Thursday, February 26, 2015

'Classical' theism and a simple god

Some time ago a visitor to this site called Cale took issue with a post in which I expressed my very personal opinion that many religious believers have got it exactly backwards: In my view, a universe without god is less depressing than a hypothetical one in which we would be the marionettes of a god; thinking standard hopes about life after death, heaven and hell through to their logical conclusion leads to absurdities and horror; and religious faith makes a spectacularly weak foundation for moral behaviour.

Although Cale was somewhat cryptic on what precisely he disagreed with, I believe he believes that I have a wrong concept of god, and that if I had the correct concept in my head the religious perspective (of the universe being run by a god etc.) would appear more desirable than I am so far willing to grant.

To give me something to think about, Cale helpfully pasted several links to other websites into the comment field. The first few are to blog posts by one Edward Feser who advertises himself as a writer and philosopher, where 'philosophy' apparently means following one very specific school of Medieval theology. The remainder have such inviting titles as “Original Sin and its Consequences”. Because something like sin is unlikely to make much impression on somebody who has yet to be convinced that there is something to sin against, it is perhaps more productive to have a look at Feser first. A quick scan shows that Feser, for his part, constantly refers back to what he calls 'classical theism', so the post with that title would probably be the best place to start.

For the following note again that this is all just my personal view, and that I do not claim any official or professional expertise in this area. Furthermore, I am not trying to antagonise anybody needlessly, but I like discussing issues like these and don't see why I shouldn't present my honest opinion, especially here where nobody has to read it if they don't want to.

What is classical theism? Essentially, it is Feser's concept of god, one that he claims has been the dominant concept through Christian and, it is heavily implied, Jewish and Islamic history. To get a handle on it, I will now go through the relevant post from start to end and note the characteristics of this god as well as those that are explicitly rejected. This 'classical' god...
  • is simple, meaning that “He is in no way composed of parts”,
  • is immutable, changeless, and therefore … “He cannot be affected by anything”,
  • is “eternal in the sense of being altogether outside of time and space”,
  • “is identical to His existence... which is His power which is His knowledge which is His goodness”,
  • is the "conserver and sustainer" of the world*, so that without him it could not exist for a second,
  • is NOT a person comparable to human persons,
  • does NOT have virtue, or duties to fulfil, and
  • is nonetheless not only “good” but “must have all possible good within Him”, but in a way that is so different from our normal understanding of that word that one apparently has to read one of Feser's books to figure out what he means with that.
The main point of this exercise, when it was posted, appeared to be to reject atheism as addressing only a silly concept of god that Feser, following another theologian, calls 'theistic personalism'. This latter, bad concept of god is that of a super-powerful person; and if anybody were actually as silly and naïve as to believe in such a personal god then, he grants, atheist arguments like the good old “and who created god?” would work. But...
Since classical theism has, as I have noted, been the mainstream understanding of the divine nature through most of the history both of philosophical theology and of the main monotheistic religions, it follows that serious critics of theism ought to devote the bulk of their attention to understanding and rebutting the arguments of classical theists.
This is followed by a list of seventeen authors that, according to Feser, an atheist is required to read and digest thoroughly before their rejection of god-belief can be taken seriously. Because he has "noted" that this rarefied theology is mainstream. Aha. I doubt that anything that cannot be explained properly in one book will become clearer after reading the life's work of seventeen people, but my first thought is a different one:

At this point one might want to lean back and ponder for a bit what view of god was and is actually, like, for realz, dominant in monotheistic religions. Does anybody really believe that some randomly selected Bavarian Catholic, or a randomly selected participant in the Friday prayer of a major mosque in Islamabad, or perhaps some randomly selected abbot in the early middle ages would actually share the supposedly 'classical' concept of god? Anybody? Ha.

And that is before we consider whether it is compatible with god as described in the bible, a book that just happens to be the foundational document of Christianity, and that just happens to have informed the theism of billions of people across history and today.

Even if one were to lean over backwards and grant that the impersonal, abstract ground of being were the god of sophisticated theologians (which is only possible by ignoring the thousands of theologians across history with differing views, which are apparently not 'classical' enough), that would still not make it mainstream or dominant. With somewhere above 99.5% of the faithful in the world believing in a personal god, criticism directed at that concept is hardly straw-manning – but deflecting the criticism in Feser's manner sure looks like No True Scotsmanning.

But admittedly that is the easy part. Let us therefore consider the 'classical' concept of god. When I see a list of characteristics like the one above, I face two closely related problems. The first is that this looks very much like a case of wanting to have it both ways, and the second is that this characterisation of god works to insulate him against refutation and atheist criticism only to the degree that it makes the concept completely unintelligible.

God doesn't have any duties to us, so an atheist cannot criticise god for creating a world that, to be perfectly plain, sucks, but god is nonetheless good. Somehow. Only not in a way that anybody would usually call goodness. Aha. God is completely outside of time but still somehow responsible for maintaining the world every second. He “is identical to His existence... which is His power which is His knowledge which is His goodness”. Does this even mean anything? No, it is word salad. I can also string a bunch of impressive sounding words together, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they accurately describe some aspect of reality.

Further, god is goodness itself because otherwise his creation could not contain good, but conveniently he is not smelliness itself just because smells are also part of his creation. We are to buy Feser's book to find out why not but I guess I will invest my money in Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds instead; I really liked the sequel which I picked up at the recent book fair. (But I digress.) Note also that his deity is not a person in any meaningful sense, no sir, but it is still, very definitely, a “He”, with a capital letter even, instead of an it. Funny how that works.

I find this neither reasonable nor convincing. It is, once more, trying to have it both ways. The theist has two coherent options. Either they postulate a simple and completely impersonal “first cause or first principle of the world”, but then such a principle would very definitely not deserve names like God or He, simply because those carry all the baggage of what Feser calls theistic personalism. Instead we might call it vacuum energy or something like that, but it would then not need popes, theologians and tithes, and it would seem a bit odd to kill heretics on its behalf, as Feser's favourite Medieval thinker advocated. (Surprised? If so, why?)

Alternatively, the theist can postulate something that deserves to be called God, creator, He and suchlike, a being that it would make sense to worship and build a church around if it weren't so clearly demonstrating its undeservingness of the same through the world it has supposedly created. But such a being cannot at the same time be simple and metaphysically ultimate, and the standard arguments against the existence or, more relevant to my original post, supposed moral superiority of such a being apply, as Feser himself concedes.

What the theist can't have is the upsides of both options without the downsides of either. Like, say, postulating that god is simple, not at all composed of parts, and not a person, but still at the same composed of the parts father-person, son-person and holy spirit. That self-contradiction alone should intellectually disqualify the whole school of thought.

If one were to be uncharitable one might suspect that classical theism is just a classical bait-and-switch. When the atheist comes knocking, the theologian tells him that he is an unsophisticated buffoon for criticising a personal tinkerer god when really the whole church believes only in an abstract first principle; the moment the atheist buggers off, the congregation happily goes back to praying to a personal god for miracle cures, to believing in guardian angels and saints, and, if the day has been a bad one, to exorcising demons.

Don't get me wrong: many ivory tower theologians may well be bona fide 'classical' theists and really conceptualise god as an abstractum that shouldn't really be called god any more. But funnily enough we do not very often hear them telling their rank and file co-religionists that they can just as well stop praying for their team's success on the football field because god is the ultimate metaphysical something or other instead of a person and cannot be affected by anything.

Footnote

*) Personally, I find it highly revealing how often religious apologists use the term world instead of universe. When pressed they would probably shrug and say that the first is merely a (perhaps somewhat poetic) synonym for the latter, and that is likewise understood to refer to all that exists. However, the word world produces in our mind a picture of the globe that we all live on, relatively well suited to our needs, small and neat, a picture that at least does not immediately make it implausible that this place could have been created by a well-meaning god for our benefit. The word universe, in contrast, brings to mind the massive, empty void that is utterly hostile to life, a space so mindbogglingly huge and old that we can scarcely comprehend it.

For me, just contemplating nature of the universe is to realise the absurdity of assuming that it was created by the kind of god that the Abrahamic religions venerate: one that has a plan for us, looks after us, would care about our prayers and desires and about what we do with our sexual organs, and who has ultimately created the universe as our home. The best attempt to grapple with this issue I have ever heard was when an apologist told me that all those fantastillions of stars, nebulae and meteorites were only there to show us the greatness of the creator, but of course that too seems plainly absurd and fairly conceited.

I get the feeling that talking of the world instead of the universe may be an attempt to block out, either consciously or unconsciously, another problem for traditional theism.

10 comments:

  1. Those links claim that God is not a person like we are, but much smarter, more powerful etc. Where I think you’ve erred is in concluding that if God isn’t that, then God must be “abstract” and “impersonal”.

    On Unintelligibility:
    “He “is identical to His existence... which is His power which is His knowledge which is His goodness Does this even mean anything? No, it is word salad.”

    I don’t see that it’s word salad. Take the following passage “...there is in God something that is analogous to power, something analogous to knowledge, something analogous to goodness, etc., and that these “somethings” all turn out to be one and the same thing. “Power,” “knowledge,” “goodness,” etc. are merely different, analogously used descriptions we use in order to refer to what is in God one and the same reality, just as (to borrow Frege’s famous example) the expressions “the morning star” and “the evening star” differ in sense while referring to one and the same thing (the planet Venus).”
    Sure, you might have objections to that, but it certainly didn’t come from here: http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/
    Similarly, what exactly is incoherent about holding both these two statements to be true:
    1. God is outside of time
    2. God upholds the universe in existence from moment to moment.
    Nothing, as far as I can see.

    “Further, god is goodness itself because otherwise his creation could not contain good, but conveniently he is not smelliness itself just because smells are also part of his creation.”
    The key word in your sentence is “conveniently”. If these were just arbitrary stipulations conveniently cooked up to avoid objections, then your objection has force.
    Here’s an analogy:
    A: “If evolution is true, then why are there still monkeys?”
    B: “That objection depends upon an erroneous view of evolution.”
    A: “So evolution is just defined into existence in a way that avoids my awesome objection! Isn’t that convenient!”
    But, in both cases, these aren’t arbitrary stipulations: they are argued for. In a month’s time or so, I’d be quite happy to send you a copy of Feser’s book where he deals with this objection. Consider the possibility that you may have committed the same fallacy as A.

    ReplyDelete
  2. “such a principle would very definitely not deserve names like God or He... Instead we might call it vacuum energy or something like that”

    I’m not a physicist, but as I understand it:
    1. Systems in a vacuum state undergo change.
    2. There can be more than one system in a vacuum state.
    So, given the arguments for the immutability and unity of God, a physical system in a vacuum state cannot be metaphysically ultimate.

    “it would then not need popes, theologians and tithes, and it would seem a bit odd to kill heretics on its behalf, as Feser's favourite Medieval thinker advocated.”

    You’re correct that God doesn’t need anything on this view. But as far as I can recall (I may be wrong) Aquinas didn’t advocate the execution of heretics because he believed in some inner lack of God’s that needed to be satisfied, but to preserve the possibility of his fellow creatures inheriting eternal life. (Lest anybody reading is inclined to misinterpret, this isn’t a defence of Aquinas’ conclusion on this matter)

    “postulating that god is simple, not at all composed of parts, and not a person, but still at the same composed of the parts father-person, son-person and holy spirit. That self-contradiction alone should intellectually disqualify the whole school of thought.”

    There would be a contradiction if both those statements were held to be true, but Western theologians have typically denied the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are parts of God. It is above my pay-grade to explain how they construed the relationship of the Father Son and Spirit, but one can’t claim that this is some objection that is just so obviously unanswerable that theologians haven’t even tried.

    You also mention the existence of saints and angels, but there is no incompatibility between the existence of the God of classical theism and the existence of angels and saints. But I think your objection probably stems from your belief that angels and saints are things that only intellectually unsophisticated people could believe in, so that there’s an inconsistency. But if you want this argument to work, then I think you’d have to flesh it out, rather than appealing to the unthinking prejudice that “only peasants believe in that”.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Funnily enough, the last time I saw that cartoon that you link to in your footnote, was when I was hanging out with a German guy a year or two ago. He showed me that very same cartoon that you link to in your footnote, expecting me to laugh. It was at that point that I revealed I was a Christian. He was very surprised.
    Anyhoo, there are right ways and wrong ways to use the body and this is unaffected by the size or age of the cosmos. Surely you wouldn’t disagree with this?

    ReplyDelete
  4. > Where I think you've erred is in concluding that if God isn't that, then God must be "abstract" and "impersonal".

    As I wrote, you have two options: either something that is open to refutation and criticism or something that does not actually deserve the name "god". Words have meanings, and god means something that cannot possibly be simple (nor, I would argue, immutable, because that would mean it never does anything). And it is Feser who calls his bogeyman "personalism", making it sound very much as if god is not supposed to be a person at all.

    I guess we will have to agree to disagree. As far as I can tell, there are contradictions involved when claiming that god is outside of time but upholding the universe every time unit, in the trinity, etc. The fact that "Western theologians have typically" claimed this or that does not impress me overly either because I do not believe that they have expertise in anything that matters or are unbiased. Their job description is to conduct apologetics, not to find out what is true (the latter is what we pay philosophers and scientists for, with the caveat that the former have it much harder to test their ideas and suffer less embarrassment when they get it wrong than when a structural engineer or pharmacologist gets it wrong). Hinduist theologians have claimed other stuff. So what? There is no evidence either way.

    > vacuum state

    Sorry, what I meant is the energy stored in vacuum that supposedly made the inflationary expansion of the universe possible. But it doesn't matter, think of other concepts that are truly simple and immutable, the speed of light or E=MC^2 for example.

    > appealing to the unthinking prejudice that "only peasants believe in that".

    No, the appeal is a bit different: "this is what all the peasants really believe", so who cares about the 'classical' concept of god that hardly anybody has ever even heard of and that virtually all believers in the world would consider to be about 0.03 mm away from atheism?

    > Anyhoo, there are right ways and wrong ways to use the body and this is unaffected by the size or age of the cosmos. Surely you wouldn't disagree with this?

    Of course we live happier and longer lives if we follow certain rules instead of others, although it occurs to me that the rules promoted by Catholics tend to be among those "others". But way to miss the point. As it apparently needs to be spelled out more clearly, it is that the model of a god who would care intimately about what we do with our bodies is not, in my eyes, a good fit to the data provided by astronomy. Admittedly that is not, in itself, an argument against some kind of natural law, although I personally lean towards what appears to be called non-cognitivist moral skepticism tempered by a bit of pragmatic consequentialism. I just don't see that there is a way to ground moral claims rationally, so we all just make them up; they are preferences that only become societal rules through a process of collective negotiation and social evolution.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. “think of other concepts that are truly simple and immutable, the speed of light or E=MC^2 for example.”

      As far as I can see, the speed of light is only simple in the sense that, say c=wavelength*frequency is a simpler mathematical description than, say, Fisher's Equation.

      The speed of light isn’t a Being without parts, and thus cannot being metaphysically ultimate.

      As for the speed of light being immutable, Thomists have traditionally argued that, as E.L. Mascall put it, “immutability [doesn’t] mean remaining the same for an infinitely long time... immutability means independence of that subjection to duration which is inherent in temporal existence.”

      “No, the appeal is a bit different: "this is what all the peasants really believe",
      There is some truth to this objection. I think you are probably correct, for example, that the average Christian believes that God changes. But I think the average Christian realises that there is lots of anthropomorphism is Scripture. E.g. the passages which speak of hiding in the shadow of the Lord’s wings don’t imply that God is Mothra. A few months ago, my local newspaper had somebody complaining in the letters page that Christians “literally believe in an old man in the sky”.
      I may be wrong, but contra the letter-writer, I suspect your average Christian would hold that God is not spatially located in some distant galaxy.

      “so who cares about the 'classical' concept of god that hardly anybody has ever even heard of and that virtually all believers in the world would consider to be about 0.03 mm away from atheism?”

      I don’t think that virtually all believers would say that believing in one Being who is Goodness Itself, who transcends creation and holds it in existence from moment to moment is 0.03mm away from atheism.

      Morality:

      It’s obviously true that there is such a thing as being a sticky-beak i.e. somebody who goes out of their way in an inappropriate fashion to critique other people’s behaviour. Given that God is immutable, when we sin, it doesn’t change Him, it changes us. But why does it change us? Because, on classical theism, God is Goodness Itself, and, if we have committed an immoral act, then we have, of necessity changed in relationship to God. Now, of course we can debate about what is immoral, but whatever is in fact immoral remains so, regardless of data from astronomy.

      Delete
  5. "As I wrote, you have two options: either something that is open to refutation and criticism or something that does not actually deserve the name "god"."
    Why isn’t classical theism open to refutation or criticism? One can’t just merely assert, like A in the dialogue above, that these are stipulations arbitrarily cooked up to avoid criticism. Couldn’t it be that it is indeed open to criticism but the criticisms are just failures? i.e. it’s true?

    “Words have meanings, and god means something that cannot possibly be simple”
    Why can’t God be simple?

    “nor, I would argue, immutable, because that would mean it never does anything)“
    This objection is addressed here: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com.au/2010/05/davies-on-divine-simplicity-and-freedom.html

    “And it is Feser who calls his bogeyman "personalism", making it sound very much as if god is not supposed to be a person at all.”
    (our friend A from before): “It’s you that call your theory evolution, how can you blame me when I misconstrue it as meaning that everything must constantly change?”

    “As far as I can tell, there are contradictions involved... in the Trinity etc.” “The fact that "Western theologians have typically" claimed this or that does not impress me overly...”

    Well, if your intellectual engagement consists of making an objection that a concept is clearly incoherent, and then refusing to acknowledge that there might be refutations because you *just know* that the people who wrote them are intellectually incompetent, then you will find that yourself “triumphant” every time.

    “Hinduist theologians have claimed other stuff. So what? There is no evidence either way.”

    It is inconsistent to claim that one should be concerned about conceptual coherence (i.e. the Trinity is incompatible with divine simplicity), and then turn around and say “So what if the objection is addressed. Conceptual coherence doesn’t actually matter: only empiricism does”. As for arguments, again, there are books full of them, and I’m quite happy to buy you one.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I am not sure what you expect me to do. Read one theological book after the other until I fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy and start believing that there must be something to it now that I have invested so much time? There has to be at least some remote prior likelihood of something being true before that investment makes sense.

    If somebody came to you and said, the sky is green, and bachelors are married, and if you only read these fifteen books you will also see it like that, would you start reading? And what if after that you still plainly see that the sky is blue, and you still aren’t confused enough to have forgotten the definition of the term bachelor, would you read the next five that person has at the back of their hand? And so on forever?

    To me the things Feser argues for are on par with the above claims. The universe looks precisely like a non-created universe to me, zero energy sum, indifferent to life and all; religion looks precisely like human wish-thinking to me; and the trinity is illogical to me, indeed a very simple self-contradiction cobbled together by committee over several meetings of warring factions of late Roman Empire bishops.

    A clear and plausible argument to the contrary might make me sit up and take notice, and I can even be enticed to read through theologians’ blog posts like in the present case. What is more, I am actually planning to continue with that. But waving in the general direction of books from people whose status and income (and, in earlier times, avoidance of an auto-da-fé) depended on making an argument that appears a priori 0% plausible to me does not cut it, especially in the light of the fact that the equivalent specialists from all other religions agree with me on every single of these questions. (Yes, they’d agree with Thomists on the createdness of the universe as such and that religion totally makes sense, but they’d agree with me that the specific Thomist god didn’t do it and that Catholicism specifically is a fanciful human invention and not the true religion.)

    However, part of the problem here is clearly that we are using different definitions for several important words, for example ‘god’, ‘simple’, ‘immutable’, ‘parts’, ‘outside of time’, and ‘good(ness)’. Of course, if I defined green as wavelengths of 450–495 nm then the sky would be green, fair enough. Likewise, if I define a god who consists of three parts – two of those persons – as simple then god is simple, and if I define a god who creates a world in which innocent children suffer and die horribly from Cockayne Syndrome Type II as good then god is good.

    I tend to use the standard definitions of words though, and here is also where the analogy of evolution breaks down. Evolution is a scientific concept newly described by scientists, whereas god, simple, good and parts for example are pre-existing terms that have had meanings different from the way you and Feser are using them for hundreds of years and continue to do so. Saying that the natural process called evolution is different from the way an uneducated person understand the concept merely means that that person is uneducated; but saying that god is good but not in the way that everybody plainly understands and uses the term good on a daily basis is at best... odd, and deliberately inviting misunderstanding.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. On the zero-sum energy of the universe, I don’t think it provides any support for atheism.

      USyd cosmologist Luke Barnes wrote a good post on this: https://letterstonature.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/more-sweet-nothings/

      I agree that if we arbitrarily “define” green as being that particular wavelength, then that is silly. But, as I have emphasised already, these weren’t arbitrary “definitions”: rather, they were and are explicitly argued for.
      Another observation: When I said only a Being without parts can be metaphysically ultimate, this was something argued for by non-Christian philosophers like Plotinus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotinus). So, I think it’s false to say that this notion of simplicity was desperately conjured up out of thin air by those evil evil theologians.

      Delete
  7. I think the religious impulse is based on the faith one has in the ultimate goodness of reality. This general impulse has found its more fruitful form in theism's formula that the greatest conceivable being exists, and is therefore the ground of all reality (or the metaphysically fundamental reality as a philosopher might put it). You will not find a single theist, whether Christian or Muslim, whether primitive or sophisticated, that will agree that God is anything *less* than the greatest conceivable being, so that's a good definition. All other propositions about God such as the ones you copied from Feser are intents to understand better how such a being is.

    Now theism is an extraordinarily strong hypothesis, and given the obvious imperfection of the world around us one would expect theism not to survive the scientific age and thus the naturalistic explanation of much that was previously thought to be supernatural. And even though religion in general and theism in particular have gone somehow out of fashion among scientifically educated people (which by itself is not necessarily a good education), the fact remains that theistic philosophy is still going strong, perhaps stronger than ever. Actually philosophically minded people are discovering that the philosophical problems that plague the alternative of naturalism (the idea that reality is fundamentally a mechanism) are much worse in scope and profundity than theism's. Given the evidence I expect first that the debate between religion and non-religion will no go away any time soon, and secondly that with better philosophical education we shall experience a religious renaissance.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am sorry to say that I do not actually see an argument here. Even if all religious people agreed on a definition of god - and they don't even agree on the number of gods! - that would still not be any evidence for its or their existence.

      It would be helpful to know what are the asserted "philosophical problems that plague ... naturalism", and how even if they are serious they would make belief in a creator god more acceptable by default. Ultimately the question "if you explain the universe with reference to a creator god, how do you explain the creator god?" has never been answered in a satisfactory manner, although even four year olds can come up with this question if allowed to think for themselves.

      Delete