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Relationship with God and Divine Simplicity

August 10, 2011     Time: 00:23:54
Relationship with God and Divine Simplicity

Summary

The state of the Ontological Argument for God: ruled out of professional philosophy? If God lacks nothing, why would a will even be needed? Doesn't the Trinity require that God is complex rather than simple? What does a relationship with God feel like?

Transcript Relationship With God and Divine Simplicity

 

Kevin Harris: Come on in! It's the Reasonable Faith podcast with Dr. William Lane Craig. I'm Kevin Harris in the studio with Dr. Craig. More questions on God today, Dr. Craig, that we've received at ReasonableFaith.org. These are questions that obviously people have interacted with you and interacted with your work—yet they want some elaboration. And I'm noticing that we're getting a lot of questions on the ontological argument. What's the state of the ontological argument in philosophy? It seems to me that it's come roaring back.

Dr. Craig: Yes, over the last several decades. I don't think there have been any recent changes. If you look at the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology we have an article in there by Bob Maydole defending a version of the argument. And Plantinga has, I think, persuasive versions of the argument. It basically comes down to whether or not you think it's metaphysically possible that God exists. The atheist has to say that it's metaphysically impossible for God to exist—that the concept of God is incoherent and therefore not possibly instantiated, and that seems to me to be a rather radical position that I don't find plausible.

Kevin Harris: Do you think we're at least closing in on the notion that atheism has been falsified?

Dr. Craig: Oh, I think that would be too much to hope for. I think that what we try to do is every generation needs to renew and refurbish and re-defend the arguments for God's existence, and press the case that there are good grounds for believing that God exists. But there will always be folks who are unconvinced and unmoved by the arguments, and that's just par for the course; that's just to be expected.

Kevin Harris: This question says,

Dear Dr. Craig, Spinoza argues the following in The Ethics:

1) God has the attributes of immutability, infinity, and perfection, among others.

2) Because God is immutable, infinite, and perfect, God is not lacking in anything.

3) Because God is not lacking in anything, God could not have a will or purpose.

4) If God had a will or a purpose God would be lacking something.

5) Since God has the attributes of immutability, infinity and perfection, God could never have a will or purpose because God could never lack anything.

Do you have a contra argument?

Dr. Craig: Well, it seems to me that the premises of this argument are not plausibly true. Take the premise “Because God is immutable, infinite, and perfect, he's not lacking in anything.” I don't see any reason to think that that's true. How does that follow? God in his pre-incarnate state lacked arms. Does that mean that he's therefore not perfect, immutable and infinite? No—I don't see why we should think that a being that's immutable, infinite, and perfect has to have arms. Or, prior to God's creating the universe, God didn't have any human company; therefore, he was lacking in human company. Does that mean he's not immutable, infinite, perfect? No—not at all. So it doesn't seem to me that that's a plausible premise at all. And the premise that if God had a will or a purpose he would be lacking in something also seems to me to be implausible. Suppose God's will is that I should find salvation. In that case, the lack is mine. I lack salvation; I lack eternal life, and therefore God's will is for me to find eternal life and salvation. How is that incompatible with God's having a will or purpose? So I don't see that this argument is based upon premises that are plausible.

Kevin Harris: Okay.

Dear Dr. Craig, in your article “God, Time, and Eternity” you specify that God cannot be temporal and atemporal, as they are mutually exclusive; unless a laymen comes up with a model. You also state that you cannot have a part of God temporal and a part atemporal. The view I hold as a laymen is that Jesus is temporal, whereas the Father is atemporal. The reason I've been able to do this is that Jesus is separate from the Father in some respects – he sits at the right hand of the Father, and so on; he is not omnipresent, since he is fixed bodily – and so we have already made the Godhead into parts in allowing the Trinitarian view of God. What are the problems with this view?

Dr. Craig: Well, I think that the view as he's expressed it isn't based on the Trinity, it's based on the incarnation. The second person of the Trinity, prior to the incarnation, is omnipresent—he's not fixed bodily, he doesn’t have a human nature. [1] So what this model is really suggesting is that God the Father and God the Son and the Holy Spirit, in their divine natures are timeless, but Jesus in his human nature is temporal, he's in history. And certainly we would want to say that Jesus is temporal in his human nature. He inhabited history. But then the difficulties that I have with thinking that God in his divine nature is atemporal would be the very ones that I lay out in the book, Kevin. I would just be repeating myself. Namely, it's very difficult, number one, to see how God could have any causal relationship with the world, particularly with the human nature of Jesus. How would the timeless second person of the Trinity in his divine nature be related causally to the temporal human nature of Jesus. It's very difficult to see how you can have that. And then secondly, the problem of divine omniscience. God must know tensed facts. He must know what time it is now. He must know whether the incarnation has yet to occur, or whether the incarnation has already occurred. And those are tensed facts which a timeless being cannot know. So I would simply rehearse the arguments I've already given as to why it's very difficult to see how God in his divine nature can be timeless and yet have this temporal part which is the human nature of Jesus.

Kevin Harris: A question here about divine simplicity, Dr. Craig:

I'm writing a thesis on divine simplicity to complete an M.A. And while it appears the doctrine follows an actus purus conception of God, I have found nothing in the literature that challenges Aquinas' arguments on these grounds. In Time and Eternity, for instance, you reject the Thomistic version on multiple grounds, including its incoherence and its inability to be reconciled with the biblical data given its entailment of a strong version of immutability. Still, I must assume your rejection of the Thomistic doctrine of simplicity has taken Aquinas' positive argument into account. You've said that The Five Ways leads only to a metaphysically necessary being. Can you direct me to resources or comments that demonstrates the flaw in Aquinas's reasoning here so that I can be fair in my assessment?

Dr. Craig: Well, I haven't worked on Thomas Aquinas' cosmological argument since my doctoral work at the University of Birmingham. So all I could do would be to refer him to my book The Cosmological Argument: From Plato to Leibniz and the literature that's cited there as to why I think that Aquinas' Five Ways do not lead to a conception of God as being pure actuality, or existence itself subsisting. I don't see any reason to think that God couldn't have potentialities to act in certain ways, to do certain things, to know certain things. And the vast majority of Christian philosophers today, I think, would agree with that. They're simply not convinced that anything Aquinas has said obligates you to think of God as pure actuality. So all I can do by way of resources would be to refer to the literature that's cited in The Cosmological Argument: From Plato to Leibniz and the literature on divine simplicity that is cited in Time and Eternity.

Kevin Harris: I want to park on simplicity for just a moment, Bill, because I don't see how God can be anything but simple—a simple entity. I don't see how he can have parts, or be made up of any kind of parts, or be in any way complex. Yet apparently there are problems with God's being simple, a simple entity.

Dr. Craig: Well, it's difficult to reconcile with trinitarianism—the idea that there are three persons who are God seems to be the farthest thing from the doctrine of divine simplicity. So I think that it's very difficult to have a very strong Thomistic sort of doctrine of divine simplicity and yet be a Trinitarian. And when you read what Aquinas has to say about the Trinity he really, really struggles to explain how there can be persons in the Godhead. He reduces the persons of the Godhead to just subsisting relations—rather like I, myself, [2] I as a first person entity am related to myself as an object, me, in the accusative case. So I in the first person nominative case am related to myself, me, as an object in the accusative sense. And he takes this relation to be the Father and the Son. Well, boy, I would think there's much more to the trinitarian persons than the sort of relationship in which I stand to me, and then the Holy Spirit is supposed to be the relationship of love that exists between these two. And this is, I think, a very, very difficult doctrine, and there's nothing in Aquinas' metaphysics that would justify thinking that these sorts of subsistent relations wouldn't posit complexity in God. So I think that this strong doctrine is very hard to reconcile with trinitarian theology.

Kevin Harris: Well, is there a weaker doctrine, for instance, the one to which you appeal when people ask about God's eternity?

Dr. Craig: Yes, there are lots of different versions of divine simplicity that could be weaker. For example, you mentioned the idea, for example, of not having any separable parts. God isn't made up of a conglomeration of pieces. He certainly has no physical parts. And in that sense is remarkably simple. This is one of the failures, I think, that Richard Dawkins makes in his book The God Delusion in thinking that God must be more complex than the physical universe, when in fact the idea of an immaterial entity that isn't composed of physical pieces or parts is a very remarkably simple entity. So there are certainly weaker doctrines of divine simplicity, some of which I'd be quite sympathetic to. But this questioner is thinking of this extraordinarily strong Thomistic doctrine that God is pure actuality with no potency whatsoever.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, and it gets into something can be distinct but not separate which I guess can be semantical; but there are three persons in one essence or nature, God is one in nature or essence, but there are distinctions. But that mitigates, it seems, against a real strong simplicity if you even have distinctions within the Godhead.

Dr. Craig: Absolutely. For Aquinas there can be no distinctions within God, of properties, substance and accident, potentiality and actuality.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, he held to the Trinity.

Dr. Craig: He has this very strong doctrine of simplicity, and it's difficult for him to reconcile this with his wanting to be a Trinitarian.

Kevin Harris: This is a question from Japan:

Dr. Craig, I am a Christian and have been studying apologetics for several years now, and I have to say that I think the intellectual arguments are strongly in favor of Christianity—which is why I'm still a Christian. From intelligent design to the resurrection of Jesus it seems to me that the other side offers little in the way of deeply rational arguments in the way that Christianity does.

That having been said, for me it has never been the deep questions that have bothered my faith, but the simple ones—one in particular regarding my relationship with God. You see, there was a time in the past where I felt like certainly God was with me and was by my side helping me and guiding me. But I become skeptical of these feelings, after all when I have a relationship with another human person that relationship is not built upon my feeling this way or that way. It is built upon their direct interaction with me. For example, when I talk to them they talk back, etc. Their existence and personhood imposes itself upon me; I would actually have to go out of my way to reject it.

But with God it does not seem to be that way. I don't get direct communication back, though obviously there are even well-respected Christians who say they do or have. It doesn’t seem that God's personhood imposes itself upon me, at least in the way that human personhood does. You have often talked about the importance of having that direct relationship with God at the end of your debates. And that is why I want to ask this question of you: what does it mean to have a first-hand knowledge of God today, and how does one differentiate this experience from the experiences of others in various world religions? To put it simply, how can I tell the difference between personal feelings and emotions and the true and living God? I know this isn't the most deep philosophical question but it is one that is really important to me, and to be honest has weighed down my faith for some time, so you're response would be appreciated.

Bill, we have talked in podcasts past about what it means to have a relationship with God, [3] mostly that is goes toward being properly related to God, and so on, as opposed to having a feeling, a gushy feeling, and things like that, that the emphasis there is to be rightly related to God because of the work of Christ and so on.

Dr. Craig: That's certainly pertinent to this question. What makes this question so difficult, Kevin, to deal with is that we don't know who this person is, we don't know his background, we don't know whether this is a person that was raised in a nominal Christian home or whether he has had a genuine saving experience of Jesus Christ—is a genuine regenerate Christian. This is the sort of question that's better posed for a pastor, I think, than for a philosopher who doesn't even know the individual and can't sit down and talk with this person.

But having said that, I want to agree with what you just said, that primarily when one talks about having a relationship with God one means not this kind of imposition that he's speaking of here where in human friendships the other person acts and reacts with you and imposes his presence upon you. We're talking, rather, as you said, about being rightly related to God, forgiven, cleansed, regenerated, saved, directed and guided by God, you have the fruit of the Holy Spirit being produced in your life on a regular basis—that is the primary understanding, I think, of having a personal relationship with God.

On the other hand, he's quite right that I have spoken of this in an experiential dimension as well. And I suppose what I would say there is that I'm speaking of what in popular Christian piety is called assurance of salvation. Paul says that when we cry “Abba! Father!” the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and therefore joint heirs with Christ. And I think every Christian ought to have this sort of quiet, deep assurance of salvation, that he's properly related to God, and that he knows God.

But beyond that I don't have these experiences that he talks about here, either, where I hear voices from God or I'll say “God told me to found Reasonable Faith” or something of that sort. That kind of locution isn't in my vocabulary because I don't have that sort of experience. I'm not saying that others don't, but the first-hand experience of God that I'm talking about would be more this sort of assurance of salvation.

Now, he asks “How do you differentiate this from the experiences of others in various world religions?” Well, I'm not an expert on world religions and religious experience, though talking with those who are I have been told that, for example, Buddhist or Hindu religious experience is very different from Christian religious experience, that they're not at all the same. The Buddhist or the Hindu will experience a sense of oneness with The All, a kind of absorption of the self into the grand scheme of things, a sort of loss of individual existence and submersion into The Whole, a feeling of dependence upon The Whole. And that's very different, I think, from Christian religious experience, which is more, as I say, the sense of a personal presence, that one is rightly related to God, to this person who loves you, and that you know and who knows you—that's very different from Buddhist and Hindu religious experience. So I would think that there are definite empirical ways to distinguish these that a sociologist of religion ought to be able to tell us more about.

Kevin Harris: The danger in saying, “Well, this is what it's going to feel like,” is that I'm sure that it various person to person, from psyche to psyche, Bill. And if you were to say, “By the way, this is what it's going to feel like,” a person who doesn't feel that in that way, or whatever, will think, “Oh my goodness, I must not have that.” But a lot of Christians are distressed because our Gospel songs tell us 'and he walks with me and talks with me,' and 'he tells me that I am his own,' and 'we walk together in the garden while the dew is still on the roses,' and they really personify God. [4] Again, we're reminded from an earlier podcast that Adam had this uninterrupted relationship with God. Prior to the Fall, God still said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” Human companionship is one of the ways that God removes that aloneness, and that human relationships are a provision of God, probably because he's transcendent and immaterial.

Dr. Craig: Maybe this reader is trying to impose a model a human friendship or relationship on God.

Kevin Harris: Well, he is.

Dr. Craig: At the same time, Kevin, I'm concerned by what he says about his becoming skeptical of these feelings, and 'how can I tell the difference between personal feelings and emotions and the true and living God?' I think that there's a kind of naturalistic presupposition that works itself into one's consciousness that can be undermining of Christian experience because one becomes distrustful and skeptical of it. And I would want to remind him that we are whole people, left brain and right brain, and that we shouldn't be afraid of our emotions. We have good grounds intellectually for believing that God exists and has revealed himself decisively in Jesus. And if we are convinced that Christianity is true then we shouldn't be afraid to give ourselves emotionally to God with religious affections and worship him, and I just would say don't even worry about the source of these personal feelings and emotions. Why think that there has to be this dichotomy between personal feelings and emotions and the true and living God—why can't God work through your personal emotions and feelings? The difficulty is that perhaps he's looking to the emotions and feelings to ground his faith, and so he's distrustful of them. But that's not the ground of our faith. Our faith is grounded in the witness of the Holy Spirit, as well as in argument and evidence for the truth of Christianity, and if we're convinced that it's true then we ought to be able to enjoy personal feelings and emotions in worship and prayer and bible reading and so forth.

Kevin Harris: Sure. This seems to narrow down what the relationship with God is supposed to be like; narrowing it down to a very narrow category of feeling or what it's supposed to be like. And it would leave out things like a summer thunderstorm, or God's creation, God's witness in the world and in history and in Christ, and narrow it down to some kind of a quiver in your liver, similar to what another person would give you. And so perhaps we need to broaden out a little bit how God works through all of these things, perhaps, in his grace and provision.

Dr. Craig: Yeah. Well, let me give a specific example so that we have something concrete. Imagine that something good has happened in your life, and you feel this overwhelming sense of gratitude to God – 'thank you, Lord, that this has happened, what a blessing' – why shouldn't you enjoy that feeling of gratitude and express it? Why be distrustful of it and think this is something that I'm cranking up on my own or something? Why not allow yourself to be overwhelmed with gratitude for the goodness of God? I just don't see any reason not to.

Kevin Harris: Alright, thank you, Dr. Craig, that clears up a lot. And we'll see you on the next podcast. Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. Thanks for being with us. [5]