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The Divine Attributes and Non-personal Conceptions of God

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Abstract

Analytical philosophers of religion widely assume that God is a person, albeit immaterial and of unique status, and the divine attributes are thus understood as attributes of this supreme personal being. Our main aim is to consider how traditional divine attributes may be understood on a non-personal conception of God. We propose that foundational theist claims make an all-of-Reality reference, yet retain God’s status as transcendent Creator. We flesh out this proposal by outlining a specific non-personal, monist and ‘naturalist’ conception of God, which we call the ‘euteleological’ conception of God, and then considering euteleological interpretations of omnipotence (implicating divine agency, will and freedom), omniscience (implicating divine intellect and intelligence) and divine goodness.

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Notes

  1. On ‘weak immutability’, see Swinburne (1993, p. 219). He thinks (1994, Ch. 4 and p. 139) that the timeless view of eternity is incoherent. In (1991, p. 8) he says it is difficult to make any sense of it, and for reasons given in (1993, Ch. 12), says it is an unnecessary burden for the theist. Swinburne thinks that God’s existence is logically contingent, but ‘factually necessary’ (1991, p. 93). He often speaks of a ‘simple’ or ‘very simple kind’ of God, but he does not mean this in anything like the traditional sense of the doctrine of divine simplicity. See, e.g., his (1991, pp. 93 and 283).

  2. For the Open theist view, see, e.g., Hasker (2004, p. 97) and his Ch. 4 in Pinnock et al. (1994). For the Process view, see, e.g., Hartshorne (1948, 1964, 1984). Both open and process theists endorse weak immutability in the same manner as Swinburne, as God’s being essentially ‘steadfast in character’ or ‘righteous’. Some philosophers appear to endorse an even weaker sense of immutability: for example, Davis (2008, p. 162, note 4) defines ‘weak immutability’ as always (i.e., as a matter of fact, but not of necessity) retaining one’s nature, being true to one’s word, keeping one’s promises, never wavering in one’s purposes, etc.

  3. See Alston (1989), especially Chs. 2–4. In Ch. 6 he offers a ‘mixed’ conception of God which combines some of the classical attributes (including atemporality and immutability, but not absolute simplicity) with Hartshorne’s ‘neoclassical’ attributes.

  4. In personal correspondence, Leftow says it’s unlikely that a simple being could have freedom involving the ability to do otherwise, and it couldn’t have a mind in the sense of a system of many distinct causally involved mental states within itself. But maybe its one mental state could be what makes it true that it thinks and wills various things. Others, including, e.g., Wynn (1997, p. 100) and Mann (1983), appear less troubled by the notion of a simple personal God.

  5. In some cases, however, classical attributes are modified or rejected more on philosophical grounds than purely from considerations of religious adequacy. Sometimes attributes are rejected because they are thought to be individually incoherent (typically, simplicity or timelessness), and sometimes because they are thought to be inconsistent with other attributes: for example, on the alleged incompatibility of omniscience and immutability, see, e.g., Kretzmann (1966); and on the alleged incompatibility between omniscience and atemporality, see, e.g., Wolterstorff (2010) and Davis (1983, p. 29).

  6. Helm, who appears to retain all of the classical metaphysical attributes, also comes close to this admission in his (2008), though not so clearly in his (2010). He complains (2008, pp. 140–141) that the distinction between the Creator and creatures is blurred by regarding God as a person in much the same sense as humans are. He chides Swinburne in particular for this and notes that even he resorts to analogy at the end of The Coherence of Theism when considering the idea that a personal God in some sense necessarily exists, with the result that ‘it turns out after all [for Swinburne] that God is a person in a rather stretched sense of that term’. Leftow (2009, p. 299) seems less troubled than others by the notion of a timeless person: though he says that a timeless person ‘won’t be your common or garden variety person’, he thinks that ‘a being that has knowledge and will is person enough for philosophical and theological purposes’.

  7. Examples include Owen (1967, p. 97), Hick (1973, pp. 4–5), Swinburne (1996, p. 3), Evans (2009, p. 32) and Wainwright (1988, p. 10, 2013, p. 1). Many think this belief is essential to Christianity, if not to theism itself.

  8. For more discussion, see our (2016c).

  9. One example of this idolatrous confusion is a version of the problem of evil that wrestles with the need to hold a personal God ultimately morally responsible for the serious suffering of creatures. In our view, such wrestling may reasonably lead to the conclusion that no such God can exist. See our (2011).

  10. See his (2004, p. 8). Davies, a rigorous contemporary proponent of classical theism, is probably the most vocal critic of anthropomorphism in contemporary philosophy of religion. See, e.g., his (1987, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2010).

  11. Davies (2004, p. 9). Davies here refers to Anselm’s Monologion, Ch. 17, to support this claim.

  12. Although Stump quotes Aquinas as holding that ‘God himself is neither universal nor particular’ (ST Ia q.13 a.9 ad 2.), she suggests an interpretation of divine simplicity in which, at least with respect to apt ways in which we may speak of God, God is both universal (esse) and particular (id quod est). She compares this theological situation with the understanding of light in contemporary physics as somehow both a particle and a wave.

  13. Tanner concludes that there is a ‘failure to mean that haunts all theological claims, in the unclosable gap between the recognition that theological claims signify and the inability to specify what it is, conceptually, that they convey.’ Accordingly, she maintains, ‘no set of concepts or images is proper to theology’, which must ‘[make] do with whatever categories are at hand, twisting and violating them according to its own fundamentally non-semantic purposes’ (2013, p. 139), producing ‘a seemingly anarchic bricolage, fundamentally “disciplined” by only a thoroughgoing refusal of sense, by the systematic repudiation of all ordinary canons of sense making’ (p. 140).

  14. For good discussions of Aquinas on analogical predication, see, e.g., Klubertanz (1960) and McInerny (1996).

  15. Some of these attributes—immutability, atemporality, impassibility—wear apophaticism on their sleeves. We have construed simplicity in an apophatic way, and would suggest that the other superficially ‘positive’ attribute—divine necessity—should also be construed as essentially apophatic. We return to this topic below.

  16. See our (2014, 2016a, b, c).

  17. Romans 9:21. Biblical accounts of creation generally do not make the notion of creation ex nihilo explicit, and sometimes suggest, to the contrary, that God creates by bringing order to some pre-existing state of chaos. We will proceed on the assumption, however, that divine creation ex nihilo is required to capture the fullness of the divine transcendence.

  18. For a fuller presentation of our argument in this paragraph, see our (2016b).

  19. Clarke (1994, p. 190) emphasises the importance of keeping this point in mind.

  20. See Freddoso (2001) for a discussion of this understanding of divine action in Suarez, and for a more thorough discussion of the scholastic view that (transeunt) action exists in the patient.

  21. Mark 12:35–37 shows Jesus himself teaching about the Messiah: though the Messiah is David’s son, David nevertheless calls him ‘Lord’, so how can he be his son? Compare Revelation 22:16, where it is said that Jesus is both the source (root) and offspring (descendent) of David. Consider too the doctrine, affirmed at the Council of Ephesus (431CE), of Mary as theotokos (God-bearer), the one who gives birth to her own creator.

    It is interesting to note that, in defending his claim that God is both ultimate final and efficient cause against the objection that, if that were so before and after must exist in God and he must thus be prior to himself, which is impossible, Aquinas (at ST I, q. 44, a. 4) replies that the first principle of all things is one in reality, though there’s a distinction of reason: some things about God we come to know or think before others.

  22. What is at issue, of course, is whether God can be atemporal, immutable and impassible. Manifestations or incarnations of God are evidently not so.

  23. We are inclined to follow Findlay (1948) in rejecting the very possibility of necessary entities, but block what Hughes (1949) called his ‘Ontological disproof’ by refusing the cataphatic reading of divine necessity it presupposes.

  24. The nightmare of Lewis-style modal realism—that there are subsisting possible worlds in which evil and suffering are dominant or all-pervasive—is thus dispelled (as must follow from any viable interpretation of theism). Euteleology is thus aligned with interpretations of theism on which God is free neither to refrain from creating nor to create evil. Compare Geach (1973), who rejects God’s being omnipotent (understood as power to do all things) in favour of his being ‘almighty’ (understood as power over all things or the source of all things) because he takes the former, but not the latter, to imply that God has the power to do evil. We consider the question of what euteleology can make of divine freedom in the following section.

  25. Consider also Leftow’s remark, already quoted above (note 6). In discussing whether Aquinas must agree that God is a person, Davies (2010, pp. 38–39) conjectures that by saying that God is a person Plantinga (1980) might merely be stressing that knowledge, will and agency can be ascribed to God. Aquinas, Davies says, would certainly agree, but he cautions us that these ascriptions must of course be understood in the light of Aquinas’s doctrine of divine simplicity. In ascribing will, intellect and the like to God, then, one is not really saying that there is an individual, God, who has the properties of having will, intellect, etc. Davies does not think Aquinas has to agree that God is a person.

  26. Cf Summa Contra Gentiles III, Ch. 67, whose Chapter heading is ‘God is cause of activity [another translation has ‘operation’] in all active agents’, and which affirms that ‘every agent acts by the divine power’.

    Saying that all power is divine power doesn’t mean that God has all the power and there are no genuine secondary causes. Euteleology isn’t occasionalism: finite creatures are genuine productive agents.

  27. Euteleology, though not pantheist, might thus seem fairly described as panentheist, where this connotes that the natural world is ‘in’ God. It might be better, though, to describe euteleology as ‘the-en-pan-ist’, since, as we are currently noting, it holds that God’s power is exercised in and through all natural exercises of power.

  28. We note that euteleology avoids a competitive view of the relation between divine and creaturely power in a different way from process theism, which retains a personal God but abandons omnipotence for something weaker that involves God’s developing along with the natural world, and exercising only persuasive power in relation to free created persons.

  29. We think that it follows that divine transcendence coincides with the most pervasive divine immanence. Tanner (2013, pp. 147–149) cogently elaborates this theme.

  30. Compare also Kevin Hart’s observation that God the Father does not ‘appear’, but that references to the Father make sense through a ‘phenomenology of the basileia’—the ‘Kingdom’ as preached, and lived out, by Jesus (Hart 2014, Ch 6). In our (2016b) we argue that there are three distinct salient euteleological identifications of the divine, none of them adequate in itself, and each implicating the others without limit.

  31. Adams (1999, especially Part Two) argues that God may not properly be regarded as a member of our moral community. Yet she remains committed to the personal omniGod understanding of divinity—see, e.g., (1999, p. 81) and (2016). We find this puzzling. Davies (2008, pp. 113–115) adopts a more clearly consistent view, we think, in denying that God is a person as well as a moral agent. Once one takes God to be a person, making covenants with created persons, issuing commandments, and so on, it seems arbitrary to deny that God is a member of our moral community who may properly be held morally responsible. (We think that Davis (2008, p. 164) would agree.) The sense that this conclusion trespasses against a proper recognition of divine transcendence—which we share with Adams—seems to us clearly to favour the view that God is not a person.

  32. The phrase is from the absolution pronounced by the priest at Morning and Evening Prayer in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. In all likelihood the torturer will be in the thrall of ‘worldly principalities and powers’, so that the transformation God desires for him requires the defeat of those powers and the collective, institutional, evil that characterizes them. Christianity proclaims that these powers are defeated through the death and resurrection of the Christ.

  33. Previous work by Bishop (2007) took this possibility seriously. Adams considers this interpretation of our euteleological view in her (2016, pp 135–6). Her critique of our alternative positive conception of divinity and her discussion of the ‘neglected option’ of Rolt’s (1913) Platonist understanding of God as the love that is the final (but not productive) cause of the universe, deserve a fuller consideration than we have space for here.

  34. It seems, then, that concrete Reality must be infinite with respect to potential concrete realizations of the good—grounds for a theological endorsement for the multi-verse posited by some cosmological theories.

  35. Euteleology is thus clearly distinct from theological axiarchism, since it does not identify God with the good as arché.

  36. Classical theism takes God’s being and God’s goodness to be the same. Euteleology can be taken as endorsing this claim, since it holds that making sense of ‘God exists’ and of ‘God is good’ can be achieved only by appeal to one and the same fundamental fact—namely, that Reality is inherently directed upon the supreme good and exists because this telos is fulfilled.

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  1. The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    John Bishop

  2. The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Ken Perszyk

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Bishop, J., Perszyk, K. The Divine Attributes and Non-personal Conceptions of God. Topoi 36, 609–621 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9394-z

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