Nature Of God Flashcards
Descartes’ voluntarism
A tiny minority of theologians and philosophers, most notably Descartes, argue for ‘voluntarism’; the view that God’s omnipotence involves the power to do anything, even the logically impossible. Descartes gives the example that God could create a ‘square circle’.
Descartes’ argument is that because of God’s ‘immensity’ “nothing at all can exist which does not depend on Him.” This includes maths and logic. Descartes concludes that logic is a human limitation, but not a limitation for God on which all things, including maths and logic, depend. Thus, the rules of logic are decided by God and they then emanate from his mind.
Aquinas
Aquinas argued that the correct definition of omnipotence was the ability to do any logically possible thing. He argued that God’s power is founded on God’s infinite divine nature which ‘possesses within itself the perfection of all being’. Therefore, God’s omnipotence can only bring about things consistent with the perfection of being.
That does not include things which are logically impossible: ‘that which implies being and non-being at the same time’ cannot be brought about by God ‘not because of any defect in the power of God, but because it has not the nature of a feasible or possible thing.’ So, God cannot create something which both exists and does not exist because it is not consistent with being, the perfection of which his power is founded on. Aquinas concludes:
‘it is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them.’
Even though God cannot create impossible things, that is not a limitation of his omnipotence, once properly understood as power founded on the perfection of being.
Self-imposed limitation
Self-imposed limitation suggests that the only limits on God’s power are limits God chose. God still has the power to do anything he chooses as God is only limited by God’s own choice.
One reason God might self-limit is that that when creating the universe, God made it logically consistent and orderly. This means that if he did something logically impossible within the universe, that would disrupt the logical order of universe and make it chaotic, probably uninhabitable. Since God does not want to do that to his creation or to humans, he must have limited his ability to do logically impossible things within the universe.
Another reason God would self-limit is because of God’s intention for humans to have free will. It is typically considered important in Christianity for our salvation that we have free will so we can choose good over evil. However, our having genuine free will requires that God does not intervene to stop us every time we do something wrong. If God did that, we would have free will in a technical sense, but it would not be significant because it would be prevented from having an impact on the world.
Boethius
Boethius grappled with the puzzle of divine foreknowledge – the idea that God knows what we are going to do before we do it. If he does, how can we have free will? Boethius thought this needed solving because if we don’t have free will, then how can God judge us fairly, sending us to heaven or hell. That would seem to question his omnibenevolence. Yet if God didn’t know what we were going to do next, that would seem to question his omniscience.
Boethius’ solution was to suggest that God is eternal. This would mean God sees all time simultaneously in the ‘eternal present’. God’s eternal omniscience does not interfere with our free will, he simply sees the results of our free choices in our future in his eternal present. So Boethius saves God’s omnibenevolence from the criticism that divine foreknowledge would determine our actions making him unjustified in rewarding or punishing us for them. God’s knowledge is not ‘foreknowledge’, it does not exist ‘prior’ to our action as it exists outside of time.
Anselm’s four-dimensionalist approach
Anselm attempts to improve on Boethius’ theory, arguing that God’s eternity followed from the definition of God as ‘that than which none greater may be conceived’. Humans are within time, so we perceive time unfolding moment by moment. Being within a particular time/place is a limitation which ‘confines’ a being to having certain parts of itself existing at one time/place and other parts of itself at others. So, as an unlimited being, God cannot be within time like we are.
Anselm does not think that God is radically disconnected from time, as Boethius seems to suggest. Anselm wants to reconcile the eternal view with God’s action within time, for example with God being the sustaining cause of every place and time. His solution can be seen in the Proslogion, ‘That he is not in place or time, but all times and places are in him’ Anselm argues that although God is not in time, God still has some relationship to time. All of time is in God. For us, time unfolds moment by moment. For God, all the moments of time, are equally and eternally present. All of time always exists in divine eternity.
In space, objects can be extended through the three spatial dimensions, meaning they take up particular physical coordinates in space. Four dimensionalism is the view that we can understand time as an object’s extension through the fourth dimension. Anselm claims that just as all of space is contained in one moment in time, so too is all of time contained in eternity. Eternity is thus the totality of the fourth dimension.
Our future actions do not yet exist within time, but in eternity they always exist. So, God knows our future actions because he exists simultaneously with them in eternity, though within time they are not yet fixed. Anselm came to the somewhat radical conclusion that God therefore actually learns when he knows our future actions, which is controversial. It’s the only way to make sense of free will though. Free choices can only be known by observing them, they cannot be predicted.
Anthony Kenny’s critique of the eternal view
Kenny claims that if God is eternal/timeless, then all events in history are happening at the same time for God. Kenny rejects that as ‘radically incoherent’. There a causal relation and sequence between events within time. The fire of Rome necessarily happened before Kenny wrote his paper. Yet if all things were perceived simultaneously, it seems an atemporal being could not know one happened before the other, but this seems to bring omniscience into question. Another example is that God would see Boethius writing his book at the same time as Boethius’ body lies in his tomb. That seems incoherent. Boethius’ view seems to wipe out the temporal distinction between events in time.
The Everlasting view
Swinburne claims God exists within time. Before the creation of the universe, God existed in a durationless non-metric time. Once the universe had been created then time began to unfold moment by moment – both for creation and for God. God thus knows what we have done in the past and what we are doing in the present. However, regarding the future, God only knows the logically possible choices we could make, not which choice we will actually make. This resolves the apparent conflict between omniscience with free will and subsequently with omnibenevolance because if God does not know what we are going to do next, there is no conflict with free will and thus omnibenevolence is not called into question in his punishing us for our actions. God is omniscient in that he knows everything which can be known.
Swinburne argues that an eternal God could not respond to people’s prayers, since that would require acting within time.
The Logical problem of evil
The problem of evil attempts to show that Gods omnipotence and omnibenevolence cannot both co-exist with the existence of evil.
The logical problem of evil is the a priori argument that evil and the God of classical theism (as defined as omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient) cannot exist together. In other words, there is no possible world in which both evil and the God of classical theism exist.
Mackie’s version of this argument is the ‘inconsistent triad’ which argued that the God of classical theism cannot exist if evil exists. Either Omnipotence, omnibenevolence or evil must not exist, since all three are inconsistent. Therefore, if evil exists, an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God cannot exist.
Augustine vs the logical problem of evil
The logical problem claims that it is impossible for God and evil to co-exist. Augustine’s theodicy claims that God allows evil because we deserve it. If the logical possibility of that claim can be defended, then Augustine will have defeated the logical problem of evil.
