Problem of Evil

‘Critically discuss the theodicy presented by John Hick” [40]

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

John Hick presented his “Theodicy for Today” through “Evil and the God of Love” (1966).  Here, Hick explored the history of the so-called Irenaean Theodicy in the work of Origen and Schleiermacher as well as Irenaeus, then crafting a new version of this theodicy which he felt more suited as a response to the logical problem of evil and suffering than the traditional Augustinian Theodicy given the atrocities of the mid 20th Century.  While Hick’s theodicy is persuasive, it does not provide a complete defence of God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence. 

Firstly, Hick adapted Origen’s idea that human beings were created in God’s image but with the potential to grow into His likeness through a life that is a “schoolroom for the soul”.  While he rejected the “exegetically dubious” distinction between image and likeness in the Hebrew – as this is more probably designed for emphasis in the original poetry than intended to make two separate points – he argued that there is truth in the claim that human beings exist on two levels, as BIOS – sophisticated animals – and as ZOE – morally and spiritually unique beings.  Hick took Keats’ phrase to argue that our lives are a “vale of soul-making”, through suffering we grow and develop from BIOS towards ZOE, meaning that suffering (and Hick includes others’ suffering as well as our own) has a purpose and is spiritually good for us, so plausibly part of the Best Possible World that an Omnipotent, Omnibenevolent God would have created.  Later, Richard Swinburne agreed with Hick, presenting his own Irenaean Theodicy which also contended that we learn from suffering, becoming better people and more able to use the freedom that God has given us.  Swinburne likened God to a parent, allowing his children to suffer in order that they might learn to make decisions independently.  This aspect of Hick’s Irenaean Theodicy seems persuasive, because there is no doubt that people do become stronger and more spiritual as a result of the suffering which is an inescapable part of life, however Hick fails to account for the extent of suffering, which most people would agree is gratuitous.  For example, William Rowe identified suffering which could and should have been eliminated by an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, suggesting that innocent child suffering (such as in Rowe’s example of Sue) disproves the existence of such a God.  Ivan Karamazov would surely have agreed that the degree to which young children suffer is far beyond anything that could be proportionate to the ends of helping us develop spiritually.  While Hick appealed to the “epistemic distance” between God and human beings and while Swinburne agreed that we are in no position to know that God could have prevented such suffering without causing or permitting something worse, retreating into mystery at the first sign of difficulty is not an adequate philosophical response.  Because of this, Hick’s theodicy fails to defend God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence in the light of his allowing gratuitous, innocent, child suffering.

Secondly, Hick reasoned that God might be justified in allowing some people to suffer more than others – even if some people were broken and afflicted and so unable to develop spiritually as a result – if he provided eternal recompense for unjust suffering after death.  For example, God could be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, even if some children die embittered and afflicted after suffering years of bone cancer if God made up for it in heaven.  Nevertheless, this is unconvincing because there is no adequate theory of what heaven could be like in order to justify God in this way.  In “Death and the Afterlife” 1978 Hick recognised the problems with standard Christian doctrine in that it relies on future physical resurrection, which is neither scientifically plausible nor fair to those whose bodies are either extremely young, extremely old or dispersed/destroyed.  Instead, Hick chose to focus on St Paul’s teaching, which suggests that resurrection is spiritual before the soul is re-clothed in a spiritual body, which is then rewarded or punished appropriately.  St Paul wrote that “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable… it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” 1 Corinthians 15:42, 44 Nevertheless, as Hick later realised, this account of life after death is problematic because it relies on the soul being separable from the body, albeit temporarily, when there is almost no evidence supporting substance dualism.  It also relies on all our human identity residing in an immaterial “soul”, so that “I” could be re-created into a new body and what happened to that body would still serve as just reward and punishment, incentive and disincentive.  Hick developed his famous Replica Theory to defend the possibility that a person could still be a person despite a break in the spatio-temporal-continuity that philosophers like Derek Parfit rely on to determine identity. Yet so much of human identity relates to our body that even if we accept that a replica could still be me (and ignore the possibilities of multiple replicas etc) this is difficult to accept.  Would our spiritual body be male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, old or young, Black or Asian?  If no, then how can a reward applied to some idealised and unrecognisable form really recompense for my unjust suffering… but if yes, then the spiritual body theory has few advantages over physical resurrection theory because inequalities and injustices would persist after death and heaven would not be an eternal or perfect reward but rather an endurance test which would do little but prolong the memories of suffering in this life in another location.  In the end, Hick abandoned replica theory and belief in spiritual bodies and came to believe in a form of reincarnation, showing that he didn’t believe that this aspect of his own theodicy was convincing.  It follows that because Hick’s theodicy fails to explain how an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God could make up for unjust suffering after death, it fails to provide a complete defence against the logical problem of evil.

On the other hand, Hick’s theodicy is more persuasive than the classical Augustinian Theodicy.  It does not rely on a literal interpretation of Genesis 2-3, avoids focusing on Original Sin and allows for evil to be real and not only “privation boni”, all of which make Hick’s approach more palatable in the 20th Century.  Further, Hick draws on modern science in his account of how we develop from BIOS into ZOE and in his beliefs about life after death and the impossibility of standard physical resurrection, which makes his theodicy more acceptable to a broader audience than standard Christian doctrine.  Nevertheless, a big weakness of Hick’s approach is that it fails to account for the suffering of animals.  As Rowe pointed out, the suffering of animals like the fawn he used in his example is endemic in nature.  The whole evolutionary process, which Hick accepts as characterising creation, depends upon the intense and gratuitous suffering of life-forms who have no possibility of growing or developing spiritually as a result, or of experiencing a heavenly recompense.  Hick seems to ignore and then sidestepped this question completely.  While Swinburne confronted the issue of animal suffering and included it in his version of the Irenaean Theodicy, he did no more than to speculate that animals might suffer less intensely and/or learn something from suffering, showing the inadequacy of this type of theodicy with respect to animal suffering.  Another weakness of Hick’s approach is that it defends a very limited version of omnipotence in God if he had to use suffering – and such intense suffering – as the means for human beings to grow from BIOS into ZOE.  As JL Mackie had already pointed out in “Evil and Omnipotence” (1955) theodicies which suggest that we learn from suffering assume that God could not have designed a better and more efficient way for humans to learn or created human beings with no need to learn in the first place. A God with such limitations would not reasonably be described as omnipotent.  While Hick is far from being alone in limiting God’s omnipotence to being able to do what is logically possible, Mackie’s objection to his theodicy is reasonable. 

In conclusion, Hick’s theodicy is more persuasive than many older theodicies, but does not provide such a complete defence of God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence as even St Augustine did.  Hick’s God may be benevolent, but He is extremely limited in power.  Further, while Hick’s theodicy gains strength from avoiding Biblical literalism, in moving away from the Bible and Christian doctrine in some respects, it is also weakened by not being acceptable to the mainstream Church.  Also, Hick fails to explain the extent and unfair distribution of suffering or provide an account of the afterlife that would serve as “eschatological justification”, making up for unfairness in this life, both of which leave this theodicy open to criticism. 

Critically compare the logical and evidential aspects of the problem of evil as challenges to belief. [40]

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

The problem of evil presents such a severe challenge to Christian belief that Hans Kung referred to it as “the rock of atheism.”  On one level, the problem of evil can be presented as a logical puzzle.  As John Hick noted “As a challenge to theism, the problem of evil has traditionally been posed in the form of a dilemma; if God is perfectly loving, He must wish to abolish evil; and if He is all-powerful, He must be able to abolish evil. But evil exists; therefore God cannot be both omnipotent and perfectly loving.”  As such, the logical problem of evil demands Theodicies or logical defences of God against charges of creating or allowing evil. On another level, the problem of evil can be presented as conclusive evidence that God cannot exist – at least in any form that would be worthy of worship – rendering any attempt at Theodicy… and religious faith… nigh-on impossible.  For example, Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov presented an evidential challenge to the simple faith of his brother Alyosha, rendering him speechless and certainly not rushing to God’s defence.  In the end, the evidential aspect of the problem of evil is a greater challenge to belief than the logical aspect. 

So challenging is the evidential aspect of the problem of evil to faith that it was presented as an argument for atheism by William Rowe in “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” (1979) Rowe focuses on a particular kind of evil that is found in our world in abundance: “intense human and animal suffering” which is, Rowe argues, intrinsically evil…meaning that it is bad in and of itself, even though it sometimes is part of, or leads to, some good state of affairs (p.335)  He uses this kind of evil as the basis for a DEDUCTIVE disproof of God, which is clearly VALID.

P1: There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

P2: An omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

C: There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.

If there are rational grounds for accepting its premises, to that extent there are rational grounds for accepting the conclusion, atheism.  Rowe gives two powerful examples to support his first, factual premise; the fawn and Sue.  While Stephen Wykstra tries to reject this premise, arguing that “if we think carefully about the sort of being theism proposes for our belief, it is entirely expectable – given what we know of our cognitive limits – that the goods by virtue of which this Being allows known suffering should very often be beyond our ken” (1984: 91) playing the “mystery card” in this way will only ever persuade those with deep and unfalsifiable faith to the point of being what RM Hare called a BLIK.  The author of the Biblical book of Job tried what became known as Wykstra’s CORNEA argument centuries before Christ and it hardly reduced the force of the evidential challenge to belief.  Attempted defences of Wykstra from Alston, Hick and Swinburne do no more than restate the claim that human beings are in no position to judge why an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God would allow the fawn and Sue to suffer.  They do not make this claim any more persuasive in the face of the agonies that Rowe describes.  Rowe sees his second, theological premise, as self-evidently true.  While advocates of OPENNESS THEOLOGY disagree, suggesting that God’s existence as everlasting-in-time rather than eternal outside time places logical constraints on God’s power and knowledge so that God may not prevent instances of intense suffering that come about as a result of human free-will.  They argue that “the theistic worldview is not only compatible with, but requires or demands, the possibility that there is gratuitous evil” [Nick Trakakis IEP article on Evidential Problem of Evil] because it hinges on the existence of genuine free will.  Nevertheless, this fails to answer the question posed by JL Mackie in relation to his presentation of the logical problem of evil; why could not an omnipotent God create free beings who always choose what is right?  In practice, advocates of Openness Theology are advocates for a limited, anthropomorphic God for whom there is no credible evidence at all.  It follows that Rowe’s first and second premises are true, making his deductive disproof of an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good being is sound, making his evidential argument the biggest possible challenge to belief.   

This conclusion is further supported by Gregory S Paul in “Theodicy’s Problem” (2007).  Where Rowe begins with very specific examples of dysteleological suffering, Paul widens the scope of the evidential argument by citing  “THE HOLOCAUST OF CHILDREN” as proof that there cannot exist any omnipotent, omnibenevolent God.  Like Rowe, Paul fine-tunes his argument to evade classical theodicies, but he also improves on Rowe’s argument because it is much harder to suggest that God could have an unknown purpose for designing the whole world to create maximum suffering than it is to suggest that he has an unknown purpose for allowing specific instances of animal or child suffering. As Paul writes, “The full extent of the anguish and death suffered by immature humans is scientifically and statistically documented… Probably hundreds of billions of human conceptions and at least fifty billion children have died, the great majority from nonhuman causes, before reaching the age of mature consent. Adults who have heard the word of Christ number in the lower billions. If immature deceased humans are allowed into heaven, then the latter is inhabited predominantly by automatons. Because the Holocaust of the Children bars an enormous portion of humans from making a decision about their eternal fate while maximizing the suffering of children, the classic Christian “free will” and “best of all possible worlds” hypotheses are falsified.”  He goes on, “The situation could not have been much worse than it actually is. If prenatal and juvenile mortality and disability were significantly higher than they actually are, then the population would not be able to grow, and would be at high risk of crashing, leading to human extinction. The level of natural evil has been about as severe as is practically possible.” p.132 Continuing… “If a creator exists, then it has chosen to fashion a habitat that has maximized the level of suffering and death among young humans that are due to factors beyond the control of humans over most of their history.”  It is very difficult to respond to Paul’s challenge as a believer.  Just as Darwin, Mill and Dawkins found, when faced with the “pitiless indifference” of nature laid bare, it becomes impossible – even ridiculous – to maintain a faith position.  This shows that the evidential aspect of the problem of evil presents the greatest possible challenge to belief.   

Of course, the logical problem of evil is still a significant challenge to belief.  JL Mackie (in his essay “Evil and Omnipotence” (1955)) pointed out that Christians usually believe that

P1.  God exists and is omnipotent

P2.  God exists and is omnibenevolent

P3.  Evil exists

Mackie went further than Hume, who had called this an “inconsistent triad” of beliefs, stating that holding these three propositions as co-beliefs is “positively irrational”.  In this way, the logical problem of evil seems to force Christians to choose between God’s omnipotence and His omnibenevolence, or else deny the existence of evil. Yet it has been the attempt to show that faith is (possibly) rational that presents a greater challenge to belief than the logical problem itself.  If only theologians had been content to admit that faith is irrational, or to choose which of Mackie’s propositions to drop!  The effect of doing so on belief would have been far less dramatic than the logical gymnastics of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas have been.  Firstly, both thinkers demanded that Christians believe that evil is “privatio boni” making God less responsible for its effects. Aquinas used the analogy of silent pauses which add sweetness to the chant!  Yet, as Rowe and Paul have shown, it is difficult to categorise evil as a simple lack of good when the whole of nature seems designed to inflict maximum suffering.  Can the suffering out of which evolution is fashioned really be explained in terms of silent pauses making the totality of nature better?   This Theodicy only serves to highlight how out of touch Christian theology is and this to challenge peoples’ belief.  Secondly, St Augustine claimed that human beings deserve the effects of both moral and natural evil because as a species they misused their free will.  Again, this fails to account for the suffering of animals, which is hardly to be dismissed as an illusion.  It also fails to account for the suffering of innocent children, documented in such detail by Rowe and Paul, without appealing to “Original Sin”, a concept as incredible and abhorrent as it has become necessary to mainstream Christian doctrine.  These examples show how it is the logical gymnastics resorted to by Christian theologians in their blind attempt to defend their position against the logical aspect of the problem of evil that has twisted and distorted the position they sought to defend and presented an enormous challenge to belief, not the logical problem in itself.  As Marilyn McCord Adams noted, to a large extent philosophical reflection on the problem of evil makes the suffering worse.  She wrote ”There is a time to drop philosophical reflection, to forget about questions of meaning… in order to act to get the suffering to stop…”  

In conclusion, the evidential aspect of the problem of evil presents the biggest possible challenge to belief, closely followed by Christian responses to the logical aspect of the problem.  The logical aspect of the problem in itself is not so much of a challenge; believing that God has the all three attributes of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence and as defined by Mackie is not really demanded by the Bible or by Religious Experience or by the rational arguments for God’s existence, Cosmological, Teleological, Moral or Aesthetic.   

Human freedom is not compatible with divine omniscience. Discuss [40]

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

The tension between divine omniscience and free-will matters because without free-will God becomes responsible for the consequences of human actions and cannot justly use evil and suffering to punish “sinful” choices, to deter people from sinning or to teach them to make better choices in future, falsifying the both the theodicies of St Irenaeus and St Augustine and making the logical problem of evil seemingly insurmountable.  Both Boethius and St Anselm acknowledged the apparent contradiction between believing that God has omniscience and that humans have free will, at least sufficient to make them morally responsible for the consequences of their actions.  In Book V Part III of The Consolations of Philosophy, Boethius wrote “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”.  In De Concordia 1.1 St. Anselm wrote “for it is necessary that the things foreknown by God be going to occur, whereas the things done by free choice occur without any necessity.”  Nevertheless, both Boethius and St. Anselm believed that they had succeeded in reconciling divine omniscience and human free will and in showing that there is no contradiction between them.  As St. Anselm wrote “the foreknowledge from which necessity follows and the freedom of choice from which necessity is absent are here seen (for one who rightly understands it) to be not at all incompatible.” Nevertheless, while Boethius and Anselm succeed in showing that there is no necessary contradiction between God’s omniscience and human freedom, they do so only by highlighting the limited meaning that words like omniscience have when applied to God to such an extent that by attempting to solve one challenge to religious belief, they open up another. 

Boethius approached the task of reconciling divine omniscience and human freedom by arguing that God’s knowledge is timeless and therefore while God knows what free beings do, this in no way causes their actions because there is no sense of temporal progression or causation within in God’s knowledge.  Boethius wrote “[God’s] 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) For God therefore, knowledge of what (for us in time) precedes a free choice, of the choice itself and of its consequences are all concurrent and there is no sense of process, of one thing leading to or causing another.  Further, God’s knowledge does not in itself precede what God knows, since God exists timelessly and the whole creation exists in the simple, changeless present to God.  Because God’s knowledge doesn’t in fact exist before what happens, God’s knowledge can’t be said to make what happens logically necessary.  As Boethius explains, God’s knowledge of what happens is not simply necessary, but rather conditionally necessary.  Just as my sight of the bus arriving at its stop at 3.14pm does not make the bus arrive at that time, so God’s sight of what happens in His eternal present depends on what happens and does not necessitate what happens or take away from the freedom of those people who make it happen.  Boethius’ attempt to reconcile human freedom with divine omniscience casts some doubt on the assumption that God’s knowledge of what, to us, is in the future causes what happens and so dilutes human freedom.  Nevertheless, in practice the difference between it being logically necessary that something will happen and being only contingently necessary that something will happen is more of a technical and less of a pastorally satisfying argument.  Christians believe that God is omnipotent as well as omniscient, so the fact that God knows that suffering happens and does nothing to stop it is the heart of the matter.  For the free-will defense to work as a defense of God’s goodness and justice in allowing suffering, God’s creation of free-beings must be justified by this being part of the best possible world and yet Boethius’ argument only serves to make this more difficult to believe.  If God created the world containing free-beings simultaneously with knowing all the suffering this action would cause, there is no way that human freedom can justify God in creating at all.  There was never a possibility that human freedom could exist without the holocaust or the sorts of gratuitous innocent child or animal suffering outlined in papers by William Rowe and Gregory S. Paul, so the idea that God is justly punishing human beings for misusing free-will seems void and the Christian salvation narrative falls flat.  While Schleiermacher, drawing on St. Paul’s argument in Romans 5, argued that God would be justified in causing us to fall into sin, evil and suffering because this facilitates and enlarges God’s gift of grace in saving us, as John Hick pointed out in Evil and the God of Love (1966), a doctor would not be so justified by causing injuries to patients because this facilitates and enlarges their actions in healing these same injuries.  In this way it seems that Boethius’ attempt to reconcile human freedom with divine omniscience, while interesting on a technical level, only serves to open Christian belief to further challenges. 

Secondly, as William Lane Craig explains in his article “St. Anselm on Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingency” (1986) St Anselm began by agreeing with Boethius, arguing that the proposition “If God foreknows something, necessarily this thing will occur” is logically equivalent to the proposition “If this thing will occur, necessarily it will occur.” Because the proposition contains an “if” the event is conditionally, not simply, necessary.  However, in his “De Concordia” St. Anselm went beyond Boethius with the result that he argued that God foreknowing that something will happen contingently (i.e. as a result of a free choice) actually ensures that human beings have a free choice rather than taking human freedom away.  As St Anselm wrote “Now, on the assumption that some action is going to occur without necessity, God foreknows this, since He foreknows all future events. And that which is foreknown by God is, necessarily, going to occur, as is foreknown. Therefore, it is necessary that something is going to occur without necessity. Hence, the foreknowledge from which necessity follows and the freedom of choice from which necessity is absent are here seen (for one who rightly understands it) to be not at all incompatible.”  Nevertheless, this argument is unconvincing because God’s timeless knowledge must be both of the fact that something happens contingently and of what actually happens.  To be meaningful, most people would demand that human freedom consists of being able to effect different outcomes – known as the Principle of Alternate Possibilities – but if God knows the outcome of a choice (whether or not that he also knows that that outcome is only contingently necessary) there is no alternate possibility, no freedom and no moral responsibility for that outcome.  Because God knows the outcome, that outcome will happen, whether or not it results from a choice that felt free.  Take an example; a person is offered a range of identical boxes and they are told that each contains something different.  They “freely” choose one box… but it then turns out that all the boxes contained the same thing, so the outcome of their action was in fact pre-determined.  Was the choice really a free choice?  Compatibilists like Harry Frankfurt try to argue that human freedom and moral responsibility do not in fact depend on the ability to effect different outcomes (the Principle of Alternate Possibilities).  Frankfurt uses the example of Jones, Smith and Black to show that Jones could still be free and morally responsible for shooting Smith even if Black had decided to make sure Smith died if Jones chickens out.  Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference between Frankfurt’s example and the case of human freedom and moral responsibility in relation to an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God; Black is not omnipotent, omniscient or omnibenevolent!  Black does not know what Jones will do or whether he will have to step in and shoot Smith… or even whether he will miss.  God, on the other hand, knows what Jones will do and what He will do and what will happen simultaneously as part of his timelessly simple knowledge of creation.  God is omnipotent and omniscient and needs to be omnibenevolent as well if freedom is going to work as a theodicy but because God, unlike Black, knows what Jones will “freely” choose, that Smith will die and what He will or won’t have to do to square those facts. Because there really are no alternate possibilities in God’s case (where there still are some in the case of Jones, Smith and Black) Human beings cannot be said to be morally responsible for what they do, leaving God’s goodness compromised.  It follows then that St. Anselm’s attempt to reconcile human freedom with divine omniscience, however sophisticated it is, gets us no closer to a resolution to this problem than did Boethius’. 

Nevertheless, using God’s eternity to reconcile omniscience and human freedom demands that God’s eternity is understood in the sense of God existing wholly simply, outside time, rather than eternally and aware of the passage of time as Theistic Personalists like Richard Swinburne would prefer.  As both Swinburne and Wolterstorff have argued, this model of God’s eternity is problematic because it renders God’s knowledge so different from human knowledge that it ceases to be recognizable as knowledge at all.  As Anthony Kenny observed, for a timeless eternal God, “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) If God really has no sense of progression or causation, then in what sense does he really know or better understand anything at all?  Swinburne points out that God can still have omniscience provided his knowledge extends to his knowing everything that it is logically possible that God can know.  If God exists timelessly-eternally, then what is logically possible for God to know is extremely limited, given that all sense of time as well as space must be removed.  Perhaps the best way to imagine it is that God’s knowledge of the universe can only extend to being aware of the singularity that gave rise to the Big Bang – within this infinitely small, infinitely dense particle the whole universe, all time and all space, all matter and all energy was contained, but in itself it would be far, far removed from the universe as it has ever existed since the beginning of time.  To use another analogy; a person’s genome is contained within the nucleus of a single cell, but knowing the genome is far removed from knowing the person (or people) the genetic instructions could give rise to.   If God’s attributes are so limited by his timeless-eternal nature, then the meaningfulness of religious language and of any religious claim about God is called into question.  Consequently, while Boethius and Anselm succeed in showing that there is no necessary contradiction between God’s omniscience and human freedom, they do so only by highlighting the limited meaning that words like omniscience have when applied to God to such an extent that by attempting to solve one challenge to religious belief, they open up another. 

Clearly, Classical Theists from Boethius through Anselm to Aquinas and later Thomists would disagree, arguing that seeing God’s eternity in terms of His existing timelessly and wholly simply is the only possible model of God.  A God who exists eternally in the sense of being everlasting and aware of the passage of the present moment cannot be said to be immutable, because even if God knows past present and future, if God’s knowledge is changed from being knowledge of the future into being knowledge of the present and then into being knowledge of the past by the passage of the present moment, then God’s knowledge is changed by and must depend on time to some extent.  While Classical Theists would accept that the content of religious claims such as “God is omniscient” is limited and certainly that the word knowledge cannot be used univocally, they deny that there is no content such claims.  St Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy attempted to demonstrate how claims about God contain meaning because concepts take their primary meaning in the being of God and only their secondary, analogical meaning from things in the world. For Classical Theists like Boethius and St Anselm then, using God’s timeless-eternity to reconcile divine omniscience and human freedom is rational and presents no insurmountable problems to religious believers.  Nevertheless, God’s immutability is hardly the most important attribute of God for Christians.  Immutability is in itself difficult to reconcile with Christian beliefs about the Fall, the Incarnation, the action of the Holy Spirit in the world and life after death.  As Nelson Pike pointed out, the scriptures are “unavoidably tensed” and so it is difficult to conceive of how they could retain the meaning and authority that Christian doctrines imbue them with while making so many claims about God that cannot be true if God is timelessly-eternal.  As Oscar Cullman observed in 1950 “in the biblical picture, God’s eternity is not qualitatively different from our temporality.” For Theistic Personalists like Richard Swinburne and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Scripture and the Good News that it contains must be the starting point for and not a potential embarrassment to Christian faith in an eternal, omniscient God.  It follows then that the attempt to use God’s eternity to reconcile God’s omniscience with human freedom comes at too high a price… and yet there is no other satisfactory way to reconcile God’s omniscience with human freedom.  Putting God as everlasting-in-time preserves God’s goodness – as well as essential Christian doctrines – but doing this in effect limits what God knows, compromising His omniscience and through that His omnipotence as well.  The passage of the present moment would at the very least change what God knows from future to present and present to past, making God’s knowledge depend on time, changable and not immutable or perfect. Arguing that God’s knowledge in time is further limited by logic, so that God can’t know the future insofar it is effected by free-choices compromises God’s knowledge even further. Realistically, what could God know about the future if all the ways in which free choices might effect that future are removed? In the nuclear age, God’s knowledge of the future couldn’t extend to knowing the world will exist tomorrow, and a God who doesn’t know whether tomorrow come is hardly more omniscient than I am! In the end it comes down to a choice – preserve God’s omniscience (and omnipotence) at the expense of human freedom, God’s goodness and essential Christian doctrines or preserve God’s goodness and essential Christian doctrines at the expense of his omniscience (and omnipotence).  There is no way to make logical sense of the “inconsistent triad” of Christian beliefs about God or to make human freedom compatible with God’s omniscience.

In conclusion, human freedom is not compatible with divine omniscience… unless freedom isn’t really freedom or omniscience isn’t really omniscience.  Indeed, there is no way to reconcile real freedom to effect alternate possibilities with timeless-eternal-omniscience, while everlasting-in-time omniscience is not really omniscience, because time at the very least changes what is known.  The implications of this are significant and show that there is no way to really resolve the logical problem of evil and that classical theodicies yield nothing.  Christians are left with an inconsistent set of beliefs about God, which they may well be willing to live with on an individual level… but which inconsistency can only cast doubt on the role of reason and philosophy in faith. 

Critically evaluate St Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil. (40)

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

The logical problem of evil was most famously expressed by David Hume when he wrote “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent…”  The existence of evil seems to demonstrate that Christian faith rests on what Hume called “an inconsistent triad” of beliefs, namely that God exists and is omnipotent, God exists and is omnibenevolent and that Evil exists.  While writing many centuries before Hume, St Augustine repeatedly responded to this same problem and developed a complex, multi-layered theodicy.  While St. Augustine is best remembered for his free will defence, he also proposed that evil is a lack of good (privatio boni) and so not a positive part of God’s creation and reasoned that God allowing there to be privations of good is justified with reference to the principle of plenitude, in that they facilitate diversity in nature which is awe-inspiring and beautiful, pointing to the glory of God and the need to worship Him. Nevertheless, and despite the sophistication and importance of St. Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil, his attempt was not successful.

Focussing first on the free-will defence argument, St Augustine argued that evil results from the human misuse of free-will and is therefore our fault, not God’s.  God, being omnibenevolent, is beholden to create the best possible world and this, St Augustine reasons, contains free beings who can choose the good, rather than achieving it by design.  However, the freedom to choose the good necessarily entails the freedom to choose to sin, causing suffering to ourselves, other people and indeed the whole of creation as God, again being omnibenevolent and so just, is beholden to ensure that evil actions have evil results in order to deter people from choosing them again.  When human beings chose to sin, first corporately at the Fall in Genesis 3 in which all humanity was “seminally present” in Adam, and then as individuals, evil and suffering entered the world not by God’s design, but as a logically necessary consequence of God creating the best possible world. This argument is fraught with difficulties however.  Firstly, as JL Mackie asked in his famous essay “Evil and Omnipotence”, why could not an omnipotent God create a world containing free beings who always chose to do what is right?  Omnipotence suggests that ability to do anything, even (as Descartes reasoned) what seems logically impossible to us, such as making 2+2=5.  Secondly, even if (as St Thomas Aquinas argued) God’s creative action is timelessly simple and cannot, therefore, contain logical contradictions, why shouldn’t an omnipotent God create free beings whose poor choices have less severe consequences than they do in our world.  Is the holocaust a logically necessary consequence of God’s creation of the best possible world?  If it is, the meaning of omnipotence – and of best in the context of possible worlds – seems to be very far indeed from any meaning we can understand. Thirdly, such omnipotence and such a “best” possible world seems incompatible with God’s omnibenevolence; wouldn’t a good God have been better not to create at all than to have created a world in which the holocaust (and perhaps even worse examples of human depravity yet to come) was a logically necessary feature. Fourthly and finally, the whole idea of human beings having free will is inconsistent with the notion of divine omnipotence.  Ass Boethius acknowledged in the Consolations of Philosophy Book V, Omnipotence is usually understood to entail omniscience and, if God knows what we will choose before we choose it, our freedom is not meaningful.  Given that God has both the power to step in to prevent the consequences of our poor choices and the goodness that demands that he should, divine omniscience negates the free-will defence and means that this aspect of St. Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil is unsuccessful.

Moving on to consider St. Augustine’s suggestion that evil is “privatio boni” and therefore not a part of God’s creation for Him to be responsible for.  While defining evil as a privation has been popular through the history of the Church with Philosophers – St Thomas Aquinas also defined evil in this way – as John Hick pointed out, it is deeply unconvincing in a pastoral context.  To those afflicted by suffering saying that child cancer is not a positive part of God’s creation but only results from a justified instance of a lack of good things seems deeply inappropriate as well as being unconvincing.  Medicine has moved on since the 5th Century and we now know that much sickness is not caused by a lack of health but by pathogens which have a very real existence.  Why did an all-powerful, all-good God create coronaviruses, whose only purpose seems to be to infect beings in order to multiply themselves, whatever suffering that causes?  The standard response to this, pointing out that we are criticising God’s creation on the basis of our own perspective, not God’s, falls foul of the central Christian belief that God created the natural world for human beings.  If aspects of creation make it impossible for human beings to do as God commanded, “be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it…” (Genesis 1:28) then this demands an explanation.  If God, being omnipotent and willing human beings to be good, created a world in which the conflicting purposes of organisms naturally and inevitably results in suffering then there is indeed a logical problem.  It is simply not possible to deny the existence of evil or reduce it to a lack of good when “nature is red in tooth and claw”.  In this respect as well, therefore, St. Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil is unsuccessful.

Moving on to St. Augustine’s claim that God allowing evil and the suffering it causes is justified with reference to the Principle of Plenitude, this aspect of his Theodicy is also unsuccessful.  St. Augustine claimed that God is justified in creating, even when creation necessarily involved privations (evil), each of which would cause intense suffering, because of the beauty of creation, which would point towards and express God’s own glory.  For St. Augustine, part of God’s goodness is the need to express his nature creatively, yet this implies a limitation on God.  If God is omnipotent, then why should God have the need to express his nature creatively… and even more so if that creative self-expression would inevitably lead to privations on the scale of the holocaust.  St Augustine also reasons that God’s creative self-expression, including its necessary privations, is justified because it points the human mind to the existence and glory of God.  Yet again, this implies that God has a need to be known, acknowledged, worshipped and glorified in a way that seems to undermine His omnipotence.  If God is omnipotent He must also be omniscient which, as St. Thomas Aquinas argues in Summa Theologica 1,14,2, includes having perfect self-knowledge such as that “God understands Himself through Himself”. If God knows himself perfectly, then why would he have any need to be known, acknowledged, worshipped and glorified by any created being?  In this respect as well, therefore, St. Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil is unsuccessful.

Of course, St Augustine’s theodicy has been enormously influential.  Today Alvin Plantinga’s “God, Freedom and Evil” draws heavily on all aspects of the Augustinian tradition to provide a way for believers to defend themselves against the “defeaters” levelled at faith by atheists.  Plantinga has adapted Augustine’s arguments to address common criticisms, such as by developing his argument for transworld depravity to show that suffering will result from God’s creation of free beings in any possible world without ever having to be part of God’s intention for any world. Nevertheless, despite the continued popularity of the Augustinian-type theodicy, it remains deeply problematic.  Plantinga’s argument still depends on God being both omnipotent and having to create free beings the consequences of whose actions cannot be limited.  He still reasons that God can be both omnipotent and omniscient and not be responsible for the consequences of human choices. He does not so much defeat Mackie’s criticisms of the Augustinian theodicy as deny them. 

In conclusion, St Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil is unsuccessful at every level.  His free will defence fails to reconcile God’s omnipotence with His omnibenevolence, his re-definition of evil as privatio boni fails to do justice to the real experience of evil and its effects in the world and his Principle of Plenitude implies that God, being omnipotent, is still limited.  Despite the fact that St. Augustine’s theodicy continues to inspire writers like Alvin Plantinga, philosophers of religion should look elsewhere if they want to make progress towards a resolution of the logical problem of evil.

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 .

 

 

Critically evaluate St Augustine’s theodicy.

/ vardycharlotte / 8 Comments

St Augustine is often blamed for bringing the problems of evil and suffering to the forefront in Christianity.  Certainly, responding to the problems was a major theme in his writings – as well they might be given his own experiences of persecution.  Yet in fact the tension between the Christian concept of God and the existence of evil and suffering in the world He created was apparent well before St Augustine was born.  The Nicene Creed (325AD) affirmed the omnipotence of “the Father Almighty” and the full divinity of Jesus Christ.  The doctrine of the Trinity, developed in response to Christological controversies such as Arianism, made the logical problems of Evil & suffering inescapable for Christians. St Augustine is best understood as the first very substantial, systematic attempt to resolve these problems on behalf of the orthodox Church.   Of course, the logical problem of evil was well-known to Greek Philosophy.  Epicurus wrote “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.  Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”  Later, David Hume claimed that Christian belief rests upon an “inconsistent triad” of beliefs and JL Mackie went further, claiming that the co-beliefs God exists and is omnipotent and omniscient, God exists and is omnibenevolent and Evil exists are “positively irrational.”  St Augustine attempted to defend God in several different ways.  In the 1990s American Philosopher Robert Adams listed four separate ways to approach theodicy and it is fair to say that Augustine tried all of them.  Given the constraints of time, this critical evaluation will focus on the three best-known of Augustine’s approaches, namely his definition of evil as “privatio boni”, his free-will defence and his doctrine of original sin.  In relation to these, it seems that St Augustine’s theodicy was rationally successful (at least when taken as a whole) it ultimately yielded a pastorally unsatisfying God.

St Augustine sought an answer to the problems of evil and suffering for a long time.  Unconvinced by the efforts of Christian leaders he engaged with Manichaeism and then the writings of the Platonists before eventually returning to Christianity.  It is fitting, therefore, that St Augustine’s most important theodicy is rooted in Greek Philosophy, which defined goodness in terms of actuality and fulfilment of purpose and evil in terms of potentiality and falling short of purpose. For St Augustine, evil is privatio boni and has no existence in itself.  Evil is parasitical and can only affect things that in themselves are good.  The extent to which something fulfils its nature and God’s purpose is good and the extent to which it falls short and retains potential it is evil.  All created things move, change and are contingent on other things therefore all are affected by evil to some extent.  God is the only wholly good being, unaffected by evil because, being outside time and space, fully actual and necessary, God cannot fall short and has no potential.  In this world-view, the problem of evil shifts from being about why God created evil things to why God created anything when its existence would necessarily entail being affected by evil to some extent.  This, Augustine answers by arguing that God cannot be held responsible for creating something which has no existence in itself and by arguing that the goodness in creation greatly outweighs the evil within it.  Of course, the first point is semantics and the second is a subjective judgement.  For Christians affected by horrendous evils – whether natural or moral – neither explanation is likely to be pastorally satisfying.  People do not pray to a wholly simple, necessary being… and it is difficult to square the Bible with such a being either.  Put bluntly, the parent of a terminally ill child is not going to be comforted by St Augustine’s “privatio boni” theodicy, however philosophically brilliant it might be.  This shows that St Augustine’s theodicy, although rationally successful, yielded a pastorally unsatisfying God.

St Augustine’s Free Will Defence is probably the best known of his theodicies.  The work of Alvin Plantinga has re-awakened scholarly interest in it in recent decades.  Free-will is intuitively appealing and fits beautifully with the Biblical narrative, which seeks to blame human beings for the horrors visited on them by the creation God supposedly controls and to use this as a reason to worship Him.  Nevertheless, this theodicy remains philosophically unconvincing. As JL Mackie pointed out in his famous essay “Evil and Omnipotence”, the God of the Free Will defence is limited and far from being the omnipotent being that the Creeds claim He must be.  It seems that God either CANNOT or WILL NOT create a world in which significantly free beings always choose to do right and is subservient to the laws of logic. St. Augustine (and later Plantinga) assumes incompatibilism without arguing for it.   If as St Luke and St Matthew affirm “anything is possible with God”, why can’t he create free beings AND determine (or at least limit) the outcomes?  Christian Philosophers of Religion have tried to extricate St Augustine from this mess.  St Thomas Aquinas and later Descartes both tried to argue that God is limited by logic only within this-world and that (for all we know) our omnipotent God could have created a different world in which free beings are compatible with determined outcomes.  We can only infer from the existence of this world that it must at least be part of what Richard Swinburne called the best-possible-world type – because an omnipotent God would only create such – and be satisfied on this basis that the best possible world must contain evil & suffering, that it must be better than it would be without it…  This line of argument is philosophically inadequate because it is circular.  This world suggests that God cannot be omnipotent but because God is omnipotent we must accept that this world is the best possible.  Not very convincing, at least when the Free-Will Defence is taken in isolation. 

In addition, St Augustine extended His free-will defence argument to a broader critique of Human Nature which sought to show that human beings deserve whatever natural – or moral – punishment they receive in this world.  For Augustine, the story of the Fall in Genesis 2-3 suggests that human beings fell from grace not individually but collectively and that we all inherit sin from Adam because we were all “seminally present” in him when He betrayed God in Eden.  St Augustine did not invent the idea of original sin, but he used it as a major part of his theodicy and as his main way of explaining apparently innocent suffering such as infant mortality.  For St Augustine there is no such thing as innocent suffering.  God is just and justly punishes the guilty – including infants who bear the stain of original sin.  Christ’s atoning sacrifice and the sacrament of baptism offers evidence that God is good and offers those who believe a chance to be redeemed and saved to eternal life.  For St. Augustine, God’s justice and God’s mercy is amply defended through his Doctrine of Original Sin.  Nevertheless, St Augustine’s approach is pastorally unsatisfying.  Why would a good God punish an unbaptised baby with all the horrors of cancer or starvation to satisfy His vengeance for the sin of Adam… in eating an apple?  Can St Augustine – who generally approached Biblical interpretation with such humility – really have taken the ancient and troubling story of the fall so very literally?  It is not surprising that atheists find this argument distasteful and even ridiculous.  Muslims and Jews reject Augustine’s approach and uphold the innocence of infants, despite Augustine’s claims to have seen evidence of their corruption in twins fighting over their mother’s milk.  Again St Augustine’s theodicy, although arguably rationally successful as a whole, yields a pastorally unsatisfying God.

Clearly, St Augustine’s theodicies are more convincing when taken together than when examined in isolation.  The philosophical strength of seeing evil as privatio boni does something to offset the shortcomings of the free-will defence and the pastoral strength of free-will tempers the doctrine of original sin, yet the fact that St Augustine had to have so many attempts at defending God against charges of creating or allowing evil suggests that he himself remained unconvinced.  In the Enchiridion, written towards the end of St Augustine’s life c.420AD, Augustine confronted the reality of the situation, writing “Nothing, therefore, happens unless the Omnipotent wills it to happen. He either allows it to happen or he actually causes it to happen.”  It seems that St Augustine was not unaware of the shortcomings of his own theodicies and he had to fall back on faith and prayer in the end.

In conclusion, although St Augustine’s theodicy was rationally successful (at least when taken as a whole) it ultimately yielded a pastorally unsatisfying God.  Christians have struggled with this ever since.  There is no way to acquit God of all charges when it comes to having created or at least allowed evil and suffering, and the only possible response is to pray for understanding and continued faith.  This is the message at the heart of the book of Job.  As Holocaust-survivor Elie Weisel remarked,

“I was there when they put God on trial… at the end they used the word “chayev” rather than guilty.  It means “he owes us something”.  Then we went to pray.”

The Via Negativa is the best way to approach religious language. Discuss [40]

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

Whether this claim is valid or not very much depends on the concept of God in question.  If God is inside time, everlasting but personal – as the God of Abraham and Isaac in the Bible seems to be – then using religious language in a positive and univocal way seems reasonable.  On the other hand, if God is eternal outside time – as the God of the Philosophers, the Prime Mover, “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” seems to be – then using words coined to describe things within time seems more problematic.  Maimonides, the most famous proponent of the Via Negativa, was heavily influenced by the Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and so saw God as eternal outside time.  Given this, his claim in the “Guide for the Perplexed” that… “To give a full explanation of the mystic passages of the Bible is contrary to the law and to reason… God cannot be compared to anything…” and his proposal that the most that can be said about God is what God is not i.e. God is not limited, evil, something physical etc… seems persuasive.  Nevertheless, Maimonides’ Via Negativa, his apophatic way of approaching God leaves religion in a difficult position.  Religions make positive claims about God; the Holy Books and doctrines of all religions are full of them!  Maimonides’ approach makes religion die the death of a thousand qualifications.  Believers need to have something positive to fix their faith on, not silence, the empty space left by negations and a lot of small print saying that Holy Texts can’t be understood to mean what they say.  The Via Negativa – for all its logical appeal and for all its possibilities in terms of framing that language of spirituality and personal faith – is far from being the best approach to religious language. 

In a sense, Christianity is defined by the Nicene Creed:

“We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen. 

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God…”

Approaching the Creed from the Via Negativa is problematic.  Admittedly, it doesn’t start too badly.  One God.  Oneness is a quality being positively ascribed to God.  Is oneness a concept bound by time and space?  Arguably.  Maimonides might replace this line with “We believe in a God who is not many…” but the sense is very much the same.  Nevertheless, things quickly go downhill.  We believe in God “the Father”… clearly “Father” is a word rooted in time and space.  Maimonides – along with Christian proponents of the Via Negativa such as Tertullian, St Cyril of Jerusalem and Pseudo-Dionysus – might have to admit that the word has no positive meaning when applied to God and worse, that it is likely to be positively misleading about His nature.  While St Cyril’s point that believers should “candidly confess that we have not exact knowledge concerning Him…” (Catechetical Homilies), this approach is unlikely to have found favour at the Council of Nicaea or in Churches today.  The central Christian mission would be a lot more difficult if believers openly confessed that they have little idea what it is they believe in!  As Maimonides wrote “However great the exertion of our mind may be to comprehend the Divine Being or any of the ideals, we find a screen and partition between God and us.” (Guide for the Perplexed)  This doesn’t offer people much incentive to be baptized, attend Church or read the Gospel; it pushes people towards deism or non-denominational “spirituality”.  In this way, the Via Negativa is not the best approach to religious language as it makes religion dysfunctional.  

Further, there is a better alternative to the Via Negativa in the form of Aquinas’ doctrine of Analogy.  Aquinas read Maimonides and was persuaded both by his concept of God and by his skepticism concerning the positive meaning of terms applied to God.  He strongly disagreed with the univocalism employed by scholars like St Anselm and absolutely rejected the idea that people can know and describe the nature of God sufficiently to analyze it and find necessary existence within it a priori, as proponents of the ontological arguments do.  In Summa Theologica 1:2:2 Aquinas wrote “because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition “God exists” is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are known to us…”  In Summa Theologica 1:2:3 he responded to the question “Is God a body” by making quite clear that the meaning of words applied to God can only be understood in a strictly limited and analogical sense.   Aquinas argues that words applied to God have meaning as analogies of being (1) and sometimes discusses two separate senses in which meaning should be understood; analogies of attribution (2) and analogies of proportion (3).

  1. Most importantly, God’s being is not the same as our being – he is Wholly Simple and timeless and as such has no potential.  The meaning of words applied to God have to be consistent with the mysterious, timeless nature that we know that he must have as a result of reasoning from movement, causation and contingency.  For Aquinas, when believers say that God is good they cannot understand that God is morally good, because that implies freedom and choice which are concepts which only make sense in time.  God is timeless and eternal, so His goodness can only be timeless and eternal – goodness in the sense of perfection and the fulfilment of nature only.  Hence, there is a positive sense in which attributes positively ascribed to God can have meaning; that in which they are compatible with His being or nature.
  2. In addition, the meaning of terms applied to God and to earthly things has an overlap in the way that I might say that I am healthy and my yoghurt is healthy.  Healthy is a property primarily of living creatures like me and only secondarily of foods or activities which contribute to my health.  According to John Milbank, Aquinas suggests that the primary sense of attributes such as “good” relate to God and the meaning of the word in an earthly sense is only secondary.  There IS a positive connection between the meaning of attributes applied to God and earthly things; the connection is not large but it is rationally defined.
  3. In addition, God’s unchangingly perfect and actual nature dictates that he must be 100% everything that can be ascribed to Him.  God cannot fall short, because to do so implies potential which is not compatible with God’s timeless nature.  Given this, God is the scale against which we make judgements about things in this world.  If I say “Jamie Vardy is a great footballer” I have to have an idea of what greatness means.  Vardy can only fulfil a proportion of what that idea is, because he is only one man in one time playing for one team – and he is not a rugby player, rower, artist or opera singer, all of which might be described as reflecting greatness in a different way.  The meaning of attributes ascribed to earthly things has a proportional relationship with the meaning of divine attributes.  Again, the shared meaning (analogy) is not a large one, but it can be rationally described.

Aquinas’ analogical approach to religious language is a much better approach to religious language than the Via Negativa because it enables believers to use and defend the meaning of positive claims about God, while not supporting naïve univocalism or a philosophically unsatisfying and ultimately limited concept of God.  Aquinas’ model of God is deeply appealing in that it is supported by real experience, but it also retains the “otherness” and unlimited idea of God that is so important to believers.  Aquinas’ theory of religious language completes his model of God because it shows how believers are worshipping in an ultimately meaningful way, even though God is beyond ordinary understanding.  The Via Negativa is not the best approach to religious language because Analogy is a much better approach. 

Scholars who employ cataphatic theology and approach religious language through the Via Positiva reject the Via Negativa on the grounds that it ignores the important connection between God – the creator – and the world – the creation.  In the same way that Philosophers reason from movement, causation, contingency, grades of perfection in things, order and purpose to the existence of a necessary being who explains these qualities we experience in the universe, people should be able to apply words based on qualities we experience in the universe to the God who created them.  Anselm and John Duns Scotus both defended the univocal use of religious language on these grounds, arguing that words refer to concepts which depend on God to define them through His creation.  Anselm’s ontological argument depends on this argument, because it analyses the definition of God and finds necessary existence within it.  This could not work if the word “greater” meant anything different when applied to God than it does when applied to things in this world.  The problem with the univocal approach to religious language is that the type of connection between creator and creation does not support a literal approach to the meaning of language.  When a person creates something, their creation does not have to be like them.  The potter is not made of clay and a skilled potter is capable of making a bad pot. We have no reason to believe that words apply to God in exactly or even much the same way as they apply to things in this world.  Aquinas strict limitations on the sense in which meaning should be understood when words are applied to God seems much more realistic in relation to a God whose relationship with the world is understood to be the creator, Prime Mover, uncaused cause, necessary being, supreme perfection and intelligent designer.   Because of this, the Via Negativa is a better way to approach religious language than the Via Positiva, but it is still less good than Analogy.

Certainly, the Via Negativa has its uses, but these are more apparent when it comes to Philosophy or the practice of personal spirituality than they are in the practice of religion.  The word “religion” refers to what binds us as people together; the ties that bind need to be clearly defined and understood if they are to function and endure. In terms of Philosophy, approaching the nature of God through negation is an important check in naïve literalism.  As Maimonides wrote “it is of great advantage that man should know his station, and not imagine that the whole universe exists only for him.”  For philosophers, it is all too easy to move from saying that there are absolute limits to human knowledge to ignoring what lies beyond those limits to denying that there is anything beyond those limits to denying that there are limits.  As philosophers and as individuals, reflecting on the nature of God as “wholly other” forces us to confront the falsity of the prevalent assumption that “man is the measure of all things” and deepen their spiritual understanding, which includes confronting limitation and embracing humility.  As Tertullian said “our very incapacity of fully grasping Him affords us the idea of what He really is…”  and as St Cyril said “in what concerns God to confess our ignorance is the best knowledge…”  Certainly, the Via Negativa is a useful brake on naive literalism and a spiritual tool for individuals, but it cannot be described as the best approach to religious language in general.

In conclusion, the Via Negativa is far from being the best approach to religious language, although it is still useful in some ways. The best approach seems to be Aquinas’ doctrine of Analogy, which treads the line between acknowledging the otherness of God and retaining the ability to say some meaningful things about God successfully.  Ian Ramsey’s suggestion that words being used in an analogical sense should be signposted or qualified in some way seems a sensible way of improving Aquinas’ analogy further, avoiding the probability that believers could miss the careful sense in which words are being applied to God and confuse religious language with ordinary language.  Thomist scholars such as Gerry Hughes SJ use the word “timelessly” as such a qualifier, showing that words such as “good” should not be taken to mean more than can be defended in relation to the being and attributes of God and as proportional to His qualities.

 

“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.