'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.