Critique of Dr. Craig's View of Divine Simplicity

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, we are going to look at a video that interacts with some of your work. There are some good friends who have commented on some of your teaching, some of your work. In the meantime, before we get into that, I want to know how the writing is going.

DR. CRAIG: I'm working on my systematic philosophical theology. I'm on the doctrine of God, and I have now begun to actually write on divine simplicity. There was an enormous amount of literature just to be read on this subject, but now I am actually writing. I have begun this section by looking at the biblical grounds for the doctrine of divine simplicity, and then looking at the doctrine historically and showing how different figures in the history of the church have actually held quite different doctrines of divine simplicity. So it's something of a misnomer to speak of “the” doctrine of divine simplicity – one should really speak of it in the plural.

KEVIN HARRIS: And the William Lane Craig Center?

DR. CRAIG: Well, we are now to the stage where we are in private conversations with different educational institutions in negotiations to try to affiliate the Center with one of these. Obviously I can't disclose the content of those conversations but we pray that something good will come out of at least one of them and that we will find an institution that wants to affiliate with the Center. In the meantime part of our sustaining donor campaign this spring goes toward the costs of building this Center – paying for the company that is in charge of these negotiations.

KEVIN HARRIS: If anyone is interested in donating, please do because this is going to reach future generations. You can do that when you go to ReasonableFaith.org, and, Bill, I'm glad you mentioned divine simplicity because that's what we're going to talk about today.

DR. CRAIG: All right.

KEVIN HARRIS: This is from a video from the podcast from Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte. Adam Tucker and Dr. Brian Huffling are talking about divine simplicity, interacting with you.^[1] They mentioned a couple of things. First of all, they mentioned that you were on a panel discussion a while back discussing this topic.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that's right. I think Richard Howe was on that panel who is a professor at Southern.

KEVIN HARRIS: Another thing that they said . . . and this was a long video, so we've cut it down. Bear with us. We will go through these clips and then make sure that everything is covered, but we have edited it down to get to the main thing. One of the things that they said was that divine simplicity is important because it's an act of worship to contemplate the attributes of God. So it's not just a side doctrine. It's to know God more fully, and that is an act of worship.

DR. CRAIG: Well, actually that's a very interesting claim because on a strong doctrine of divine simplicity it's become clear to me that simplicity is not really an attribute of God at all. Rather, it is a formal claim about God – namely that God has no composition in him and therefore he has no specific attributes like omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, holiness, or simplicity itself. If God had the attribute of simplicity, he wouldn't be simple! That would be one of his many properties. So those who hold to a strong doctrine of simplicity don't really regard it as an attribute of God. It's rather the denial that God has any composition, including a composition of different attributes.

KEVIN HARRIS: That's a good clarification. I think what I'm getting at is that – and they may be getting at it as well – is that when you contemplate God, some things you just have to kind of meditate on. You can't fully comprehend it. And that can be perhaps an act of worship. Or to worship God more fully.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I have to say that I haven't watched this entire video, and so I'm reacting to these things out of context. I would want folks to understand that. I was focusing on what you said with regard to its being an attribute. But with respect to worship, I think that while it might lead you to a sort of mystical approach to God where God is incomprehensible and beyond intelligibility, I don't see that as really worshipful. I think that that kind of mysticism may be characteristic of certain Eastern religions which think of God as absolutely simple and without any differentiation or properties, but I don't see that as being worthy of worship. I think that a God who is possessed of perfections like omnipotence and omniscience and holiness and goodness and all the rest is worthy of worship. While he is incomprehensible in the sense that we cannot fully comprehend God, nevertheless I think that we do have biblically a good idea of many of God's essential attributes. So any view that would deny that God has these essential attributes, it seems to me, is not worshipful. It may be mystical, but I don't think that it's something that Christians should engage in.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go to this first clip then. From Adam and Brian – and if at any point that you want to interrupt I'll hit pause. But here's our first clip.

ADAM TUCKER: Dr. William Lane Craig is perhaps the most popular Christian apologist and philosopher today, and of course he's a dear brother in Christ. Ironically, however, he rejects some of the most foundational aspects about the nature of God upon which classical theism at least rests.

DR. CRAIG: I want to comment on this label “classical theism” because that's a codeword among the proponents of divine simplicity for Thomism, and we shouldn't be fooled by it. One of the things that my study has disclosed is that the church fathers whom I think we would want to call “classical theists” didn't hold to the doctrine of divine simplicity in its full strength that Thomas Aquinas articulated in the 13th century. So we shouldn't think that Thomism is accurately characterized as classical theism.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Continuing then.

ADAM TUCKER: The simplicity of God. And then we'll get a little bit into God's knowledge about the future and what, if any, are the implications of thinking wrongly about these issues.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. That's the first clip there. We will continue.

ADAM TUCKER: We put a lot of emphasis specifically on simplicity and how these attributes are like dominoes – they stand or fall together. So if this is important as we claim that it is, it seems odd that someone of Dr. William Lane Craig's stature would deny something like simplicity. I know you and Dr. Howe have had the privilege of speaking with him. You guys have interacted with him directly on this specific issue.

DR. CRAIG: I don't think he should be surprised. What I hold to is biblical theism, and the Bible is very clear in ascribing to God different properties or attributes such as the ones that I've mentioned. I think that implicit in the teaching of the New Testament, moreover, is that God is three persons – that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all distinct persons. We can all agree that God is simple in a sort of innocuous modest sense; namely, God is not composed of more fundamental or separable parts. Of course. God isn't going to fall apart like a bag full of marbles with a hole in it. God is not composed of parts that can be separated. So God is indivisible or indissoluble. If that's all you mean by simplicity then it's unobjectionable. But these Thomist theologians have a much, much different doctrine of divine simplicity at the center of which is the claim that God is identical to the pure act of being. That God's essence is just to exist. This is almost incomprehensible, but that is the claim that whereas in the case of every other being their essence is distinct from their existence, in the case of God his essence just is the act of being. He just is to exist. And that's a very, very strong claim that goes far beyond anything that the Bible teaches. So it shouldn't be surprising that most Christian theologians today deny it.

KEVIN HARRIS: This is all based on a question of the week, and then your response.^[2]

ADAM TUCKER: Do you think he's fair?

DR. HUFFLING: Yeah, I think he's fair as far as he describes the view; I don't think he's very fair with the implications of the view. Maybe we'll get on that issue in a minute, so I don't want to jump the gun. But in terms of how he describes what the Thomistic metaphysics looks like and how that plays into simplicity I think it's fair on that point.

ADAM TUCKER: In a summary format, what is the essence-existence distinction?

DR. HUFFLING: OK. When we talk about existence for Aquinas and a lot of Thomists, it's almost a commonsense view of, well, if something exists it's real, and to be real in this sense means that it's mind independent. So if I picked up a pen from my desk, I can say this pen is real because the pen is actually there in existence. It just has its own being in other words. We can talk about things, though, that seem to have a kind of reality that are not real in the same sense as the pen, like, for example, a leprechaun. We can talk about a leprechaun existing in the mind, for example, but it doesn't mean that it is there like the pen is. So we can talk about the essence of what it means to be a leprechaun and then we can talk about the essence of what it means to be a pen. But to know the essence of a leprechaun doesn't tell you whether it exists. It doesn't have necessary existence. So we can talk about leprechauns or fairies or whatever. I can say with a leprechaun or I can use the word leprechaun or unicorn and people know what that means. But that doesn't mean that it exists. That’s the distinction – we can discuss essence separate from existence, in other words.

KEVIN HARRIS: Comments, Dr. Craig?

DR. CRAIG: My only comment would be that this distinction between the thing’s essence and its existence is drawn from Aristotle, and in Aristotle this is a conceptual distinction. You can conceive of the nature (essence) of something without knowing whether there is such a thing. But for Thomists this is not simply a conceptual distinction. It is a metaphysical distinction. Thomists hold to what's called a constituent ontology where things are made up of ontological parts. And for the Thomist all creaturely things are composed of essence and existence. These are metaphysical parts of the thing. The claim then is that in God there is no such composition of essence and existence. God just is existence subsisting without any sort of limiting or restricting essence to this or that kind of thing. So that's the real bedrock metaphysically of this view: Is there merely a conceptual or is there a real distinction between essence and existence?

KEVIN HARRIS: All right. Continuing to the next clip.

DR. HUFFLING: And so if things that actually exist other than God (things that are finite) have both a nature and actually exist, but because their existence isn't necessary (they don't have to exist) they're separate. And Thomas, as Craig points out, wants to make not only a conceptual difference (and there is a conceptual difference) but there's also a real distinction that Aquinas talks about – that of between the pen or you and I and our actual existence. Because if there's no difference then the very nature of the thing would be such that it exists necessarily. Well, God can be that, but nothing else would exist necessarily in a finite way or it wouldn't need a cause. . . . It would be a contradiction.

ADAM TUCKER: And as we've said on previous shows the difference with God is that his essence just is to exist.

DR. HUFFLING: Right. His nature itself is being. Our nature itself is not being. We can lose our being; we can change. We didn't have “being” until we were conceived.  These things go together. My analogy really is like Legos. You got these different parts. My son really likes Legos and I do, too. So they got this little Lego thing – this little dog. Well, you have got to have these different parts put together by something else. We can think of two of those parts as being essence and existence. Now, existence isn't a thing like God walks over and grabs a bucket full of existence. That's not what I mean at all, but we can take it within those kind of categories.

KEVIN HARRIS: Legos and unicorns, Bill.

DR. CRAIG: There you've heard exactly what we were talking about. The presupposition is that the distinction between essence and existence is a metaphysical one so that creatures are like those Lego parts that have these two ontological constituents that make them up – their essence and their existence or act of being – whereas in God he has no essence. He's just the pure act of being subsisting. That's the controversial metaphysical claim. And Thomas says nothing to justify this idea of a real distinction between essence and existence.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. A couple more clips.

DR. HUFFLING: We can't know anything positive about God. I pretty much agree with that. I think Thomas would, too. But Thomas himself would disagree that we can't say positive things about God or that when we “see” God in the beatific vision that we're not learning anything about him. This is where I said the implications I don't think are very fair. And Craig said other things, like in his Time and Eternity,  that if simplicity is true then God can't cause things because there's no relationship there because that would be an accident and that would make him not simple. He says that God can't know or love. These are things that Aquinas clearly thinks that God does and can do and also be simple. So there are a lot of things I agree with what Bill said there. For example, yeah, we are left with a great deal of agnosticism. And that's going to be the case I think with any view of God because we're finite beings and we're talking about an infinite being. There's no way even in principle by definition we're going to be able to understand an infinite being with our finite minds. So Thomism or no Thomism, simplicity or no simplicity, we're not going to be able to comprehend all of God. So at some point in some way there's going to be some level of agnosticism which is just to mean that we don't know everything there is to know about God – not about his existence but about his nature.

DR. CRAIG: While I appreciate his candor, I think that the attempt to avoid the charge of agnosticism about God's nature by saying that we're all committed to a degree of agnosticism is completely overblown. I think that we have good accurate knowledge of many of God's essential properties and therefore know what God is. But on Thomism you cannot know what God is. You cannot know his nature even in part. And there's a couple of reasons for this. One reason is that the way in which we grasp things (like the pen that he mentioned or the unicorn) is that we grasp their essence and we understand their essential properties (what they are). But with God, you see, he doesn't have any essence other than his pure act of being, which is incomprehensible. It cannot be rationally grasped. And that's why all that's available would be that sort of mystical experience which is non-cognitive. But I think on a biblical view of God we do have an accurate, if incomplete, knowledge of God's nature – what he is like. I think this is the most objectionable thing I find about Thomism: the profound agnosticism about who or what God is that it leads to. Now, in terms of the claim that God does not cause things, love things, or know things – that's not an objection. That's Thomism! That's what Thomas Aquinas affirms. You see, he says that God stands in no real relations to the world and therefore he is not related to things really as cause to effect, knower to known, lover to loved. Rather, these relations exist only in creatures. Thomas’ paradoxical doctrine is that while creatures are effects of God, God is not the cause of creatures. While creatures are known by God, God does not know creatures. While creatures are beloved of God, God does not love creatures. These properties or relations exist only in the creatures themselves. I think this is a paradoxical doctrine that is not only unbiblical but incomprehensible. It has a very, very negative consequence that usually goes under the label “the modal collapse” argument or objection. What is the modal collapse objection? It is that if all of God's knowledge and causal activity is essential to him – if God has no contingent properties but everything that he knows or does is essential to him – then that means that this is the only possible world. That God could not have done anything different; he could not have known anything different. So since God knows every true proposition, that means that every true proposition is necessarily true – there is no possible world in which that proposition is false because then God would have different knowledge than he does. And so this doctrine leads to a modal collapse that implies logical fatalism – that everything that happens, happens necessarily. I do want to add one final thing, and it's a bit of an irony. I mentioned that Thomism holds to a constituent ontology where things have metaphysical parts and so they're composed. I reject a constituent ontology. I don't think there are such things as metaphysical parts. So, for example, if the dog is brown, I don't think that brownness is an ontological constituent of the dog. If an elephant is big, I don't think that bigness is an ontological constituent of the elephant. I think there's a brown dog and a big elephant, but I don't think that there's something brownness or bigness that is a metaphysical part of those animals. So, in a sense, I actually affirm simplicity. In contrast to the Thomist, I don’t believe in ontological constituents. So the difference between me and the Thomist in that respect is that I think that everything is simple, not just God! Nothing has these sorts of metaphysical parts. But that doesn’t prevent us from having a true and accurate knowledge of brown dogs, big elephants, and an omnipotent, omniscient, holy and eternal God.^[3]