3.3 Metaphysics of God
3.3.1 The concept and nature of God:
God’s attributes:
Omniscient - to see and know all things
Omnibenevolent - all loving/ supremely good.
Omnipotent - all powerful
God has given humans free will
,Competing views on such a being’s relationship to time, including God being timeless
and God being within time:
Being eternal means existing outside of time, whereas being everlasting means existing within
time.
For Aquinas, God is eternal. Time is the measure of notion, consisting of successive parts,
something that must change as it has a before and after. God however doesn’t change,
meaning that God therefore exists outside of time.
Arguments for the incoherence of the concept of God including:
The Euthyphro dilemma:
The Euthyphro dilemma has two horns: is the pious being is loved by God because it is pious,
or is it pious because it is being loved by God. The first horn suggests that what is morally good
is good independent of God’s will, which means that there is a moral standard independent of
God. This poses a problem for his omnipotence as it means that we can by-pass God if we
wish to be moral, making that higher authority supremely good - not God. The second horn
suggests that God is the source and standard of moral goodness, meaning that he could
command us to do trivial or terrible things and they would be good as God commanded them.
This poses a problem as nothing good existing prior to his will means that nothing is guiding his
will and goodness is thus arbitrary. Further, a standard of goodness set by God makes our
praise of him for meeting it inappropriate. The Euthyphro dilemma consequently undermines
God’s omnipotence - God either is not actually the supreme good or he is not worthy of
worship.
The paradox of the stone:
The paradox of the stone attempts to point out the inconsistency of a being being omnipotent. It
is as follows: If God is all powerful then he would be able to make a stone so powerful that he
can’t lift it. However, if he can’t lift the stone then he does not have the power to lift it, and if he
cannot create such a stone then he lacks the power to create such a stone. Therefore, in both
scenarios there is some power that God lacks and he is not omnipotent.
(Response would be that God can only do what is logically possible.)
The compatibility of the existence of an omniscient God and free human beings:
The Fatalist’s Challenge-
- P1 Necessarily, if God foreknows X, then X will happen.
- P2 God foreknows X (he is omniscient).
- C1 Therefore, necessarily, X will happen.
- C2 Consequently, if X happens necessarily then it is not free.
Therefore, a problem is posed for the nature of God as being simultaneously omniscient and
bestowing on us free will. If God is omniscient then he knows future actions and thus we don’t
have free will, however if we do have free will then God cannot know our future actions and
hence can’t be omniscient. Thus omniscience and free will cannot coexist and the concept of
God is incoherent.
Richard Swinburne response-
- Swinburne argues that we should be defining omniscience as all that is logically
possible to know. God, therefore, cannot know our future actions as such
, foreknowledge isn’t logically possible (our actions depend on us at that moment, God
can only know all that is predetermined for the future such as logical necessary truths).
God has made a choice to limit his knowledge about our actions to preserve our free
will; if he wanted to he could abolish such freedoms if things aren’t going the right way,
‘turn Hitler off’ as it were. Thus, in spite of our free will, God remains omniscient as he
chooses to do only what is logically possible despite having the ability to instead know
our futures.
- Critique. Swinburne states that God can abolish our freewill if things aren’t going
correctly, ‘turn Hitler off’. However, this is still a contradiction against our freewill as
going against God’s desires can therefore result in our freedoms being limited. To be
fully free we would be able to do any actions, regardless of their consequences, and so
if our freedom relies upon us only taking certain actions then we aren’t actually free to
do anything.
William Lane Craig response (stronger than Swinburne)-
- The fatalist reasoned that if God foreknows X, then X will necessarily happen and thus
we can’t be free since X’s necessity means that we are unable to make a choice that
would prove God wrong. Craig however, argues that there is a flaw in the modal logic.
He claims that X could in fact fail to happen, meaning that it doesn’t have to happen
necessarily - God would instead know something different. Craig explains that by our
actions we have the ability to determine what God would have believed in the past,
likening God to an infallible barometer. God exists in all of time, meaning his
foreknowledge is chronologically prior to our choice as he knows before he creates us
what we are going to choose. Our choice however, is logically prior to his
foreknowledge since God must play out events to see what we will choose. God
simultaneously sees our choice in real time and creates a world in which that could
occur as he sees all time at once.
- This is stronger than Swinburne’s position as God can remain fully omniscient whilst
humans have full free will. Swinburne changes the definition of omniscience to
encompass a God with reduced knowledge, however Craig’s explanation allows God to
have omniscience not bound by constraints; using his timelessness to show that our
freewill is logically prior to his foreknowledge. Craig is able to maintain the original and
wider definition of omniscience in accordance with human free will, which Swinburne
does not.
- Critique this with a stronger fatalist argument.
- No Forking Paths Argument: Whenever we make a choice we are doing something like
a traveller does when faced with a choice between different roads. The only roads a
traveller is able to choose are roads which are a continuation of the road they are
already on (choices after the actual past and consistent with the laws of nature.) If
determinism is false, then making choices is indeed like this - the past road is behind us
and we have two or more different potential future paths to follow depending on our
choosing. If determinism is true however, then our journey through life is more like
travelling on a road which has no branches. This is correct because our actual future is
our only possible future, we aren’t able to choose anything other than what we actually
choose - different pathways exist but each agent only has one they will take in spite of
others being visible.
