The Nature and Attributes of God
So what's the point of this bit? This section is all about how we define a traditional God and whether these definitions work or are coherent.
We'll look at the logical problems of God's existence and the evidential problems.
Keywords:
Omnipotence: All powerful
Voluntarism: the view that God’s omnipotence involves the power to do anything, even the logically impossible
Omniscience: All knowing
Omnibenevolence: All loving
Voluntaristic Omnipotence
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Omnipotence is to be all powerful. But there are two different versions of omnipotence.
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The first is Voluntarism. This is the ability to do anything, even the logically impossible.
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This is a view of God that Descartes subscribes to.
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God can do absolutely anything. God can make 2+2 = 5. Descartes thinks that God has the power to change mathematical, geometric, logical and moral truths.
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Descartes concludes that logic is a human limitation, but not a limitation for God. Thus, the rules of logic are decided by God and they then emanate from his mind
“It would be rash to think that our imagination reaches as far as his power”
“I admit that this is unintelligible to us. Yet on the other hand I do understand, quite correctly, that there cannot be any class of entity that does not depend on God; I also understand that it would have been easy for God to ordain certain things such that we men cannot understand the possibility of their being otherwise than they are”
Problems with Voluntarism
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Is Voluntarism incoherent? If it is possible for God to make 2+2=5, then it looks like it IS possible for 2+2 to equal 5.
In that case, it cannot be logically necessary that 2+2=5. Is there any logically necessity? Voluntarism suggests not.
Voluntaristic omnipotence seems to destroy logical necessity. As God can do the logically impossible, meaning it is not actually logically impossible. Voluntarism undermines itself and it is self-defeating.
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The problem of evil: The reasons usually given for why God allows evil is that it’s not logically possible for God to eliminate evil without contradicting his divine justice because free will is so important. However, if God can do the logically impossible, then it seems he could eliminate evil without removing our free will or opportunities for growth.
Aquinas' Omnipotence
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Thomas Aquinas argued that God’s omnipotence should be understood as the ability to do anything that is logically possible.
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God’s power is grounded in His infinite divine nature, which “possesses within itself the perfection of all being.”
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Because of this, God can only bring about things that are consistent with the perfection of being.
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Omnipotence does not mean the ability to do the logically impossible. For example, God cannot create something that both exists and does not exist at the same time, because that would contradict the nature of being itself.
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"It is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them.”
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In other words, logical impossibilities are not limits on God’s power, but rather reflect the incoherence of the concept itself.
Problem: The Paradox of the Stone
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Can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift?
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If he can, he cannot lift the stone. If he can't, he can't make the stone. Both end up being things he cannot do.
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So is there some logically possible action that God cannot do? Because this isn't something logically impossible like making 2+2=5.
Response: George Mavrodes: creating a stone too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift IS logically impossible though and does not debunk Aquinas.
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This is a criticism of Aquinas' omnipotence but not Descartes' because Descartes would claim that God can create a stone too heavy for him to lift and then he can also lift it. That is a logically impossible solution, but that’s no issue for Descartes’ view of omnipotence.
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We might be able to respond to this problem by saying that the only limits on God’s power are limits God chose. God still has the power to do anything he chooses as God is only limited by God’s own choice. This is a self-imposed limitation. He could have done this to make the universe more orderly and not chaotic. Things follow order or to give humans free will.
Problem: Omnibenevolence, Omnipotence and the Euthyphro Dilemma
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The Euthyphro dilemma looks at whether morality is created by, or independent of, God.
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Applied to the moral judgement ‘killing people is wrong’, we can ask:
1. Is torturing babies wrong because God says it’s wrong?
2. Does God say ‘don’t torture babies’ because it is wrong?
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The second option implies that morality is independent of God and is a challenge to God's omnipotence. The reason for this is that God’s power would be limited by morality.
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But if the first option is true and God created morality then God could say ‘killing people is good’, and it would be true. Why, then, does God say some things are bad and not others?
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This makes good and bad arbitrary terms which presents a challenge to God's omnibenevolence.
Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?
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We could argue that goodness is not something external to God, nor is it something to be discovered. Very simply, God is the definition of Goodness. God commands what is good because he is good.
- Robert Adams: moral goodness is rooted in the loving nature of God. God’s commands aren’t arbitrary because they flow from His essentially good character.
Response
The Relationship between Omniscience, Free Will, Omnibenevolence & Time
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Omniscience poses a problem because if God knows what we're going to do next, we don't have free will and God cannot judge us fairly. But if he doesn't know, then surely he is not omniscient.
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Boethius’ solution was to suggest that God is eternal – outside of time. This would mean God sees all time simultaneously in the ‘eternal present’.
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God’s eternal omniscience does not interfere with our free will – he simply sees the results of our free choices in our future in his eternal present.
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Ordinary creatures move and change, but God is immutable, fully actual and perfect and thus he cannot be temporally located.
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Everything we do is ‘present’ to God. God observes our free will.
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Like a person atop a mountain can see all paths below at once, God sees all temporal events at once from his eternal perspective
Anselm and Time
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This is a development on Boethius' ideas.
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Anselm does not think that God is radically disconnected from time, as Boethius seems to suggest.
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God does not exist in time, and he does not experience a temporal sequence. God has no past, future or temporal present.
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Humans are within time, so we perceive time unfolding moment by moment - linearly. So, as an unlimited being, God cannot have the same experience of time.
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All of time always exists in divine eternity for God. God is eternally present within all moments of time and everything that happens.
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Anselm’s timeless God is a very early version of the modern 4D eternalist view. Like a being outside a spacetime block, God apprehends all temporal events simultaneously in a single eternal present. Anselm effectively presents a 4-dimensional perspective on time.
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God is not just present in all of eternity. God IS eternity
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Good to know: Anselm and Boethius' definitions of time are something exam boards like asking. It has come up more than once so you need to get the distinction right. They make it very clear in the markscheme that they'll only accept God IS eternity for Anselm.
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“That he is not in place or time, but all times and places are in him”
“Just as the present time contains all place and whatever is in any place, in the same way the eternal present encloses all time and whatever exists in any time.”
Anthony Kenny and Time
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Kenny claims that if God is eternal or timeless, then all events in history are happening at the same time for Him which is ‘radically incoherent’.
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There a causal relation and sequence between events within time.
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Things HAVE to have a sequence because otherwise history becomes impossible, what are historians for?
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If God were to perceive all things at once, outside of time, it might seem that He could not distinguish which events occur before others. This raises a question about omniscience: truly having all knowledge seems to require knowing the order of events.
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Since a timeless God cannot experience events sequentially as we do, His knowledge of temporal events must be understood as a tenseless apprehension. He knows all moments simultaneously without experiencing them in sequence.
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Kenny believes that God is timeless, but his foreknowledge does not compromise free will. God's timeless knowledge does not cause our actions
Swinburne and Time
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God exists within time.
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Before the creation of the universe, God existed in a durationless non-metric time but, once the universe had been created, time began to unfold moment by moment – both for creation and for God.
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God knows what we have done in the past and what we are doing in the present. But, regarding the future, God only knows the logically possible choices we could make.
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This attempts to resolve the conflict between omniscience with free will because if God does not know what we are going to do next, there is no conflict with free will.
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God is omniscient in that he knows everything which can be known.
