power and fewer would worship a God who is malevolent.  Yet the possibility of God choosing to limit His knowledge of outcomes in order to make human freedom genuine remains open.  In “The Puzzle of God” (1993) Peter Vardy argued that God could have acted like King Cophetua, who hid his true identity so that the beggar-maid had the opportunity of coming to love him for himself rather than for his power. Vardy’s analogy was originally intended to make a point about how God could have self-limited with respect to his omnipotence, making the incarnation possible, and yet it might be re-purposed to explain Maquarrie’s broader argument that God could have self-limited with respect to his omniscience in order that human free will could be meaningful and support a genuine opportunity for people to choose what is right and earn salvation for themselves.  Recognising the inadequacy of Boethius’ understanding of God’s knowledge being only contingently necessary, this argument assumes that for freedom to be real, God could not know what it would lead to as then God’s knowledge of the end point would in a sense make that end point inevitable however free people may feel in the moment.  God might choose, therefore, to self-limit because human freedom was an essential part of the Best Possible World, as proponents of the Free Will Defence theodicy such as St Augustine and Alvin Plantinga have suggested. Nevertheless, this response to Mackie is not entirely convincing.  If God chooses to self-limit and as a result has no knowledge of the consequences of human free-will, he must have chosen to distance himself from His creation to a very great extent.  Is it worth worshipping a God who has no idea what is happening in history or in the lives of individuals?  Would such a self-limited God be able to work miracles or respond to prayer, when knowledge of the circumstances must involve His knowledge of at least some consequences of free will?  One possible way round this would be to suppose that God delegates the power to respond to crises to angels, saints or other intermediary beings.  Yet there is still a question over whether theism is supported by distant God who can only respond indirectly through general providence.  Take the analogy of Microsoft.  It designs Windows with regular updates, a troubleshooting module and has a FAQ page on its website, but if there was no helpline number to call when these proved inadequate, and no ability for the company to recognize and resolve improbable issues as they arise, few people would rate customer service highly, let alone regard the company as perfect !

In conclusion, JL Mackie raises important questions about the coherence of the Christian concept of God. He points out that there is no way that an omnipotent, all-good deity – as understood by most believers – can be excused from charges of creating or allowing evil and suffering by appealing to human free-will. Nevertheless, Mackie does not succeed in his aim of showing that it is impossible to reconcile the existence of an omnipotent, all-good deity with the reality of evil and suffering in this world and that atheism is the only rational conclusion. Mackie’s argument only highlights the superficiality of most believers’ understanding of what omnipotence and goodness could mean when applied to God. He is right that there is no way to sustain what he defines as “the essential core of the theistic position”, yet he does not establish that it is absolutely impossible either to base theism on a different core or to sustain deism. In the end, it is not true to say that “An omnipotent God could have created free beings who always choose what is right!” It would be more accurate to say that “For all we know, an omnipotent God could have created another, different world in which free beings always choose what is right”. Yet the fact remains that this-world, with all its limitations, exists and that if God exists, He must have created it. Further, it is unreasonable to speculate about what that world would be like or make facile judgements about which world-type would be “better”. The laws of logic by which we make these judgements depend on the world we live in and presumably don’t apply to other worlds or comparisons between worlds in the way that they don’t apply to a timeless God. Mackie’s conclusion, that atheism is reasonable position, is persuasive, but in the end it is not unreasonable to disagree .

 

 

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

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

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.

 

 

“Boethius proved that God’s omniscience is compatible with human free will.” Discuss (40)

/ vardycharlotte

Boethius’ discussion of Divine omniscience can be found in his Consolations of Philosophy, Book 5.  Facing his own death, Boethius reflects on the human condition and imagines a dialogue with Lady Philosophy, who points out the vast web of Aristotelian causation in which our lives are caught. In Part I Boethius asks…

“in this series of linked causes is there any freedom left to our will, or does the chain of fate bind also the very motions of our souls?’

pointing to a problem that has always dogged Classical Theism.  If God is Omnipotent, and if Omnipotence entails omniscience, then it is difficult to maintain any meaningful degree of human freedom.  Without freedom there seems to be no convincing way of defending God against charges of creating or at least allowing gratuitous suffering.  A God who is omniscient cannot also be benevolent.  Boethius proceeds to explore this problem and then attempts to resolve it by clarifying the very nature of God and therefore the nature of His foreknowledge, yet his resolution fails to show how Omniscience and human freedom are compatible in the end.

In Book 5 part III, Boethius sets out the paradox of omnipotence in some detail.  Drawing on Platonic philosophy, and the eternal model of God suggested to Christian Neoplatonists by the Timaeus, Boethius saw God’s eternal existence and nature as a necessary conclusion of rational reflection on a contingent world.  However, accepting God’s eternity comes with problems.  Boethius pointed out…

“if from eternity He foreknows not only what men will do, but also their designs and purposes, there can be no freedom of the will”

and explained how neither the suggestion that God’s knowledge of them makes future events necessary nor the suggestion that God’s knowledge is contingent on events in time are satisfactory.  J.M.E. McTaggart (1866–1925) differentiated between a God whose knowledge of events is from a perspective in time (A series eternity) and a God whose knowledge of events is from a perspective outside time whereby all events are simultaneous in the mind of God (B series eternity).  Boethius argued that putting God’s perspective in time, giving him A series eternity, makes God’s knowledge depend on time and the things that happen within it.  If I watch a bus arriving at its stop, my knowledge of it happening depends on the bus doing what it is doing and on time passing to facilitate what it is doing.  Clearly, in this scenario my knowledge of the bus does not determine the bus in doing what it does – I could not reasonably be held responsible for the bus being early, late or punctual – and yet it is also true that my knowledge of the future is limited because I cannot know what has not yet happened.  This sort of A series eternity fails to support the supreme knowledge and power that Classical Theists impute to God.  However there are also problems with B series eternity, as Boethius pointed out.  If God has a timeless perspective and knows all things and events simply and singly, then it seems to follow that future events happen necessarily because they are known by God before they happen and because they cannot not happen.  Consequently,

“what an upset of human affairs manifestly ensues! Vainly are rewards and punishments proposed for the good and bad, since no free and voluntary motion of the will has deserved either one or the other… And therefore neither virtue nor vice is anything, but rather good and ill desert are confounded together… Again, no ground is left for hope or prayer, since how can we hope for blessings, or pray for mercy, when every object of desire depends upon the links of an unalterable chain of causation?”

Boethius sets out how if God knows things that might not come to pass, then His knowledge is limited and if God’s knowledge depends on how things are in time, His power is limited.  He accepts that on the issue of omniscience rests the plausibility of Religion – for without genuine human freedom there can be no morality, no hope for meaningful salvation and no real communication with the Divine. In Part IV Boethius addresses this fundamental problem by attempting to show that God’s foreknowledge of events is not necessary by pointing out that God’s knowledge is not like human knowledge, and suggesting that freedom and foreknowledge could be compatible for God in a way that they do not seem to be to us. God’s knowledge, argues Boethius, is not due to physical senses, nor to imagination, nor to thought, but is instead the knowledge of pure intelligence which understands the very underpinnings of reality

“by surveying all things, so to speak, under the aspect of pure form by a single flash of intuition.” 

For Boethius,

“eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment… since God abides for ever in an eternal present, His knowledge, also transcending all movement of time, dwells in the simplicity of its own changeless present, and, embracing the whole infinite sweep of the past and of the future, contemplates all that falls within its simple cognition as if it were now taking place. “ (Book 5, Part VI)

This is persuasive; St Augustine discussed something similar in The Confessions (354–430) and St. Thomas Aquinas extended and developed a very similar position in the Summa Theologica (1264).   However, the price of resolving the conflict between foreknowledge and free-will seems to push God far into timeless abstraction and seeming unknowability.  Arguably, this approach preserves the technical plausibility of Religion by sacrificing the practical plausibility of Religion and so achieves, at most, a pyrrhic victory.  Surely, it is no more meaningful to pray to “pure intelligence” – whose knowledge of individual circumstances is limited to part of a single flash of intuition unsullied by sight, imagination or thought – than it is to pray to a being who has determined the prayer, its cause and its outcome by His very existence?  Further, the meaning of the divine attributes would be severely restricted by pushing God outside the spatio-temporal framework that describes ordinary human language.  What can the words “benevolence” or “power” really mean in a timeless sense?  A timeless God cannot have choice – because choice implies a time before and after a choice is made and the possibility of things being other than they are.  A timeless God cannot act – because action implies a time before and after at the very least.  As Sir Anthony Kenny pointed out that the concept of a timeless God seems “radically incoherent.”  He wrote…

“my typing of this paper is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Again, on this view, the great fire of Rome is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Therefore, while I type these very words, Nero fiddles heartlessly on.” (Kenny, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford, Clarendon Press) 1979, 38–9)

The idea that a timeless God can do or be anything that is comprehensible through normal concepts and words is ridiculous.  There is no shared analogical meaning between words applied to God and the world, whatever Aquinas tried to argue.

Boethius was aware of this problem in positing a completely timeless God and tried to reconcile his claim that God exists in a timeless eternity with God having the ability to know events as they happen and a degree of freedom or openness in the future.  In Part VI he argued that while God sees events an eternal present, God’s knowledge cannot be understood to cause them to happen.  God can know an event or action that is genuinely free because his knowledge is of an eternal present rather than a future as we would understand it…  Taking the bus analogy again, God witnesses its journey like a single stack of still photographs.  Every step of the journey is known as if in the present – God’s knowledge is not constrained by time because he sees everything now, but God’s knowledge still depends on the way things are rather than making them the way that they are and removing all freedom. God’s knowledge is neither conditional (as ours usually is) nor simply necessary (as would be the case with a completely timeless God who would be unaware of any present).  God’s knowledge is unlike any form of human knowledge in that it is conditionally necessary.  The very categories “contingent” and “simply necessary” suggest temporal and logical frameworks that do not apply to God who creates these frameworks and exists outside them.  While this is persuasive, God’s conditionally necessary knowledge of events seems little more religiously satisfying than God’s timeless knowledge of events.  God’s experience of an eternal present is almost as different from human experience as a genuinely timeless experience would be.  The preservation of free will, moral responsibility and divine benevolence is by no means clear either.  If God knows future events now and they cannot be other than how they are, then whether God knows them as if in an eternal present or otherwise, it is difficult to see how anything can really change by human agency.

EL Mascall tried to suggest that quantum science could provide a model for understanding how God’s actions could both be timeless and have an appearance of being in time if each action could be conceived to have a timeless and a temporal pole which are interrelated, this does not advance the discussion by much.  Mascall is just restating the assertion that things would look different from God’s point of view in different language.  He doesn’t seem to do more explain how God can both know the future in a way that God ensures that nothing but what God knows can happen and not be responsible for what happens.  Other contemporary writers, such as Eleonore Stump, Norman Kretzmann, and Brian Leftow, have also tried to modify the timeless model of God by insisting that God’s timeless eternity has some of the features of temporal duration.  The project that Boethius started retains its interest because arguably, the plausibility of religion depends on its success.  However, the project has yet to yield conclusive results.

In addition, Protestant scholars Nelson Pike and Richard Swinburne have developed related arguments.  For Nelson Pike the idea that God’s knowledge can be that of pure intelligence taking in the whole of reality in a single flash of intuition is incompatible with the God revealed through the Bible.  The God of the Bible – of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to borrow Pascal’s phrase – is active and responsive and seemingly possessed of the ability to see, hear, imagine, think and even feel.  In his essay “Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action” (1965) Pike points out that whatever metaphorical interpretations are put on Biblical accounts of God wrestling Jacob or speaking with Moses or acknowledging Jesus at His Baptism, God’s knowledge is inescapably tensed.  If this is true, then it is difficult to see how Boethius model of a God experiencing an eternal present could be acceptable to people of mainstream Christian faith. A timeless model of God – even the modified timeless model proposed by Boethius – conflicts with the Biblical account of His creative action and nature.  Swinburne agreed, pointing out that…

“The God of the Hebrew Bible… is pictured as being in continual interaction with humans – humans sin, then God is angry, then humans repent, then God forgives them…” (The Coherence of Theism 2nd ed. 2016 p233)

Without the idea of God responding to human sin and human repentance, there is no obvious way to preserve what is meaningful about Christianity.  Swinburne adds that…

“The Hebrew Bible shows no knowledge of the doctrine of divine timelessness… God is represented as saying “I am the Alpha and the Omega…”  … but it seems to me to be reading far too much into such phrases to interpret them as implying the doctrine of divine timelessness.”  (Ibid. p230)

Although the ideas of God’s timelessness or eternity are philosophically useful in that they provide possible means of defending God against responsibility for suffering – including inflicting endless fiery punishment arbitrarily – the ideas find no support in Scripture and conflict with essential Christian beliefs and teachings.

There seems to be a contradiction between the Philosophical model of God suggested by Boethius, developed by Aquinas and enshrined in Catholic doctrine and the everlasting God described by the Bible and proposed by Theistic Personalists, many of whom are Protestant.  Further, neither model of God really avoids the problem of Omniscience outlined by Boethius in Book 5 of The Consolations of Philosophy.  The God of Theistic Personalists must either be limited in knowledge or power (and so is Philosophically unsatisfying) and the Timeless God is limited in terms of not being able to witness, experience, respond or act in any recognizable sense (and so is religiously unsatisfying.)  Boethius failed to prove that God’s omniscience is compatible with human free will, but he succeeded in outlining the inescapability of the problem and the importance of addressing and ultimately resolving it.  While Nelson Pike was careful to open his 1965 essay Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action by disassociating himself from the implications of his contribution to the project Boethius started, it is difficult to ignore these implications for long.  Either God is limited (i.e. not Omnipotent, Omniscient or Benevolent) or human beings are determined… but in any case Classical Theism is incoherent.