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The Concept of God
An Exploration of Contemporary Difficulties with the Attributes of God
By Ronald Nash Zondervan
Copyright © 1983 Zondervan
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-310-45141-8
Chapter One
Some Preliminary Considerations Philosophical reflection about God has taken a new turn. During the past fifteen or twenty years, American and British philosophers have written a surprisingly large number of books and articles on various issues related to the concept of God. These philosophical investigations usually focus on one or two of the divine attributes and normally include some analysis of what the attributes mean. In many of these writings, traditional Christian theism comes under attack from one of two different directions: (1) Some allege that theism is internally inconsistent, from which it follows that the God of theism is a logically impossible being. This constitutes a new and powerful argument for atheism. (2) Another group of thinkers rejects the atheist's conclusions and argues instead that the classical concept of God must be modified in several dramatic ways. This second procedure is adopted by advocates of the increasingly influential school of Process theology. According to the first challenge, Christian theism must be abandoned because its concept of God is incoherent. According to the second, the classical Christian concept of God must be replaced by the substitute offered by Process theology.
I intend to show that the conclusions of the atheist and the process theologian are premature. A theistic concept of God is still viable, even though a major rethinking of several aspects of its package of attributes may be required.
THE CONCEPT OF GOD
A concept of God may be thought of as a cluster or package of properties attributed to the divine being. The phrase package of attributes suggests that the properties attributed to God are tied together in some way. I can go still further, and speak of the set of divine attributes as a logical package, which is simply a way of saying they must fit together logically; the entire cluster of divine attributes must be logically consistent. Any concept of God that contained logically incompatible attributes would picture a logically impossible being. Whatever else may be true about a logically impossible being, it cannot exist. With respect to any proposed concept of God, then, it is proper to ask if the various elements of the concept fit together, if they are logically consistent. The concept of God found in Christian theism must pass the test of logical consistency.
In recent debate, the question of the consistency or coherence of the concept of God has taken four different forms:
1. Each individual attribute must be self-consistent. Some philosophers have maintained, for example, that the very concept of an omnipotent being is logically incoherent. Sometimes this assertion has been based upon certain paradoxes said to be generated by the notion of omnipotence. One such paradox begins by asking whether an omnipotent being can create a stone too heavy for it to lift. If the question is answered affirmatively, then supposedly there is one thing an omnipotent being cannot do; he cannot lift the stone that is too heavy to lift. On the other hand, if the question is answered negatively, there is something else an omnipotent being cannot do; he cannot create the stone in question. In either case, an "omnipotent" being faces a task he cannot perform. Because the concept of an omnipotent being generates such a paradox, it is dismissed as incoherent. Similar challenges have been raised about the coherence of other divine attributes such as omniscience, timelessness, simplicity, and necessity. All of these properties have been alleged to be self-contradictory. Anyone who wishes to preserve the intellectual integrity of theism must answer such charges.
2. Divine attributes must be logically compatible with each other. Some thinkers have claimed that two or more divine attributes are logically incompatible. Anthony Kenny has written that "the traditional doctrines of omniscience and omnipotence cannot be stated in a way which makes them compatible with other traditional doctrines such as that of divine immutability." According to one argument used to show that God's omniscience is incompatible with his immutability, God must know everything, including what time it is. But time changes. Therefore, if God is omniscient and knows everything, He knows some things that change which entails that He changes. Thus, God cannot be immutable. It is sometimes asserted that an incoherence exists between the attributes of omnipotence and timelessness. How can a timeless being (a being completely removed from time) be Creator of a temporal world? Supposedly, the Creation took place at a particular time. But how can a being be timeless and yet create a temporal world, an event that had a location in time? Moreover, how can a timeless God sustain a world of temporal processes?
3. Divine attributes must be consistent with other important concerns within a particular theological system. Kenny, whose doubts about the compatibility of omniscience and immutability have already been noted, wonders, for example, if the divine attributes of omnipotence and omniscience are consistent with such central Christian convictions as God's "lack of responsibility for sin, and human freedom of the will." Most Christian theists have believed it is important to preserve some kind of human freedom. But how can human free choice be affirmed in conjunction with the belief that an omniscient God has total and perfect knowledge about the future? If God knows everything that is going to happen in the future, how can any future event occur other than in accord with the divine foreknowledge? Does not God's foreknowledge make the future necessary?
4. Finally and most important, for theism to be coherent demands that the concept of God itself be consistent, not contradictory. David Blumenfeld boldly announces that "the concept of God is contradictory." Blumenfeld makes it clear that the target of his attack is "the standard Judeo-Christian theological conception of divinity, a being who is by definition absolutely perfect." Such a challenge dare not be taken lightly by the theist. After all, as Kenny explains:
Anyone who is interested in the question of the existence of God has to study first of all the divine attributes; for to say that God exists is to say that there is something that has the divine attributes; and if "God exists" is to be true, then the divine attributes must at least themselves be coherent and jointly compatible. The coherence of the notion of God, as possessor of the traditional attributes, is a necessary, though of course not sufficient, condition for God's existence.
If a particular concept of God is logically contradictory, then it is logically impossible for such a God to exist. The incoherence of the concept of God would provide an inescapable argument against the existence of such a God.
Logical coherence and the concept of God are related in one additional way. Richard Swinburne asks, "Are there any logical relations between the predicates ascribing properties to God or are they just a string of predicates, such that it is coherent to suppose that there might be beings with different combinations of them?" Adopting the first view, Swinburne illustrates his point by suggesting it is logically necessary that an omniscient and perfect free deity "be perfectly good, and that a perfectly good creator of the universe ... be a source of moral obligation." He also argues that a being who is both omnipotent and omniscient must of necessity be an omnipresent spirit.
A person who is omnipotent is able to bring about effects everywhere by basic actions. One who is omniscient at a certain time has justified true beliefs about all things which are going on anywhere at that time.... An omniscient being does not depend for his knowledge on the correct functioning of intermediaries. Hence an omnipotent and omniscient person, in my senses of the terms, is of logical necessity an omnipresent spirit.
In many instances, a particular divine attribute will logically entail certain other attributes. For example, theists often maintain that the attribute of timelessness entails the attribute of immutability. If God is timeless, then He must also be immutable. The very possibility of change presupposes a "before" and "after." If a being is such that no "before" or "after" is possible with respect to its being (and this is certainly true of a timeless being), then it is logically impossible for that being to change. But immutability also entails timelessness. If God is incapable of change in any way, then God must be timeless. Whether or not all of the given examples turn out to be correct, it does seem clear that logical entailments between different attributes have the effect of producing different packages of attributes and thus different concepts of God.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Concept of God by Ronald Nash Copyright © 1983 by Zondervan. Excerpted by permission.
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