Evan Fales on God and Perfect Creatures

KEVIN HARRIS: Hey there. Welcome to Reasonable Faith with Dr William Lane Craig. I'm Kevin Harris. Dr. Craig and I have been having a good time listening to this Real Atheology podcast. Ben and Justin do a good job bringing us some good guests. We are kind of on a roll. We have been listening to some of these interviews that they've done on this podcast. We are going to interact with another one today. Dr. Craig responds to an interview with Dr. Evan Fales, a philosopher today that many of you may be familiar with. By the way, as we get started, we want to remind you again to go to ReasonableFaith.org. There is a lot going on at the website. There are some new things. You can always support our ministry there at ReasonableFaith.org. Definitely stop by. Bookmark it. Go there often. Okay? Here is the first excerpt from this interview with Dr. Evan Fales.

INTERVIEWER: In your article in the Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil a few years back you build an argument around an interesting concept that you call “perfect creature.” What is a perfect creature?

DR. FALES: This is a way – just a natural outcome – of pushing this line of thought.

INTERVIEWER: Pushing it further and further.

DR. FALES: How good could God make creatures assuming that he wanted to maximize value in the universe along these lines? It struck me that it is really hard to find any sort of argument that forecloses on the possibility that God could create beings that are just exactly like him except for one feature which is that, of course, trivially they are created creatures whereas God is uncreated. But otherwise they would be just like identical twins to God. Wouldn't that be a great world? These are creatures that would be as free as God is, and now, by the way, this is a matter of some controversy among Christian philosophers and theologians – is God free or isn't he? I personally happen to have views about freedom of the will which are libertarian but a consequence of which is that God is maximally free. So perfect creatures would be maximally free as well. However, like God, they would necessarily only will and do the very best.

INTERVIEWER: So God is essentially morally perfect but he is morally free in the sense that he is not held down by any kind of irrational desires or any kind of dispositions in that sense.

DR. FALES: I situate myself in a long tradition that tries most fundamentally to understand freedom of the will as a matter of having the capacity to exercise reason, rational choice. In fact, for me, the act of freely deciding just is the act of rationally deliberating. And God is maximal in his ability to do that. He has maximum information; he has maximum power when it comes to seeing consequences, and so on and so forth. So he is maximally free.

DR. CRAIG: I suspect that the notion of a perfect creature is an oxymoron. Such a thing is metaphysically impossible. Perfection is an attribute of God alone who is the greatest conceivable being. So I don't think it is possible, probably, that God could create another being exactly like him except it would be created. I think a being that is morally perfect would be God himself. Moreover, did you notice that he says that God's perfect freedom is the capacity to exercise reason. In order to be perfectly free like God we would have to have perfect rationality, and that again I think is probably incompatible with creaturehood. I suspect that the hypothesis that Fales is entertaining here is simply a fantasy. I see no reason to think that there could be such a thing as a creature who has perfect freedom and perfect goodness.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here is the second segment.

DR. FALES: The plenum objection is the worrisome one. The plenum objection simply goes like this: Well, for all you know, Evan Fales, God did create perfect creatures.[1] Bully for him. That was a good thing to do. But why should he stop with perfect creatures? After all, there might be tons of other types of beings which are such that they are worthy of existence, and such that the world would have more value in it if they did exist. Plus you have the added benefit of variety. Right? A perfect creature world is, after all, a little bit dull. So why wouldn't God have created other things including even such woebegone creatures as ourselves in addition to perfect creatures. Why wouldn't he have created a kind of plenum of worthwhile existence? I don't have a decisive argument against that view. But I do have reasonably strong intuitions that it would be ill-advised for God to do that and that it wouldn't be an improvement. First of all, because when it comes to amount of value, each of the perfect creatures has an infinite amount of value but my value is only finite. You add a finite bit to an infinite bit – what do you get? That may be too simple. Maybe I have, and you have, a kind of value that a perfect creature doesn't have. It is not commensurable with the value of a perfect creature. Even if there are some uniquely worthwhile goods that could only be brought about by creatures such as we, there is an awfully high price to pay for that. And God would have known that if he has foreknowledge. Why would he do that? It may even be true that in some ways there is more net value in the world if he creates us than if he doesn't, but you can't say, well, it's because he wants creatures that are free, because perfect creatures are free, or, well, he wants company and things to worship him because perfect creatures can do that.

DR. CRAIG: I have already said that I don't think that God could create perfect creatures. But here Fales says maybe he did but he also created some imperfect creatures as well. Fales doesn't have a knockdown argument against this. He just says it would be ill-advised on God's part. Well, of course nobody is turning to Fales for advice to God about what he ought to do. But I think, for example, of the value of redemption. Alvin Plantinga has speculated that maybe a world in which the great self-sacrificial redemption wrought by Christ occurs is a world that is actually more valuable and greater than a world in which sin never occurs. I think that is not at all implausible. God's redemptive love is more manifestly shown in a world of imperfect creatures in which he redeems them by this act of self-giving sacrifice than in a world of the supposedly perfect creatures who have no need of redemption and forgiveness. Here I think we are just simply lost in speculation and conjecture. We have really left any kind of, I think, strong plausibility arguments on Fales’ part.

INTERVIEWER: In your opinion, what do you think is the most promising or interesting (take your pick) argument in the theist's toolbox?

DR. FALES: I do think that the development of sophisticated fine-tuning arguments like Robin Collins’ and some others’. I am open to the possibility that such arguments can be successful. My main response to Robin is, look, we are talking here about the results of particle physics and cosmology which are and have been in a state of considerable flux for some time now, fifty, sixty, seventy years. What people think now and what they will think ten years from now are quite likely to be very different stories, perhaps even very fundamentally different stories. We don't know. What you are doing is to some extent holding your argument hostage to ignorance – our ultimate ignorance about fuss and feathers over something that may be changing.[2]

DR. CRAIG: It is interesting how many atheists are impressed with the fine-tuning argument. That is to say, that this universe appears against all probability to have been fine-tuned for the existence of conscious embodied life in the universe. He is certainly right in saying that Robin Collins is probably the premier defender of this argument today. But Fales' response to this, our listeners need to understand, is really desperate. The idea that fine-tuning is based upon physics that is highly in flux and may be overturned is simply inaccurate. The cases of fine-tuning that physics continues to discover are so numerous and so various that the idea that they are all going to vanish by some advance in a future physics is highly implausible. I think that the theist who holds to intelligent design as the best explanation of fine-tuning is basing his argument on pretty solid scientific foundations. The atheist who would avert the argument by holding out hope that somehow the fine-tuning is going to evaporate is really adopting a desperate hypothesis that goes strongly against the evidence.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here is the final segment. Listen to what he says about the renaissance of Christian philosophy.

INTERVIEWER: Setting aside specific arguments for and against theism, in your opinion what do you think are some of the more interesting or surprising broad developments in philosophy of religion since the kind of renaissance of the 1960s?

DR. FALES: It is really a phenomenon. In fact, with the demise of positivism I anticipated that something like this would happen – that Christian philosophy would no longer be considered professionally disreputable and it would start to emerge. And it certainly has.

DR. CRAIG: Well, Fales' expectations have been met, haven't they? If I might answer the interviewer's questions, I think one of the most fruitful areas of Christian philosophy over the last several decades has been an analysis of the concept of God. A popular atheistic argument back in the 60s and early 70s was that the very concept of God is incoherent, and that therefore no argument or evidence for God could succeed because no amount of evidence could establish the existence of a being which is incoherent. This has led to just an avalanche of philosophical work on the concept of God.

This has been the area of philosophy to which I have dedicated myself professionally. I think most of our listeners probably know of my work through the defense of theistic arguments because they are often featured in the public debates that I engage in. But actually those haven't been my main interest in philosophy. My main interest has been in what's called the coherence of theism. I spent seven years, for example, studying God's omniscience and explicating the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom and also defending the doctrine of middle knowledge. I then turned to the subject of divine eternity and explored in considerable depth for a period of twelve years the relationship between God and time. This led to a rich interdisciplinary study of God, relativity theory, time as it plays a role in various theories of physics as well as philosophy of time, and resulted in six books that came out of that study. Most recently I have completed a study that lasted over a dozen years on divine aseity which concerns God's relationship to abstract objects and how the theist can meet the challenge of Platonism, which is the view that there are necessary, eternal, self-existent objects apart from God. I tried to show various ways in which the theist can meet that challenge successfully.

So this has been, I think, one of the most fruitful and interesting areas of Christian philosophy which puts one very much in dialogue with other fields of philosophy.[3] To just give one more example, I am currently studying the doctrine of the atonement. In reflecting philosophically on the doctrine of the atonement, this has taken me into another area of philosophy in which I had not worked before and that is the philosophy of law. It is in the philosophy of law that the theory of punishment, for example, has been most developed by philosophers. In order to understand the atonement, you need to understand something about the theory of punishment – both the definition of punishment and the justification of punishment. This has been an unexpectedly rich study.

Anthony Kenny, the Oxford philosopher, once remarked to me that the reason he found philosophy of religion so interesting is that it is like the hub of a wheel from which spokes go out and touch every other area of philosophy. I find that image so apt – theism is at the hub or the center of the wheel and then these spokes relating to all of these other disciplines of philosophy: philosophy of time, philosophy of mathematics, logic, philosophy of language, and so on and so forth. It has really been a very gratifying experience for me to study the concept of God over these years.[4]