demiurge of Aristotle to the pantheism of Spinoza. Nevertheless, much
of western thought about God has fallen within some broad form of
theism. Theism is the view that there is a God which is is the creator
and sustainer of the universe and is unlimited with regard to
knowledge (omniscience), power (omnipotence), extension
(omnipresence), and moral perfection. Though regarded as sexless, God
has traditionally been referred to by the masculine pronoun.
Concepts of God in philosophy are entwined with concepts of God in
religion. This is most obvious in figures like Augustine and Aquinas,
who sought to bring more rigor and consistency to concepts found in
religion. Others, like Leibniz and Hegel, interacted constructively
and deeply with religious concepts. Even those like Hume and
Nietzsche, who criticized the concept of God, dealt with religious
concepts. While Western philosophy has interfaced most obviously with
Christianity, Judaism and Islam have had some influence. The orthodox
forms of all three religions have embraced theism, though each
religion has also yielded a wide array of other views. Philosophy has
shown a similar variety. For example, with regard to the initiating
cause of the world, Plato and Aristotle held God to be the crafter of
uncreated matter. Plotinus regarded matter as emanating from God.
Spinoza, departing from his judaistic roots, held God to be identical
with the universe, while Hegel came to a similar view by
reinterpreting Christianity.
Issues related to Western concepts of God include the nature of divine
attributes and how they can be known, if or how that knowledge can be
communicated, the relation between such knowledge and logic, the
nature of divine causality, and the relation between the divine and
the human will.
1. Sources of Western Concepts of God
Sources of western concepts of the divine have been threefold:
experience, revelation, and reason. Reported experiences of God are
remarkably varied and have produced equally varied concepts of the
divine being. Experiences can be occasioned by something external and
universally available, such as the starry sky, or by something
external and private, such as a burning bush. Experiences can be
internal and effable, such as a vision, or internal and ineffable, as
is claimed by some mystics. Revelation can be linked to religious
experience or a type of it, both for the person originally receiving
it and the one merely accepting it as authoritative. Those who accept
its authority typically regard it as a source of concepts of the
divine that are more detailed and more accurate than could be obtained
by other means. Increasingly, the modern focus has been on the
complexities of the process of interpretation (philosophical
hermeneutics) and the extent to which it is necessarily subjective.
Revelation can be intentionally unconnected to reason such that it is
accepted on bare faith (fideism; compare Kierkegaard), or at the other
extreme, can be grounded in reason in that it is accepted because and
only insofar as it is reasonable (compare Locke). Reason has been
taken as ancillary to religious experience and revelation, or on other
accounts, as independent and the sole reliable source of concepts of
God.
Each of the three sources of concepts of God has had those who regard
it as the sole reliable basis of our idea of the divine. By contrast,
others have regarded two or three of the sources as interdependent and
mutually reinforcing. Regardless of these differing approaches, theism
broadly construed has been a dominant theme for much of the history of
Western thought.
2. Historical Overview
a. Greeks
At the dawn of philosophy, the Ionian Greeks sought to understand the
true nature of the cosmos and its manifestations of both change and
permanence. To Heraclitus, all was change and nothing endured, whereas
to Parmenides, all change was apparent. The Pythagoreans found order
and permanence in mathematics, giving it religious significance as
ultimate being. The Stoics identified order with divine reason.
To Plato, God is transcendent-the highest and most perfect being-and
one who uses eternal forms, or archetypes, to fashion a universe that
is eternal and uncreated. The order and purpose he gives the universe
is limited by the imperfections inherent in material. Flaws are
therefore real and exist in the universe; they are not merely higher
divine purposes misunderstood by humans. God is not the author of
everything because some things are evil. We can infer that God is the
author of the punishments of the wicked because those punishments
benefit the wicked. God, being good, is also unchangeable since any
change would be for the worse. For Plato, this does not mean (as some
later Christian thought held) that God is the ground of moral
goodness; rather, whatever is good is good in an of itself. God must
be a first cause and a self-moved mover otherwise there will be an
infinite regress to causes of causes. Plato is not committed to
monotheism, but suggests for example that since planetary motion is
uniform and circular, and since such motion is the motion of reason,
then a planet must be driven by a rational soul. These souls that
drive the planets could be called gods.
Aristotle made God passively responsible for change in the world in
the sense that all things seek divine perfection. God imbues all
things with order and purpose, both of which can be discovered and
point to his (or its) divine existence. From those contingent things
we come to know universals, whereas God knows universals prior to
their existence in things. God, the highest being (though not a loving
being), engages in perfect contemplation of the most worthy object,
which is himself. He is thus unaware of the world and cares nothing
for it, being an unmoved mover. God as pure form is wholly immaterial,
and as perfect he is unchanging since he cannot become more perfect.
This perfect and immutable God is therefore the apex of being and
knowledge. God must be eternal. That is because time is eternal, and
since there can be no time without change, change must be eternal. And
for change to be eternal the cause of change-the unmoved mover-must
also be eternal. To be eternal God must also be immaterial since only
immaterial things are immune from change. Additionally, as an
immaterial being, God is not extended in space.
The Neo-Platonic God of Plotinus (204/5-270 A.D.) is the source of the
universe, which is the inevitable overflow of divinity. In that
overflow, the universe comes out of God (ex deo) in a timeless
process. It does not come by creation because that would entail
consciousness and will, which Plotinus claimed would limit God. The
first emanation out of God (nous) is the highest, successive
emanations being less and less real. Finally, evil is matter with no
form at all, and as such has no positive existence. God is an
impersonal It who can be described only in terms of what he is not.
This negative way of describing God (the via negativa) survived well
into the middle ages. Though God is beyond description, Plotinus
(perhaps paradoxically) asserted a number of things, such as that
virtue and truth inhere in God. Because for Plotinus God cannot be
reached intellectually, union with the divine is ecstatic and
mystical. His thought influenced a number of Christian mystics, such
as Meister Eckhart (1260-1327).
b. Early Christian Thought
Early Christians regarded Greek religion as holding views unworthy of
God, but they were divided as to Greek philosophy. Christian
philosopher Justin Martyr (c. 100-c. 165) saw Christianity as
compatible with the highest and best Greek thought, whereas Tertullian
(c. 160-c. 225) dismissed philosophy, saying that Jerusalem (faith)
could have nothing to do with Athens (philosophy).
Having been born out of Judaism, Christianity was unambiguously
monotheistic and affirmed that God created the material of the
universe out of nothing (ex nihilo). But it also affirmed the Trinity
as multiplicity within unity, a view it regarded as implicit in
Judaism.
Consistent with theism, Augustine (354-430) regarded God as
omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, morally good, the creator (ex
nihilo) and sustainer of the universe. Despite these multiple
descriptors, God is uniquely simple. Being entirely free, he did not
have to create, but did so as an act of love. As his creation, it
reflects his mind. Time and space began at creation, and everything in
creation is good. Evil is uncreated, being a lack of good and without
positive existence. Though God is not responsible for evil even it has
a purpose: to show forth what is good, especially what is good within
God. Augustine developed a theme found as early as Plato, Aristotle,
and Zeno of Citium, that God is a perfect being. After enumerating a
hierarchy of excellencies (things to be "preferred") Augustine affirms
that God "lives in the highest sense" and is "the most powerful, most
righteous, most beautiful, most good, most blessed" (On the Trinity,
XV, 4). When we think of God, we "attempt to conceive something than
which nothing more excellent or sublime exists" (Christian Doctrine,
I, 7, 7). But where Aristotle concluded that the greatest being must
be aware only of himself, Augustine emphasized an opposite and
distinctly Christian theme: God loves creatures supremely to the point
of becoming incarnate in Christ in order to be revealed to them and to
reconcile them to himself. Moreover, God is providentially active in
history, from an individual level (Confessions) on up to dealings with
entire nations (City of God). So as to the important subject of God's
relationship to the world, Christian thought could not be more
opposite Aristotle's view of a Being who contemplates only himself.
John Scotus Erigena (c. 810-c.877) had stronger affinities for
Neo-Platonic thought. God created the universe according to eternal
patterns in his mind and it is an expression of his thought, however
incomplete an expression the cosmos may be. Erigena's pantheistic
tendencies can be seen in his notion that God creates out of himself
and "God is in all things." Creation is not in time but is eternal. In
the process God used universals and made them particulars (e.g.,
humanity became individual persons). Immortality is the reverse
process of particulars going back to universals. In Erigena's terms,
division is the process of differentiating universals into
particulars; analysis is the reverse, a return to unity and thus to
God. These are not mere mental activities but mirror reality and God's
relationship to the world. God is ultimately unknowable, being beyond
all language and categories. Aristotle's predicates and categories
cannot apply to God because they assume some type of substance.
Nevertheless God can be described, albeit inadequately, using both
positive and negative statements. Positive statements are only
approximate but can be made more exact by adding negative statements.
For example, it can be said that God is good (positive), but also that
he is not good (negative) in that he is above goodness. These can be
combined in the statement that he is "supergood." In spite of these
approximations, God must be reached by mystical experience.
c. Medieval Thought
Islamic Neoplatonist al-Farabi (875-950) held that universals are in
things and have no existence apart from particulars. Objects are
contingent in that they may or may not exist; they do not have to
exist. Therefore there must be something that has to exist-that exists
necessarily-to ground the existence of all other (contingent) things.
This being is God. The world evolves by emanation, and matter is a
phase of that process. The potential in matter is made actual, and
over time God brings out its form. Thought is one emanation from God,
and through it knowledge arises in humans. The actualized human
intellect becomes an immortal substance.
Avicenna (Ibn Sina; 980-1037), a Muslim, also distinguished between
God as the one necessary being and all other things, which are
contingent. The world is an emanation from God as the outworking of
his self-knowledge. As such it is eternal and necessary. God must be
eternal and simple, existing without multiplicity. In their essence,
things do not contain anything that accounts for their existence. They
are hierarchically arranged such that the existence of each thing is
accounted for by something ontologically higher. At the top is the one
being whose existence is necessary. From contingent things we come to
know universals, whereas God knows universals prior to their existence
in things.
Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) challenged any joining of theology and
philosophy, holding that because the mind and senses are subject to
error, truth must come by divine grace. Rather than the world existing
necessarily in a Neoplatonic sense, it exists by the will of God
alone. It is in no way autonomous, and even causal relationships are
non-necessary. He rejected as un-Islamic Avicenna's view that things
like souls or intellects could be eternal.
Anselm (1033-1109), archbishop of Canterbury, raised the perfect being
concept to a new level by making it the foundation of his celebrated
ontological argument. He accepted that God is the highest level of
being under which there are, by degrees, lesser and lesser beings.
Similar to Plato, Anselm assumes the realist view that entities which
share an attribution, such as "good," also share in being. And
somewhere there must be a perfection of that being (e.g., perfect
goodness). That perfection is God.
Though a Muslim and an Aristotelian, Averroes (Ibn Rushd; 1126-1198)
added to the growing concept of emanation by claiming that the
universal mind is an emanation from God. Humans participate in this
universal mind and only it, not the soul, is immortal. The mind of the
common person understands religious symbols in a literal way, whereas
the philosopher interprets them allegorically. Consequently, something
understood as true philosophically may be untrue theologically, and
vice versa.
Working from Judaism, Maimonides (1135-1204) accepted creation rather
than an eternal universe. He drew from philosophic traditions to
formulate three proofs based on the nature of God, and these were
developed further by Aquinas. Following Aristotle Maimonides
demonstrated the existence of a Prime Mover, and with some inspiration
from Avicenna, the existence of a necessary being. He also showed God
to be a primary cause. Though he considered God's existence
demonstrable, he held that nothing positive could be said about God.
Bonaventura (John of Fidanza, c. 1221-1274) argued that the
Aristotlean denial of Platonic ideas would entail that God knows
himself but not the world. As such God could not be its creator.
Furthermore, because some change in the universe is cyclic and
therefore unexplainable by chance, change would have to be
deterministic. But this would deny God's providence as well as human
moral responsibility. So a proper concept of God must include Platonic
ideas. Reason can prove God as creator since an eternal universe
entails both that the amount of time of its existence is infinite and
that it is increasing. Yet there cannot be both an infinite and a
larger infinite (a view not held in modern times).
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) accepted both Aristotle and Christian
revelation. He accepted both reason and revelation as sources of
knowledge of God. Over the neo-Platonic notion of a hierarchy of
reality in which lower existences are less real and a mere shadow of
the divine, Aquinas accepted gradations of form and matter. Atop the
hierarchy is God as pure form and no matter. As pure actuality and no
potentiality, he is perfect and therefore changeless. He is also pure
intelligence and pure activity. To these Aristotelian concepts Aquinas
added Christian convictions that God is loving, providential, and
ruler of the universe. Reason and revelation are in harmony because
they have the same divine source, and revelation is not unreasonable.
Perception is also in harmony because the world's origins are divine.
This being the case, God as cause can be known through the world as
effect. For this reason empirical facts ground Aquinas's theistic
proofs.
The God that can be known in part from the universe is fundamentally
different from it. Only God is identical to his essence, being neither
more nor less than it. By contrast, a being such as Socrates is
transcended by humanity because there are other people. On the other
hand, Socrates has qualities ("accidents") that are not part of his
essence; for example, he may be sitting. So unlike God, Socrates is
both greater than and less than his essence. There is nothing that
transcends God so nothing is greater than his essence. And there are
no accidents in God because accidents are caused by something else
(just as part of the cause of Socrates sitting is a chair).
God is not (completely) knowable because he is not material, whereas
our knowledge is normally dependent on our senses. Furthermore, we
normally know things by knowing their genus and species, yet God is
unique and so cannot be known in that way. We can know something of
God the negative way (via negativa) by removing limits, concluding for
example, that God is unmoved, and unlimited by space. What we can know
of God positively is neither exactly like our knowledge of temporal
things (univocal) nor entirely different (equivocal). Rather, it is
analogical, being in some ways the same and in other ways different.
God knows x in a way that is both like and unlike the way in which
Socrates knows x. God knows, but in a way that is, among other things,
complete, immediate, and timeless.
That God created is evident (though not provable) because a material
universe cannot emanate from an immaterial being. The universe exists
to manifest God, who created the fullest possible range of beings
because in them he can be revealed to the fullest extent. Beings range
from angels, who are immaterial; to humans, who are material and
immaterial; to animals, who are purely material (and both eat and
move); to plants, to inanimate objects.
God as primary cause works through such created things as secondary
causes. Nevertheless, creatures with a will remain free and
responsible. God can also work apart from secondary causes in what we
call miracles. Being good, God created the best possible world in the
sense that it has the best kinds of things. Evil is a privation or
lack of good and as such God did not cause it the way he causes other
things. So we cannot ask why God brought about evil, but we can ask
why he did not bring about more good. He did not bring about more good
in order that he could be revealed through the greatest range of
things, and as well, to allow for certain types of good (such as
compassion, which can exist only where there is some suffering).
Aquinas and others grounded the scholastic synthesis of knowledge in
the view that truth, morality, and God himself could be known by
reason because the divine will itself is guided by reason. What is
reasonable is therefore what is true and right. But John Duns Scotus
(1265-1308) claimed that in humans and in God it is the will–not the
intellect–that is primary. Evidence of this is that a being must will
what to think about, thus something must act on the intellect; whereas
nothing need act on the will. The view entails that there is no reason
why God acts or wills as he does. This makes truth and morality
essentially arbitrary and thereby unknowable through reason. God could
have willed different moral standards. Scotus's view makes our
knowledge of God a matter of revelation and faith, not of reason.
Another concept about God's will further destabilized the medieval
world view. William of Ockham (1285-1347) held that omnipotence means
God can do literally anything. Accordingly, a person could perceive
something by sheer act of divine will, without the object being there
at all. On his view, faith and reason can be contradictory. Ockham's
"razor" sought to cut from explanations those entities that are
unverifiable thereby making simpler explanations preferred. This was
later used to cut out of world views such things as divine purposes,
which had been central to explanations since the Greeks. Eventually,
even concepts of a divine being would be optional–or even
unnecessary–to explanations and world views.
The connection between reason and God was further undermined by
Meister Eckhart's (1260-1327/28) view that God is "above being" and
that human unity with the divine must be suprarational. Knowledge is a
matter of proceeding from particulars to unity, beyond which is a
unity with the divine surpassing all differences, "a silent desert."
The divine being is therefore inexpressible. God knows all things in
their unity, timelessly; but on our temporal level it makes sense to
differentiate time as well as events.
d. Renaissance Thought
God moved out of the intellectual center of knowledge as faith was no
longer grounded in reason and reason was no longer supervised by
faith. The power of the church waned and society found inspiration in
the classical world. Interest in this life and the world drove
interest in science, which soon uncovered mathematically describable
physical regularities. This development shaped the concept of God in a
way that further undermined the Aristotelian world view, with its
emphasis on such things as divine purpose. Regularities such as those
discovered in Kepler's laws of planetary motion and Newton's laws
implied a supreme engineer. Early in these developments, Giordano
Bruno (1548-1600) emphasized God as immanent in the universe as an
active principle, a trend in the conception of God that would increase
along with the ever more detailed understanding of natural processes
to be achieved in the scientific revolution.
The Reformation period saw an emphasis on divine sovereignty over
human affairs as a corollary to its emphasis on fallen humanity's
inability to achieve a right standing with God. If humans cannot come
to God unaided, then it is God who must choose some to be right with
him. Since the Reformers affirmed that divine choice cannot be based
on merit, love must be the central divine attribute operating in
salvation. This view of divine predestination brought new questions,
both theological and philosophical, about the relationship between the
human and divine wills. The question of how people could be free and
responsible if predestination ultimately determines fate was resolved
in John Calvin's (1509-64) tradition partly by distinguishing between
God's irresistible and resistible will. The latter consists of human
choices which God allows (for a higher divine purpose) to run counter
to his perfect will. Thus God is entirely sovereign and humans are
responsible for their deeds. James Arminius (1560-1609) objected that
Calvinism made God responsible for sin, and he proposed instead that
God predestined those whom he foresaw would repent.
The Reformers' emphasis on the fallenness of the will led to their
distrust in reason as a source of information about the spiritual
realm, including God. An unfallen mind would see God everywhere
through His creation, but our fallen minds cannot find God. Being
therefore hidden, as Martin Luther emphasized (1483-1546), God must
reveal Himself in revelation and deed. Humanity must resist the
temptation to go beyond what is revealed, especially since God reveals
only what we need to know, not all that we wish to know. The
Reformers' reluctance to use reason to narrow the gap between the
spiritual and physical realms continued the Augustinian tradition
(which faintly echoed Plato's two realms), challenging the
Scholastics' high view of reason and of Aristotle. That reason has a
limited role in the spiritual realm was later emphasized by Soren
Kierkegaard (1813-55) and Karl Barth (1886-1968).
e. Enlightenment
Philosophy began splitting from religion as the two moved in opposite
directions with regard to reason. Religion was retreating from reason
both by emphasizing the divine will over the divine intellect, and in
the human realm, by emphasizing faith over reason. Meanwhile, broad
elements in the culture turned away from the authority of the church
and Aristotle to regard reason as the main source of knowledge. The
wisdom of this seemed confirmed in the discoveries of scientists like
Newton and Kepler, who had great success using observations to find
mathematical regularities in nature. Discoveries were revealing a
highly ordered universe, implying a highly reasonable God.
Deism rose as a philosophical form of theism that used reason as its
source of knowledge of God. Without revelation to give detail to
natural theology, knowledge of God was minimal. Lord Herbert of
Cherbury (1583-1648) claimed simply that there is one supreme God, who
should be worshiped; virtuous living constitutes worship, people
should repent, and God rewards good and punishes evil. The emerging
Newtonian universe was one of mechanical precision and predictability,
with no room for outside causes. Accordingly, there seemed to be
little or no room for divine intervention. Deism, then, held that God
caused the universe but did not intervene thereafter. Prayer and
miracles were deemed unnecessary because of God's superior
engineering.
The emphasis on God as a perfect designer entailed that waste and
suffering were only apparently pointless. The plan and wisdom of God
were seen in the grand scheme of the universe, hence God is known best
in generality and abstraction.
In a time of upheaval, Rene Descartes (1596-1650) famously sought to
ground all knowledge on a foundation he could not doubt: that he was a
thinking being. The success of his approach depended crucially on
God's benevolence: because we can be sure that the divine being would
not mislead us, we can trust that our clear and distinct ideas are
true. God's character thus forms the basis for our certainty that
there is indeed a reality corresponding to our ideas. God's
omnipotence entails the ability to do even what is logically
impossible. Descartes also regarded God as not merely uncaused, but
somehow the cause of himself.
John Locke (1632-1704) held a view reminiscent of scholasticism, that
revelation reveals about God what cannot be known by reason alone–yet
neither does revelation violate reason. He went beyond the scholastics
to affirm that what violates reason cannot be accepted as revelation.
His motive was to rule out what he called "enthusiasm," which would
include supposed private revelations about God held on the sole
authority of an individual's intuition that a revelation is true.
Reason must judge whether a supposed revelation is true. His view
further welded the concept of God to reason.
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) agreed with Descartes that clear and
distinct ideas indeed reflect reality, but he thought that philosophy
must start with God, not the self. This is because God is first in the
order of things. God's primacy is also the reason Spinoza rejected
Bacon's method of beginning with observation. He abandoned his
judaistic roots by affirming that God is the whole of reality, and
neither transcendent nor personal.
Aquinas had concluded that God exists on grounds that the universe
needs something outside itself as a cause. But Spinoza believed that
there can be only one thing–God–because wholes alone are independent
and there can be only one whole (or "substance"). There is nothing
outside the whole on which the whole can depend. That whole is a
network of truths connected by implication. That being the case,
everything is either necessary or impossible. Since to be free is to
be undetermined by anything outside oneself, God is free because
nothing can be outside him; and God alone is free because everything
within the whole is the way it is by necessity. There is no need to
prove the existence of God beyond the need to prove the existence of
the one substance. For Spinoza, God is not an external initiating
cause of the world and so is not demonstrable as such. He is
nonetheless an immanent and continuing cause of the world. Nor could
God be the world's designer or one who imbues it with purpose. That is
because wanting to bring something about implies lack, and God can
lack nothing. Lacking purposes, God can have no moral goals for
humanity. God is the network of all truths, not a personal being who
gives revelation. Still, to know God-which is necessarily a matter of
reason-is an essential good. As Spinoza said, "the highest virtue of
the mind is to understand or to know God" (Ethics, Part 4, prop. 28;
trans. Elwes).
Where Spinoza explained reality in terms of a singular substance that
is divine, Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) proposed innumerable
instances of the same types of substance. These monads as he called
them, are centers of psychic energy. They do not act causally on each
other but are coordinated in a grand harmony preestablished by God.
That so many diverse elements act in harmony is proof for God's
existence. Because God operates on a principle of sufficient reason,
there must be a reason why he chose to create just this world: it must
be the best one possible. While many things are possible individually,
even God is limited in what can be brought about together (just as a
man can be a father or childless, but not both). Since God alone is
perfect, created things have limitations, which is a source of evil.
Nevertheless, we find that evil is often a prerequisite for some types
of good. God's choice to create this particular world is a matter of
his internal moral necessity. He made this world because it has the
greatest variety and can, as an act of love, reveal his nature in the
greatest possible way.
Leibniz made God the source of causality, George Berkeley (1685-1753)
made God the source of perception. He denied the existence of physical
substances (because he regarded belief in the physical world as a root
of atheism) and claimed that God directly gives us our ideas of the
world. The orderliness of our ideas is testimony to the power of God.
David Hume (1711-1776) accepted Berkeley's empiricism, which claimed
that our ideas are of particular things and not universal things; but
Hume's empiricism led him to skeptical conclusions. He held that our
observations about the world do not warrant belief in the God of
theism. Design, for example, is manifestly imperfect; furthermore, a
good God would not allow evil. If our observations point beyond the
world at all it might be to a finite god, or even a number of gods. So
the concept of God must be rooted not in reason but in emotion and the
will.
f. Modern Period
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) also rejected empirical knowledge as a way
of knowing God. In fact, he maintained that God cannot be demonstrated
at all, yet neither can his existence be disproved. As humans we
typically go beyond what we can rightly infer, and our idea that God
can be objectively known is an example. Nevertheless, as an idea, God
has regulative value for our thinking in that it acts heuristically
and gives a sense of unity to our experience. Practically, too, the
idea of God grounds important moral beliefs. Specifically, it is
fitting that those who do what is right are happy; and since that is
not reliably attained in this life, we can rightly posit that there is
life in a sphere beyond this one. We can make the practical assumption
too that God exists to ensure the connection between virtue and
happiness.
God was considered to be an objective issue before Kant. After him
there was a greater tendency to consider it a subjective issue, one
that is irreducibly a matter of interpretation. It was associated with
discussions of ethics and values rather than of science and facts.
This accompanied a change from the Enlightenment's emphasis on
objective knowledge of God as a transcendent engineer, to
Romanticism's emphasis on personal experience of God as a Spirit
immanent in everything. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)
accordingly emphasized a feeling of dependence on God, while Albrect
Ritschl (1822-1889) emphasized God as a source of moral freedom and
values.
Whereas Kant and those he affected regard God as elusive to our
rationality, for G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) God is the essence of
rationality. Furthermore, Spirit reveals itself and its development
through the world, being visible for all to see in the very events of
history. Thus the categories which Kant regarded as being limited to
the human mind Hegel regarded as part of the Absolute Mind. As such,
the very structure of that Mind (or Spirit) can be known. Hegel
challenged views that had been dominant since Aristotle, that God and
truth are unchanging, and that logic deals with dichotomies that are
properly kept apart by the principle of non-contradiction (according
to which A cannot also be non-A). For Hegel, dichotomies are united in
a higher reality. For example, Being and Nothing are transcended in
Becoming. That is because Being is a general term and has no
qualities, so it passes over into the concept of Nothing. That passing
over is Becoming. The original opposition is thereby transcended.
Hegel believed that reality divides into dichotomies and
contradictions that are resolved in a dynamic synthesis. Spirit thus
moves from homogeneity to differentiation to unity in diversity. He
therefore rejected Schelling's idea that the Absolute is
undifferentiated. Because for Hegel Spirit is more than matter, he
rejected Spinoza's view that the Absolute is substance only. For Hegel
it is more than that; it is developing consciousness. In this process
God comes to self-awareness through mankind's awareness of him–God
thinking of himself through human consciousness.
Kant had claimed that ultimate reality (the thing-in-itself) is
unknowable, but Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) said it is knowable
because it is will. We can know it directly because we can know our
own will. Will manifests itself with increasing sophistication in the
physical world (through gravity, for example), in plants and animals,
and in human nature. But because the will is completely free it is
irrational and blind. He rejected Hegel's optimistic belief in the
ultimate victory of rationality, and in contrast to Leibniz, he held
that this is the worst of all possible worlds.
Hegel's view that Spirit is in process and not a static state was
continued in Alfred N. Whitehead (1861-1947). Whitehead held that God
is necessary to each act of becoming, and in turn God develops through
each act of becoming. God strives to enrich the world as well as
himself by nurturing harmony and order while preserving values that
enhance truth, beauty, and goodness. He strives to eliminate evil from
the world using persuasive (rather than coercive) power. In this
sense, "He does not create the world, he saves it." He leads it by
means of his vision, rather like a poet.
The so called right wing Hegelians rejected pantheism and interpreted
Hegel in a way consistent with theism. Left wing Hegelians associated
the Absolute with material reality. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) said
that people create the concept of God and project it onto reality.
Karl Marx (1818-1883) made religion both a product and a tool of
oppression, the "opium of the people." People formulate religion in
response to the sufferings caused by society's inequities. Like a
narcotic, it insulates them from the pain but it also makes people
incapable of dealing with the cause of that pain. Furthermore,
religion legitimates the status quo.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1884-1900) rejected belief in God as weak and
untenable. He believed his times witnessed the death of God as a
cultural force, yet at the same time he feared the outcome. He did not
think that God died in the sense that He once existed and at some
point ceased to exist, but that modern society regarded God as
irrelevant.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) regarded God as a projection of the mind, a
product of wishful thinking. The pre-scientific mind, for example,
finds it easier to cope with an anthropomorphized universe. It is
easier to suppose that a personal being is in control than to face
seemingly capricious forces of nature. But when humanity grows into a
more scientific understanding of the universe, such beliefs will be
discarded.
Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and others thus did not try to
rationally defeat belief in God. Rather, they sought to explain its
origins and the personal motives of believers.
In the early twentieth century, logical positivism narrowed the scope
of meaning in a way that made belief in God subjective by definition.
Besides tautologies only empirically verifiable statements were said
to be true or false.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was initially sympathetic to linking
meaning to verifiability. He held that language is static and pictures
reality. This limits what can be meaningfully expressed in language
and excludes propositions about such things as ethics, aesthetics, and
the meaning of life. On such topics, "one must be silent."
Wittgenstein later came to the view that meaning comes not from a link
to the world but from usage. In this way language is more like doing
than picturing. Because this necessarily gives language and meaning a
social dimension, concepts of God are bound to their use within, for
example, a believing community. On this view it is possible to claim
that to know "God" is not to know the existence and attributes of a
metaphysical being, but the use of a term and its connections to a
life style.
3. Divine Attributes
Classical theism is found in the Greeks since Plato; in the Judaism of
Philo, Maimonides, and others; in Christian orthodoxy generally, and
in Islam as early as al-Kindi. Discussions of God in classical theism
have centered on a number of specific attributes. The working
assumption from the Greeks onward has been that God is the most
perfect possible being. There is an implicit question as to whether
perfections are coherent such that they can exist in one person. If
they are not, God would have all perfections possible for a single
being. In more theologically oriented thinkers, the assumption that
God is a perfect being serves not to formulate the concept of God but
only to fill in what is given in revelation. The Reformers, for
example, depended heavily on revelation because of their conviction
that the human mind is darkened by corruption and therefore is
inadequate to shape concepts of God.
a. Incorporeality
Incorporeality. God has no body (from Latin, incorporale), or is
non-physical. This is a central tenet of monotheistic religions, which
insist that any references to God's eyes, ears, mind, and the like are
anthropomorphic. Christian belief in the incarnation is a unique case
in which God takes on human form in Christ.
While some regard God's incorporeality as true analytically (that is,
true by the very definition of the word "God"), others derive it from
one or more other attributes. Accordingly, God cannot be corporeal
because that would preclude his being eternal, immutable, and simple,
for example. Furthermore, if God were corporeal and omnipresent, it
would seem that all physical things would be part of God. Others
derive divine incorporeality from an apparent incorporeal element of
human nature, termed the soul or spirit.
b. Simplicity
Simplicity. God has no parts or real distinctions. The neo-Platonist
Plotinus regarded God as therefore characterless, but Christianity
generally recognizes the legitimacy of talk of attributes. For
Aquinas, to be simple God must be (among other things) incorporeal as
well as identical to his nature, not a member of a class that shares a
common nature. Aquinas said that God has the perfections we ascribe to
him, but that they exist in him in an incomprehensible unity such that
we cannot understand the reality behind our statements. When we
ascribe goodness to God, goodness does not mean exactly what it does
when we ascribe it to a creature (univocal meaning), nor does it mean
something entirely different (eqivocal meaning). Its meaning is
analogical: in some sense the same and in some sense different.
Maimonides insisted on equivocal meaning only, with the result that
negative attributes alone can be ascribed to God. Yet he recognized
that even negative attribution gives some understanding of the divine
being. In Islam, most philosophers (such as al-Farabi) accepted divine
simplicity, whereas most theologians rejected it. Some used it to
reject the Trinity. Augustine had recognized a potential conflict
between simplicity and the Trinity, but believed the resolution lay in
proper understanding of the Trinity.
c. Unity
Unity. Monotheism maintains that there is one God. To this
Christianity adds that there is a threefold distinction within one
God. Stated roughly, God is one substance in three persons. Aquinas
argued that there cannot be two gods because neither would be
absolutely perfect since one would have a quality that the other
lacked (Summa Theologica Ia, 11, 3). Richard Swinburne says that
theism is a simpler hypothesis than polytheism, the latter positing
more beings with various capabilities and relations. Theism is
therefore more likely since simpler hypotheses turn out to be true
more often. Moreover, the universe exhibits a unity, in its universal
natural laws for example. This unity argues for one deity as its
originator (The Existence of God, 1991, pp. 141-2).
d. Eternity
Eternity. Biblical authors spoke of God remembering the past, knowing
the future, and acting in the present. According to early Christian
thought, God exists forever, without beginning or end. For him events
are past, present, and future. Later Christian thought, under the
influence of Platonism it is said, held that God exists not inside
time, but outside it. God is atemporal in that for him everything is
simultaneous, there being no past, present, or future. This later view
was held by Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas; and classically expressed
by Boethius, "Eternity is the complete and total possession of
unending life all at once" (Consolation of Philosophy, V, vi).
Boethius regarded a timeless being as superior because it does not
lack a past and future; its entire existence is in a timeless present.
In modern times the timeless view has been defended by E. L. Mascall,
Norman Kretzmann, Eleanor Stump, Paul Helm, and Brian Leftow.
Arguments in favor include: it makes God more transcendent, it
simplifies foreknowledge, it proposes the same divine relationship to
time as to space–God is outside it; furthermore it allows for the
creation of time along with matter. Arguments for the earlier view,
that God is eternal but exists within time, include: personhood
requires existence in time because only in time can there be
intending, acting, knowing, remembering, and the like; it is difficult
to explain how a timeless God can know or respond to events; and the
notion of timeless eternity is incoherent.
e. Immutability
Immutability. Those who accept the view that God is outside time are
able to argue that God cannot change because any change would have to
take place inside time. The view that God is an absolutely perfect
being can also lead to the conclusion that he cannot change: if he is
perfect he could change neither for the better nor for the worse.
Simplicity can be grounds for accepting divine immutability since the
only things subject to change are things with parts. Immutability has
been taken in a strong sense to mean that if a predicate p applies to
God at any time then it must apply at every time. But this is so broad
that it brings into the discussion of immutability things that, while
changing, are in no way changing within God. For example, "Smith
believes in God" could be false yesterday and true today, yet nothing
within God has changed. God is immutable in a weaker and less
problematic sense if it is required only that he does not change in
his character and purpose. The weaker sense fits well with the view
that God exists in time, since he could be considered immutable yet
begin an action, forgive a person, and so on. Thus, predicates like,
"God is protecting r from harm" could be the case at one time but not
another and God would still be immutable. The stronger sense of
immutability fits well with a God outside of time.
f. Omnipotence
Omnipotence. The claim that God can do anything has been the subject
of a number of qualifications. First, many affirm the biblical view
that God cannot do what is morally contrary to his nature. Similar to
Anselm (Proslogion 7), Aquinas says that God cannot sin because he is
omnipotent, since sin is a falling short of perfection (Summa
Theologica, Ia.25.3). Nelson Pike says that it is logically possible
for God to sin but he would not do what is against his nature. Aquinas
also says that God cannot do other things that corporeal beings can
do. And, he cannot do what is logically impossible, such as make a
square circle. Descartes is one of the few to hold the contrary view,
that the laws of mathematics and logic are subject to the will of God
(Descartes' Conversation with Burman, 22, 90). Perhaps the most
significant challenge to omnipotence involves the existence of evil.
It seems evil would not exist if God is both good and omnipotent.
Process theology denies omnipotence, Christian Science denies the
ultimate reality of evil, and some post-Holocaust thinking seems to
question the goodness of God. Augustine defends the orthodox Christian
concept of God on grounds that he did what was good in creating free
beings yet they used their freedom to do evil. Some suffering is the
just consequence of sin. Furthermore, where evil is a lack of good we
cannot ask why God created it since it is merely the absence of
something. Aquinas, Leibniz and others recognize that some good things
exist only in the presence of certain types of evil. For example,
forgiveness exists only where there is sin. In the light of these
secondary goods, Leibniz argues that out of all the possible worlds
God created the one with the best possible balance of good and evil.
Some thinkers appeal to a future life to settle apparent discrepancies
in the balance of good over evil. God's future blessing, it is said,
can more than make up for suffering in this world. William Alston
develops the idea that as limited beings we are incapable of
discerning-and therefore questioning-whether God has sufficient
reasons for allowing the evil that exists.
g. Omniscience
Omniscience. While a few like Avicenna and Averroes seem to have held
that a God who lacks certain types of knowledge would be more perfect,
most have claimed that God knows everything. This is sometimes
refined, for example, to the claim that God knows everything that is
logically possible to know. An area of concern going back to Aristotle
(On Interpretation 9) is the claim that propositions about future
contingent events (that is, those whose causes are not determined by
past events) have no truth value. If so they are unknowable, even by
an omniscient being (a view held in modern times by so called Open
Theism). Some have claimed that even if future events have a truth
value, they are logically unknowable. Of special concern is the
relationship between omniscience and human free will: if yesterday God
knew infallibly that I would do x today, it seems I have no
alternative but to do x today–a conclusion that seems to violate free
will. To solve this, Boethius and Aquinas appealed to the concept of
God's timelessness, which entails that none of God's knowledge is past
or future. Aquinas also said that God determines all events and
determines that they will be done freely. De Molina objected that this
amounts to removing free will. He constructed his own view, which said
that God's knowledge is logically prior to his decree of what will be.
God knows what an individual will do in all possible circumstances (a
capacity called middle knowledge), and he decrees those circumstances
in which a person freely cooperates with the divine plan. Thus
foreknowledge is compatible with free will. Others have conceded that
foreknowledge is incompatible with free will but claim that God
voluntarily limits his knowledge of future events so that there can
still be freedom. This makes omniscience a matter of having an ability
to know rather than having specific knowledge. Another solution to the
problem of omniscience and freedom challenges the idea that God's
knowledge limits future free actions in any way. While God knows
necessarily that I will do x tomorrow that does not entail that it is
necessary I do x. What God knows is what I will freely choose to do.
So God knows today that I will do x tomorrow because tomorrow I will
freely choose to do x. But if tomorrow I choose to do y, then today
God knows that tomorrow I will do y. This view is consistent with what
we know about less than infallible knowledge of future events. I may
know that a person will choose steak over bologna though I in no way
influenced their choice.
h. Impassibility
Impassibility. Various views have been held as to whether God can be
affected by outside influences. Because Aristotle regarded change as
inconsistent with perfection, he concluded that God could not be
affected by anything outside himself. Furthermore, God engages not in
feeling, but thinking, and he himself is the object of his
contemplation. God is thus unaffected by the world in any way. The
Stoics ruled out divine passibility because they regarded
imperturbability as a virtue, and God must be the supreme example of
it. John of Damascus agreed that God is imperturbable, but stressed it
is because he is sovereign, not because he is uncaring. Aquinas
accepted Aristotle's view that God cannot change and is impassible. He
can act, but nothing can act upon him. So emotions that proceed from
God, such as love and joy, are in God; but other emotions such as
anger and sadness can be ascribed to him only metaphorically. Early,
medieval, and Reformation Christianity generally affirmed that because
God could not suffer, Christ suffered in his humanity but not in his
divine nature. However, the idea that God is unaffected by the world
is being rethought in modern times. Moltmann, who was for a time a
German prisoner of war, and Kitamori, a Japanese thinker, both
witnessed World War II and its aftermath. They concluded that God must
be moved by suffering. Richard Creel defends impassibility as being
uncontrolled by outside influences. He says, among other things, that:
God has emotions but they are not controlled by anything outside
himself, he takes into account the ultimate good that will come from
suffering, suffering does not make love more admirable, a God who
suffers would be more appropriately an object of pity than of worship,
justice does not require passibility because it need not be based on
emotion; and omniscience does not require passibility because God need
know only that a person has an emotion, he does not need to experience
it. A mediating position would allow emotion in God but not control of
him in any way by creatures. God would be affected by the world but
only in the way and to the extent he allows.
i. Goodness
Goodness. Whereas classical Greek religion ascribed to the gods very
human foibles, theism from Plato onward has affirmed that God is
purely good and could not be the author of anything evil (Republic).
In Judaism divine goodness is thought to be manifested especially in
the giving of the law (Torah). In Islam it is thought to be manifested
in divine revelation of truth through the prophets, especially as
revealed in the Qur'an. And in Christianity it is manifested in the
gracious granting of Christ as the way of salvation.
While goodness encompasses all moral perfection (e.g., truth telling,
justice), benevolence is that particular aspect of goodness that wills
the benefit of another. The Reformers, and Protestantism generally,
stressed that God's desire for the benefit of creatures is dependent
not on their merits but purely on divine love. Divine love is not only
irrespective of merit but it is shown most clearly where it is
entirely unmerited, as in grace shown to fallen humanity. Therefore
divine forgiveness and redemption are taken as the highest expressions
of benevolence. Benevolence intersects with omnipotence in providence,
wherein God orders events for good ends. It also raises the
possibility of a clash between the divine and human wills, as when a
person spurns God's action in the world.
Divine goodness raises the question of whether God wills x because it
is good, or x is good because God wills it. The former seems to weaken
divine sovereignty, but the latter seems to make goodness arbitrary.
The arbitrariness may be somewhat relieved if God's will is understood
as bounded by his unchanging character. God would not, for example,
decide to make torturing for enjoyment right since his nature forever
condemns it. The issue has implications for divine command ethics,
according to which acts are right or wrong because God commands or
forbids them (as opposed to, for example, a competing view that acts
are right or wrong according to whether they promote the greatest
happiness).
As to our knowledge of divine goodness, Aquinas separates the order of
being from the order of knowing: all goodness derives from God but we
understand divine goodness by extrapolating from the goodness of
creatures. For Aquinas, this requires an analogical (as opposed to an
equivocal) relationship between divine and human goodness. For Kant,
divine goodness is known as a postulate of pure practical reason: God
must be there to reward virtue and punish evil.
The greatest challenge to belief in divine goodness has been the fact
that evil exists, or more recently, the amount and type of evil rather
than the mere fact of it. The problem is lessened if it is
acknowledged that divine goodness does not require that each creature
always be made to experience as much happiness as it is capable of
experiencing. Reasons may include, for example, that: it is impossible
that all creatures collectively experience maximal happiness (e.g.,
because the maximal happiness of one precludes the maximal happiness
of another), or that there is some higher good than the happiness of
all creatures (e.g., John Hick's view that maturity is that higher
good, and acquiring it may entail some displeasure), or that some
forms of good are manifested only when certain types of evil exist
(for example, forgiveness requires wrongdoing; mentioned in "6,"
above); or because God's favor is undeserved and not given in response
to merit, it cannot be owed and God cannot be faulted for not giving
it.
4. References and Further Reading
* Davis, Stephen T., Logic and the Nature of God (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1983).
o Deals with challenges to the logical consistency of theism.
* Fiddes, Paul S., The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford, 1988).
o In-depth treatment of impassibility.
* Hasker, W., God, Time and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1989).
* Hick, John, Evil and the God of Love, rev. ed (San Francisco,
CA: Harper &Row, 1978).
o Overview of major historical views on evil; concludes that
the world is a place of soul-making.
* Kelly, Joseph F., The Problem of Evil in the Western Tradition:
From the Book of Job to Modern Genetics (Collegeville, MN: The
Liturgical Press, 2002).
o Comprehensive and accessible survey of western thought on
the subject.
* Kenny, A. The God of the Philosophers (Oxford, 1979).
* Morris, Thomas V., Our Idea of God: An Introduction to
Philosophical Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1991).
o Basic introduction to issues such as perfect being
theology; God's goodness, power, and knowledge.
* Quinn, Philip and Charles Taliaferro eds. A Companion to
Philosophy of Religion (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997).
o Contains 620 pages of articles by authorities; many of
them introduce various aspects of theism, including attributes of God,
pluralism, theism and modern science, and the problem of evil.
* Swinburne, Richard, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford, 1977; rev. 1993).
o Discusses many aspects of theism to show its logical consistency.
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