A Muslim's Four Objections to the Trinity Part One

DR. CRAIG: Hello. This is William Lane Craig. Here at Reasonable Faith we are in the midst of our fall matching grant campaign. From now until the end of the year, every gift you give to Reasonable Faith will be doubled by a group of generous donors, up to $250,000. So this is a tremendous way to double the impact of your giving to the Lord’s work. Remember this offer goes until December 31st at midnight, so I hope that you consider this and be a part of our fall matching grant campaign.

KEVIN HARRIS: Recently, Dr. Khalil Andani, a Harvard-trained philosopher of religion and a Muslim, presented four points against your view of the Trinity that we’ll examine today. He did this on YouTube. It appears that he tried to represent you accurately, and he went through your material. That, of course, is always appreciated, but then it is another matter to properly understand your views.

DR. CRAIG: Quite right. I do think Dr. Andani has done a respectable job of trying to understand the view that he's criticizing and not just engaging in Muslim polemics. However, I do think that in his four points (all of which are very interesting) there are some really serious misunderstandings. So I hope that the video today will help to clear those up.

KEVIN HARRIS: Andani claims that your view of the Trinity is, as he says, out of the mainstream of Christian theology. Is he right about that, and does it even matter?

DR. CRAIG: I think my view is out of the mainstream. I defend what I call the biblical doctrine of the Trinity. I am convinced that within the pages of the New Testament we find a primitive doctrine of the Trinity which consists of two theses. Number one: that there is exactly one God, and, number two: that there are exactly three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) who are properly called God. And by the word “properly” there I mean “in truth” or “literally,” not just metaphorically or hyperbolically. I believe that this primitive doctrine of the Trinity is taught in the New Testament itself, and so that's what I defend. Now, that doctrine doesn't include some of the tenets of later doctrines of the Trinity that were elaborated in the tradition of the church and which will include other elements. My view doesn't exclude those, but it simply doesn't include them, and in that sense it could be said to be out of the mainstream.

KEVIN HARRIS: Andani attempts to interact with your definition. He makes an attempt here to define your trinitarian view. Let's go to the first clip.

What is Craig's Trinity? So, Craig is a self-professed social trinitarian, and he calls his view tri-personal monotheism. In Craig's view, there is only one instance of the divine nature, and that is the Trinity as a whole. So Craig would refer to the Trinity as the one God that Christians believe in. So God is the Trinity taken as a whole.

How accurate is his initial evaluation of your view, Bill?

DR. CRAIG: I was impressed that Dr. Andani is familiar with the change in nomenclature that I introduced since the publication of Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. There I borrowed Brian Leftow’s terminology to label the view I defend “Trinity monotheism,” but I think that that is a potentially misleading label because the Trinity, I think, is the group of persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So the nomenclature that I currently prefer is to say “tri-personal monotheism.” The single instance of the divine nature is not the group “The Trinity” as such; rather, it is that concrete spiritual substance “God,” who is tri-personal. So I call it tri-personal monotheism. Now, although Dr. Andani updated the nomenclature, he didn't update the description of the view. He still describes my view as saying that the concrete instance of the divine nature is the Trinity, and that isn't what tri-personal monotheism holds to. Again, tri-personal monotheism says that there is a single spiritual immaterial substance called God who is tri-personal. And he's right in saying that my view is a social trinitarian view. Social trinitarians construe the persons of the Trinity very robustly as three centers of self-consciousness, intentionality, and free will. So there is a sort of society of three persons here, and hence the name social trinitarianism. So he is quite correct that I do construe the persons of the Trinity in this very robust sense.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's get to the objections then. Dr. Andani presents his first objection in this next clip. Here it is.

The first issue: partialism. Dr. Craig believes in a real sense the persons of the Trinity are each part of the one God, and already for most Christians this is going to be a problem. The problem that arises is what is the ontological priority between God (the whole God) and the three persons who are God's parts? If God the Trinity is dependent on the three persons, which means if the whole is dependent on the parts, then technically God himself is dependent and contingent and lacks aseity. And the three persons are ase, which would make them three gods. Or if you said that the three persons are dependent upon God, that is if the parts are dependent on the whole, then the three persons would be dependent and contingent and they would lack aseity which means they cannot be God because they're not ase. So it looks like we have a case of vicious circular dependence.

It looks like the horns of a dilemma. If God the Trinity is dependent on the parts then God is contingent. If the persons of the Trinity are dependent on God then the persons are each contingent. A vicious circular dependence is what he said.

DR. CRAIG: This objection takes us into the subdiscipline of metaphysics called mereology. Mereology is the study of wholes and parts – a very complex field of metaphysics. The part-whole relationship is very differently construed with respect to different composite entities. The diagram that he furnishes can be very misleading. We should not think of God as being like a pie chart in which he's composed of three pieces. All I meant was in saying that the persons are parts of God is that each person of the Trinity is not the whole Trinity; that in addition to the Father there is also the Son and the Spirit. It seems to me that that use of the word “part” is unobjectionable; that it seems clear that each person is not the whole Trinity. Now, what about the vicious circularity that he alleges? Well, this would depend upon a principle that is not an accepted mereological principle; namely, that parts and wholes must stand in asymmetric dependence relations; that either the whole depends on the parts, or the parts depend on the whole. Now those may be the case with regard to some composites, but this is not at all necessary or inevitable. There doesn't need to be any sort of dependence relation among the parts and wholes. To give an illustration: Think of the relationship between a circle and the radius of the circle. Does the circle depend on its radius? Or does the radius depend on the circle? It seems to me that any language here of dependence is just wholly inappropriate. There just is no part-whole dependence relationship between a circle and these parts. Or, if there is, it could be a symmetric relationship where the radius depends on the circle and the circle depends on the radius. And that would not be viciously circular. So with regard to the Trinity, I don't think there is any sort of dependence relationship that obtains between the persons and God himself. God is simply a metaphysically necessary being who is necessarily tri-personal.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the second objection. Let's go to this next response from Andani. Next clip.

The second argument is basically that, according to William Lane Craig, there is no eternal emanation of the Son, and there is no procession of the Holy Spirit. In Craig's model, the three persons are all co-eternal and no person depends on the other person. Right? The Orthodox believe that the Father is ase and uncaused, and the Holy Spirit and the Son are eternal emanations from God, the Father. That's what the Orthodox believe. The Catholics also believe in the emanation and the procession of the Son and the Spirit, and that's how they would discern which divine person is which. But Craig doesn't have this. For Craig, the divine persons, they all have the same attributes without considering the role they play in creation. In Craig's model, there is no way to tell the three persons of the Trinity apart. They are indiscernible. This problem that they're indiscernible – it sort of makes the model rather incoherent, or at best the model becomes sort of mysterious. Right? Because we don't even know who's the Father and who's the Son.

OK. He says there's no way to discern one person of the Trinity from the other in your model, Bill, and that there's nothing to individuate them.

DR. CRAIG: I like the way you phrased the question, Kevin. It really isn't a matter of discernibility but rather of individuation. Now, you'll remember that I said that my model of the Trinity doesn't feature some of the later ecclesiastical developments of the doctrine, and the procession of the trinitarian persons one from another would be an example of this. New Testament scholars are by and large agreed that the doctrine of the eternal begetting of the Son from the Father in his divine nature and the procession of the Holy Spirit is not a doctrine to be found in the New Testament. This is a product of so-called Logos Christology of the early Greek apologists like Athenagoras and Tatian and Justin Martyr. So my model doesn't include these trinitarian processions; though, if you want to add them, you can feel free to do so. Now, do we need those trinitarian processions in order to individuate the members of the Trinity? I think obviously not. On a serious social trinitarian view of the Trinity, each of the persons has a unique first-person perspective which is not shared by the other two persons. In Dr. Andani’s illustration of the three spidermen who all look alike, each one of them can look at the other two and say “I am not you and I am not you” and differentiate himself from the others. The having of a first-person perspective – a unique self-consciousness – is all you need to differentiate the three persons from one another, and you do not need, I believe, this notion of the trinitarian processions in order to do so.

KEVIN HARRIS: We get the roles of the persons of the Trinity by revelation, right?

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

KEVIN HARRIS: I mean, we know from revelation what the role of the Holy Spirit does in his ministry and so on, and what the Son does and what the Father does. That's not something that we determine philosophically, is it? He's talking about “there's no way to individuate.” They can individuate themselves by their knowledge, but as far as we're concerned, we need revelation in order to know what each function is of them.

DR. CRAIG: That's right. We can differentiate the persons of the Trinity by the roles they play in the plan of salvation. So we know from revelation that it is the Son who becomes incarnate and dies on the cross, not the Father or the Holy Spirit. But in terms of the members of the Trinity themselves, say prior to creation, they are individuated simply by their unique first-person perspective and self-consciousness and standing in what philosophers call an I-thou relationship with one another. Each one is a self (“I”) who is presented with another thou or you, and that individuates them.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's Dr. Andani's third argument. He addresses your anti-realism or nominalism. Next clip.

Let's go to the third argument. William Lane Craig is an anti-realist or a nominalist. William Lane Craig rejects Platonism, and he rejects neo-Platonism. He rejects Aristotelian essentialism. Now, what I thought about is – I applied Craig's nominalist view to his view of the Trinity. Remember, for him the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not identical although he doesn't really tell us how they're not identical. But let's just grant that they're not. So the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, they're not identical. And the three of them together constitute the one God. But here's a problem. If you are a nominalist, you would have to say that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not only are they not identical, but actually they each are a bare particular. So the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in Craig's model, they have nothing in common. The Father is wholly different than the Son who's wholly different than the Spirit. As a nominalist then you cannot affirm that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are homoousias; that is, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit under nominalism are not consubstantial. They do not share the same essence. In fact, William Lane Craig does not even believe in anything called the divine essence. And once that is realized, it logically follows that in Craig's model the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each being a bare particular but also each being all-knowing, all-powerful, and good, they basically amount to three distinct gods.

Well, there's a lot of heavy terminology in that clip. But does your nominalism or anti-realism force you into tritheism rather than an orthodox view of the Trinity?

DR. CRAIG: This objection is a real mess, and it illustrates well why I reject the label of nominalism in favor of the label anti-realism. In theology, nominalism has a bad reputation because of certain late medieval theologians who denied that God has certain essential properties, and that is not the view of the anti-realist. I believe that necessarily God is omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, morally perfect, and so forth, and that the Son necessarily is omniscient, omnipotent, eternal, morally perfect, and so forth, as is the Spirit. So the charge that these are not at all alike or bare particulars is groundless. It's simply that as an anti-realist I don't think that properties are independently existing things out there in the world to which God stands in some sort of strange exemplification relationship, and therefore I don't think that the persons of the Trinity (or God himself) is a bare particular. I completely reject this sort of ontology that thinks of bare particulars standing in exemplification relations to these abstract objects like omnipotence, omniscience, holiness, eternity, and so forth, and therefore the objection is just misconstrued. As a neutralist, I believe that we can talk about these sorts of things without ontological commitment to them. So, for example, when I say that the dog is brown, that doesn't commit me to the existence of an abstract object called brownness which exists independently and to which the dog stands in some sort of exemplification relationship and in virtue of which the dog is brown. Not at all. I just reject that kind of ontological ase of the dog. If you ask me, “Well, why is the dog brown?” I would say, “It's because his hair reflects certain portions of the light spectrum that are received then in our retinas as brown.” But it's not committed to these entities like properties and so forth in a metaphysically heavyweight sense. But I am able to affirm all of the traditional truths about God in terms of his attributes and the fact that they are all sharing those attributes. I think that Dr. Andani has just really failed to understand contemporary anti-realism about Platonistic abstract objects.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK, let’s stop right there for today. Part two coming up. Thanks for being here. I’m Kevin Harris. This is Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. We’ll see you next time.^[1]