God

views updated

God

Few concepts are as widely disputed as that of God. Therefore, it would be foolishness to write an article that purported to discuss simply the concept of God. So what follows needs a bit of refining. The focus of this philosophical article is the Judeo-Christian conception of God, which, broadly speaking, is the notion of God most widely accepted in the United States today. Of course, the concept of God within the American Jewish and Christian communities is not uncontroversial or monolithic either. Nevertheless there is a shared traditional conception of God that will be the focus of this essay.

Although the Judeo-Christian conception of God is several millennia old, its theological and philosophical development jumped by leaps and bounds in the medieval period. While St. Anselm of Canterbury (ca. 1033–1109 c.e.), lived during the latter part of this era, his crystallization of this conception of God (which owes a great debt to the writings of St. Augustine) is still widely regarded as its best statement.

In Chapter Two of his meditative work, The Proslogion, Anselm sets up his justly famous ontological argument for the existence of God by first offering a definition of the Being the existence of which he intends to prove. He defines God as "the being than which nothing greater can be conceived." Anselm believed that from this short definition one could derive all the attributes traditionally ascribed to God. In order to see how this is plausible, we will examine his formula a bit more closely.

The first thing to notice about Anselm's definition is that it does not claim that God is merely the greatest being that happens to exist; in Anselm's view, if that were the best that could be said, then that being would not be God. In order to be counted as God, the being must be such that we cannot conceive of anything greater. But what exactly does this mean? Is Anselm saying that God is the greatest being that humans can form a conception of? That would be problematic, since it would apparently limit God to the conceptual powers of human beings. Fortunately, this is not the way Anselm is to be understood. For consider the conception of a being that is the greatest conception we are able to construct, but which is nevertheless limited in ways that we are not capable of seeing. Would such a conception satisfy Anselm's definition? No, it would not. For if we have the concept of a being who surpasses the greatest being that we can conceive of (where "conceive" requires our having a somewhat detailed understanding of the relevant concept), then the concept of the being who is surpassed is not the concept of the being than which nothing greater can be conceived.

A second point about Anselm's definition: the notion of "greatness" at issue is not moral, and it is not greatness as power; nor is it greatness with respect to any particular characteristic, attribute, or ability. Rather it is what might be dubbed "overall metaphysical greatness." The more metaphysical greatness one has, the more power, knowledge, wisdom, goodness, and so on that one has.

Here is a way of understanding Anselm's definition that deviates a bit from his terminology but is closer to his intention: God is the greatest possible being. Anselm wanted his definition to explain why the idea of something being greater than God is nonsense. If the concept of God is the concept of the greatest possible being, then by definition nothing can be greater.

Earlier it was noted that Anselm believed that all the traditional divine attributes or properties could be derived from his terse definition; it is time to see why he thought this. The greatest possible being is the being that has the greatest possible combination of "great-making" properties. A great-making property is a property that it is intrinsically better to have than to lack. Let us take knowledge as an example. Is knowledge in general a great-making property? It would certainly seem so. A being that has knowledge is, other things being equal, greater than a being that lacks it. So knowledge is a great-making quality. But since one can have less or more knowledge, even if we know that the greatest possible being has knowledge, how do we know how much this being possesses? If we keep in mind Anselm's definition, this question has an easy answer. God is the most perfect being possible. How much knowledge would an unsurpassably great being possess? All that there is to have. So one who adopts Anselm's formulation of the concept of God will have reason for thinking of God as omniscient, or allknowing.

Many of the traditional divine properties are relatively well known and can be discussed only briefly. In addition to omniscience, God is also believed to be omnipotent(all-powerful), omnibenevolent (all-good), and omnipresent (everywhere present). In distinction from most forms of pantheism, the Judeo-Christian God is regarded as personal. A personal being is a being with knowledge and a will, and who is capable of acting on them.

The Judeo-Christian conception of God also portrays the deity as being the sole creator of the universe and of all that it contains. God is thought to be immanent in creation (that is to say, involved with and to be found in it) and yet transcendent from it. According to the traditional Judeo-Christian model, God is not to be confused with creation; even taken as an entirety, creation is metaphysically distinct from God. If creation were to cease to exist tomorrow, God would remain largely unchanged. The insistence on the ontological distinction between Creator and creation is a major point of distinction between the God of theism and the God of pantheism. Also, the insistence on the immanence of God distinguishes theism from some forms of deism popular during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The deistic God was believed to be an absentee Creator who no longer had anything to do with the operation of the universe. This God is like a clockmaker who builds then winds a clock, which henceforth runs entirely on its own.

In addition to these more popularly known attributes, the classical Christian conception of God includes several components that are apparently in part the result of Greek philosophical influences during the formative period of Christian theology. We will briefly look at four. The first is the notion of divine timelessness. To say that God is timeless is not to say merely that God has always existed and will always exist; it is rather to say something about God's very mode of existence. Whereas beings that are "in time" move through it from moment to moment, the past being moments that are no more and the future being moments yet to come, a timeless God will experience every moment together in an eternal present. God's life is not divided into the past, present, and future but is had forever all at once. God's timelessness is supposed to follow from the Anselmian definition of the perfect being, since a being not bound by time is thought to be, other things being equal, greater than one that is.

A closely related component of the classical conception of God is that of immutability. To be immutable (as it is traditionally understood) is to be not only changeless but also without the possibility of change. The motivation for this was straightforward: if God is perfect, then any change is for the worse. So God would not change; furthermore, even the possibility of change is the possibility of ceasing to be perfect, and the greatest possible being would be incapable of ceasing to be perfect. Although this line of reasoning has been influential, it should be noted that it is not at all clear that perfection requires the inability to change.

The third classical property we will consider is divine simplicity. To be "simple" in this sense is to have no parts of any kind. The idea is that not only does God, being an immaterial being, not have physical parts, but God is without complexity of any sort. In particular, God does not even have distinct characteristics or properties; all God's properties are identical to each other and even to the very Being of God. Simplicity was thought to be a great-making property because a metaphysically simple entity could not possibly come apart or decompose; hence change and eventual nonexistence were impossible.

The final traditional metaphysical property we will here consider is divine impassability. Although there are many different understandings of this property, they all have in common the belief that God is not affected by what humans do. It is thought inappropriate for finite beings to have any power over God; hence, he is impassable. One further wrinkle in the notion of impassability is that it is generally thought to entail a lack of emotional life in God. If God reacted to what humans do with emotions of anger, jealousy, or even compassion, then humans are exerting influence or control over God. This is traditionally thought unbecoming of the Greatest Possible Being. Although God might behave in ways that suggest the emotions of anger, jealousy, or compassion, his behavior does not in fact reveal those underlying emotional states.

These four traditional properties (timelessness, immutability, simplicity, and impassability), although absolutely fundamental to the Christian conception of God in the Middle Ages, have come under heavy attack during the latter part of the twentieth century. First, regarding timelessness, many theologians and philosophers believe that a being outside of time would in principle not be able to act in the temporal world. In particular, there is the difficulty of how response to petitionary prayer is possible if God is aware of every event in the temporal world at once. For responding to prayer seems to require being aware that the petition was made and then acting upon it. But such a sequence of events is by nature temporal with some events that come before others in the series. Also, there are difficulties for Christian theism in squaring timelessness with the doctrine of the Incarnation. For this doctrine states that the Second Person of the Trinity became incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ. Yet being a human being, Jesus Christ was surely temporal. Timelessness, then, seems at odds with the cornerstone of Christian theology and thus is looked at with suspicion by many.

The doctrines of immutability and simplicity have also come under sharp attack in the latter part of this century. First, process theologians claim that change is an essential part of being; they flatly reject the Greek and early Christian notion that immutability is a metaphysical virtue. But even many philosophers and theologians who strive to remain more traditional than the process theologians in their understanding of divinity believe that the notions of immutability (as classically conceived) and divine simplicity should be altered or even jettisoned. From the philosophical side, the grounds for immutability seem suspect. For instance, an omniscient being would know that what is happening now is happening now and that what happened yesterday happened yesterday. But in order for such a being to have knowledge that keeps up with the facts, as it were, the being's mental life would have to undergo change. As for simplicity, it has been argued that there is little sense to be made of the idea that, for example, omniscience and omnipotence are identical, and even less to be made of the claim that God's very being is identical to a single property. This is a very obscure doctrine indeed.

While timelessness, immutability, and simplicity do not enjoy the acceptance they once did, it is the doctrine of divine impassability that has come under the most serious and sustained fire in the latter part of this century. While perhaps there is something to be said for the idea that God is so ontologically above humans that God is completely unaffected by human actions, when the full implications of this view are considered, it surely seems that the conception of God that includes it will include some pretty undesirable features. For an impassable God is, it seems, a fundamentally uncaring God. For although God might behave toward humans as if God cares, the bottom line is that, if impassability is true, then God has nothing analogous to emotional states. Yet in recent years the theology of God as a suffering God, a God who loves creation so much as to enter into it and take on its burdens and hardships has been at the core of much of Christian theology in the United States and elsewhere.

There is little doubt that just as recent Christological trends have tended to stress the humanity and historicity of Jesus, recent work in theology has by and large been a move away from the conception of God as a timeless, immutable, metaphysically simple, impassable being like that imagined by Greek philosophers. (There are, however, notable opponents to the current trends; philosophers Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump have been remarkably successful at meeting objections to these traditional attributes and at giving explications of them that are as clear as one could hope for.) Current theology emphasizes God's interaction with creation, God's concern for the poor and dispossessed (liberation theology speaks most strongly to this), and God's willingness to make humanity God's partners in the redemption of creation. While many theologians who stress this side of divinity are not particularly concerned with theological orthodoxy, there are many others who note that what might be regarded as the "metaphysical excesses" of the classical conception of God are not to be found in the ancient creeds of the church, or in the Scriptures.

Let us conclude by considering again Anselm's definition of God as the greatest possible being. Medieval scholars and many traditionalists since would argue that this conception of God grounds the notions of timelessness, simplicity, and impassability. Yet this is controversial. For example, one might think that the ability to enter into creation and intimately interact with creatures is a great-making property but that this property is inconsistent with timelessness. If that is right, then timelessness might not be a great-making property after all, and being in time is. Similarly, if being able to have genuine love and compassion for all persons is a great-making property and if this precludes impassability, then the latter is cast into doubt as a property that the greatest possible being would have. In short, then we can see the disagreement between those who accept the classical conception of God and those who accept more modern conceptions not as a dispute about whether Anselm's definition is right but rather a disagreement about how to flesh out the surprisingly flexible skeleton that Anselm has left us with.