Defining God into existence

One extremely aggravating assertion leveled against theists is that they beg the question by defining God into existence, sort of like Anselm attempted to do. It usually starts off like this. The atheist concedes for argument’s sake that God could have created the universe, but then turns around and asks what, then, created God. The theist then becomes frustrated, because God, by definition, is the first cause which just is uncaused, uncreated, and necessary. Here, then, is where the theist is accused of begging the question and defining God into existence. The atheist claims that of course if one arbitrarily defines God as that which is uncaused and uncreated, then the problem is solved. But, this is the very thing up for dispute, is it not?

So, the atheist continues, if one can simply attach the concepts of uncaused and necessary to the concept of God, then why can’t we similarly do this with any other concept? Herein lies the genesis of such absurdities as the flying spaghetti monster, and invisible pink unicorns etc. Why, the atheist wonders, can’t we say that a necessary uncaused fairy is what lies behind the existential curtain, instead of God? Isn’t labeling God as necessary and uncaused just as arbitrary as taking the concept of a fairy and predicating the very same things of it?

My answer: No, no, one-thousand times no. First, and most importantly, the theist does not arbitrarily predicate concepts like necessary of God. Rather, they accept these, and take them for granted, as though they had been proved deductively. That is to say, the theist accepts these predicates after God’s existence has already been arrived at logically. Now here the atheist will cry that they don’t accept the arguments and proofs for God’s existence—obviously, since they’re atheists—and that the theist is only assuming one more thing that needs to be proven. And here the atheist is precisely right. The theist does assume that the proofs (at least some) for God’s existence achieve their objective—obviously, since they’re theists.

However, notice that the actual proofs for God’s existence are not what’s being discussed here presently—unless one is promulgating the Ontological argument. That is to say, the atheist, when asking questions like the ones above, is attacking the concept of God and not the proofs that lead up to said concept.  So the point is that the theists are not arbitrarily predicating concepts of God in an ad hoc fashion to avoid questions of prior causality and contingency. Rather, they’re assuming that these concepts have already been proved by deduction and therefore already inherently contain concepts like necessity.

Another major problem is with atheists drawing an analogy between God and existential absurdities (e.g. the flying spaghetti monster). Nobody believes that the flying spaghetti monster or the tooth fairy have been proved deductively. Thus, when the atheist attempts to attach predicates like necessity to them to prove a point they are in fact doing so arbitrarily and question-beggingly, and therefore their point is not received.  

Now, in case I still haven’t convinced you of my point, let me attempt to give an analogy to demonstrate where the atheist’s problem lies. In mathematics a famous proof is that of proving that the square root of two is an irrational number. Now imagine that a “skeptic” came along, conceded the validity of the proof for argument’s sake, and asked why the square root of two does not satisfy the definition of an integer. The mathematician then remarks that the set of integers is subsumed under the set of rational numbers, and since the square root of two is not rational then it cannot possibly be an integer either. The skeptic then claims that the mathematician is begging the question by arbitrarily defining the square root of two as irrational. Subsequently the skeptic then wonders why he cannot, like the mathematician, simply arbitrarily define any random number as irrational to prove it’s not an integer.

The problem here should be obvious. The mathematician is not arbitrarily defining anything. His assertion that the square root of two is irrational was a conclusion arrived at by use of his deductive proof. Now whether this proof is valid and sound can be assessed on its own grounds, but it should be clear that if the skeptic wants to challenge the notion regarding the square root of two as an irrational number, he needs to tackle the proof itself. Charging the mathematician with defining the number into a number group is simply confused. Moreover, claiming that, like the mathematician, the skeptic can take any number he wants and define it into a specific number set likewise confused, since the mathematician did no such a thing.

Hopefully the point has been made. When the atheist charges the theist with defining God into existence, they are gravely mistaken. The theist is not being arbitrary with the concept and attributes of God. The concept and attributes are based on so-called deductive proofs which attempt to end at and conclude with God. These proofs can be challenged of course, but when one asks questions related purely to the concept of God—e.g. what created God?—then all the ontological baggage that accompanies that concept needs to be taken account of as well.

Dale Allison on the Bible

"The inexplicable divine mystery still speaks through the old pages and through my hermeneutical confusion; and in the end I must pursue the book because it has always pursued me. It has made me feel like a worm and no man, and it has made me sing the song of Simeon. It has made known my transgressions so that they are ever before me, and it has freed me from my past so that I am free indeed. It has so shaped my intellect that, even when I do not end with it, I always begin with it. And what little good deed doing I have done has come from memory of the Good Samaritan and of the Son of Man's words to the sheep and the goats.

I have come to live and move and have my being in the Bible [...] and in the Christian traditions it has brought forth. I want this book read to me on my deathbed. Despite my modernity and my cynical nature, despite my dissection of it and my quarrels with it, the Bible remains profitable for teaching, for correction, and for training in righteousness. It comforts. It inspires. It commands. When I push its pages apart, I lay my finger on God's heart. I hate to see people not reading it."

Taken from The Luminous Dusk .

Embodied Realism Part III: Is this realism?

Let us continue our survey of the philosophy of embodied realism as expounded in Philosophy of the Flesh (first two posts here and here). We now turn our attention to probably one of the biggest topics in philosophy, with which embodied realism actively comments on, namely that of metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism is the position that an external reality exists apart from our consciousness, and that our apprehensions of this reality are determined mostly by the actual properties inherent in it. The opposite of realism is anti-realism, which states either that an external reality does not exist, or that we cannot know this reality in itself.

So, where does embodied realism stand in this dichotomy? Well, embodied realism is called realism, and thus it would seem to fit neatly in this category. And indeed this would be prima facie correct, since the authors explicitly state their belief that an external world exists. So then, are we finished here? Well, not exactly. For while the authors will admit the existence of an objective reality, they deny that there is any neutral vantage point from which we can know anything about this objective reality apart from our embodiment:

[C]lassical metaphysical realism cannot be right, since the properties of categories are mediated by the body rather than determined directly by a mind-independent reality. (p. 28)

[Embodied realism] gives up on being able to know things-in-themselves, but, through embodiment, explains how we can have knowledge that, although it is not absolute, is nonetheless sufficient to allow us to function and flourish. (p. 95)

[Embodied realism] denies that we can have objective and absolute knowledge of the world-in-itself…[E]mbodied realism denies on empirical grounds, that there exists one and only one correct description of the world[.] (p. 96)

We will deal with the inherent problems with these claims in just a moment. Primarily, we need to observe why they are being made. This is to ask why the authors are claiming that we cannot have objective knowledge of reality-in-itself, and why does our embodiment keep us from predicating properties of reality from a neutral vantage point? The main reason is due to the levels of embodiment (neural, phenomenological, and cognitive unconscious) that we surveyed in the first post of this series. Remember that embodied realism claims that, based on our embodiment, we don’t have a neutral vantage point to say “X is or isn’t the case,” because things are or are not “the case” (i.e. real or unreal) relative to our understanding at a certain level of embodiment. Therefore, we can only say “X is or isn’t the case, at a certain level of embodiment.” So, what we mean by something being “true” and “real”, on embodied realism, depends upon the perspective and level of embodiment being considered. To take the example the authors utilize—and which we saw was false in the first post—color isn’t “actually” real, if we are attempting to promulgate this statement from a neutral standpoint. Rather, color is “real” only when considered from the level of phenomenology, but is it “unreal” when considered from the neural level. That is, the existence of color is “real” only relative to the perspective, here the phenomenological level of embodiment, being considered.

Now, remember that in the aforementioned post we saw these arguments to be false. Not only can we make absolute predications of reality from a privileged perspective, but we must do so. In fact, the author’s own theses contradict their very claims. When they say, for instance, that we cannot know “things-in-themselves”, or that we cannot have objective and absolute knowledge of the world, the authors are predicating these propositions as objective predications of reality from their own privileged vantage point! That is, they’re saying that it is an objective fact that we cannot know things in themselves, and it is objectively true that we cannot have objective knowledge. This is, to say the least, self-refuting. For the embodied realist’s claim that reality cannot be known is not simply made at the neural level, or the phenomenological level, or the cognitive unconscious level. No, it’s made from a unique perspective that says “reality is this way, period,” even though this is what the embodied realist says cannot be done.

The embodied realist, thus, is blind to the absurd implications of their philosophy. If one level of embodiment cannot be privileged over and above another, then no single proposition can be seen as an adequate predication of reality in any domain whatsoever—since any single proposition can only represent one level of embodiment at a time. But if no single proposition can be an adequate predication of reality in any domain, then the embodied realist’s very claims about objectivity, knowledge, reality, and ontology cannot be adequate predications of reality either, and thus we should pay them no heed.

Furthermore, if we truly cannot know reality-in-itself, and can have no objective or absolute knowledge of this reality, then we cannot make those very same claims—i.e. that we cannot know reality-in-itself and that we cannot have objective knowledge of the world. That is to say, if we can’t know objective reality, then the statement “we can’t know objective reality” is also false, since it is predicated on a knowledge claim about the nature of reality. Everywhere we turn embodied realism shoots itself in the foot. This is why, as I said in the last post, embodied realism is junkyard of poor philosophy.

So, is embodied realism a misnomer? Should it even be labeled a form of realism? Not really. While it admits the existence of an external reality, it discards the proposition that we can have any real knowledge of the objective properties of this reality, and thus it belongs in the camp of anti-realism.

God is not good

One issue that is constantly at the back of my mind is the so-called problem of evil. This problem is formulated in many (usually philosophical) ways—e.g. as Epicurus’ or Hume’s famous dilemma between forfeiting God’s goodness or his sovereignty in the light of evil. Yet, I think that when most people feel the weight of this dilemma, they feel it emotionally and not intellectually—at least that’s the case with me. When confronted with the callous reality of suffering in the world, the question immediately arises regarding how a good and loving God could be behind the scenes, pulling the strings as it were. I mean, if the God of Christianity exists, then why do children die by the thousands every day—by starvation and disease to name a couple--or why do natural disasters constantly kill significant percentages of the inhabitants of the world in a cyclical fashion? Why is there so much filth, injustice, suffering, disease, abuse, neglect, terror, sorrow, and death in a world supposedly created and sustained by a good and loving God?

One common apologetic response is the “We cannot see the whole picture” adage. I think we’ve all heard this, and maybe thought it: God’s ways are not our ways, therefore while we look at this or that act of suffering, we are not in a position to step back from it as a whole and see how it all woves into the fabric of all of existence. The point articulated here is basically that our view of things is incomplete and because of that we lack a God’s eye view with which to see how the evils in the world relate to one another. Therefore, these acts which we mistakenly characterize as evil could actually be good when the entire picture is unraveled, and thus we lack justification for pinning these evils on the character of God.

 Surprisingly, to some of my readers, I am not sympathetic to this view. Don’t get me wrong, I agree that our vantage point as humans is finite and that we should be careful when attempting to extend this viewpoint beyond its reach to make judgements that we have no right to make. Nevertheless, the aforementioned apologetic script runs into many problems of its own. For instance, if the seeming evils of this world are really instruments for good, then it seems hard to absolve God of the label of evil. For it seems quite obvious that the rape of a woman or the death of a child is evil, and no matter what good comes of it the individual who arranged these events is morally culpable for using these acts of evil as instruments to achieve some good. More than this, the argument could also be made that if God’s purpose is to achieve certain goods, then, since he is omnipotent, he could achieve those goods without the utilization of evil—at least without the evil that is not tied to free will.

However, I still think that even these objections given are wrong-headed, and this is where I make my transition into the real subject of this post. My argument is that all this talk of God as morally culpable or morally virtuous, as well-behaved or misbehaved, is simply the wrong way to conceive of and speak of God’s relation to the world and man. You see, when one begins talking about whether an individual is morally justified or morally culpable regarding specific acts, they are assuming that that individual is a moral agent. That is, they are assuming that the individual is an agent among others and is somehow part of a moral community. When determining one’s moral standing we are asking questions regarding the moral obligations and duties of that individual and how they relate to a moral community, and subsequently we desire to determine whether or not that individual has satisfied those obligations. But the question that needs to be posed with respect to God is whether or not he is a moral agent in this way. And the answer seems to be a resounding “No.”

Remember that God, as classical theism has conceived of him, is not a being among beings, or an agent among agents. He is not, as many contemporary theologians have promulgated, simply a person with all good attributes maximized. That is to say, he is not a being with the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence etc. No, he is being, he is existence, he is goodness etc., and his being is his goodness which is his power which is his knowledge. So the significance of this to our discussion is that God is not a creature among creatures, or a being among beings, or a person among persons, or an agent among agents, or an existent among existents, therefore it seems that God is not one among many, and thus is not part of any moral community. This seems to entail that God is not a moral agent. That is to say, there are no moral obligations or duties that God needs to fulfill, and therefore he cannot be seen as morally virtuous nor unrighteous. Again, these terms simply don’t apply unequivocally or literally to God. God cannot be morally good or evil, the way we use these terms, any more than God can be corporeal.

Now even many Christians, or theists, will feel uncomfortable with this. For isn’t a central claim of orthodox theology (whatever that is) that God is morally good and just? Sure, but classical theists have always understood these terms to apply to God analogously, and not literally—just like any predications of God. So, we can indeed say that God is good, as long we know that we don’t mean that God is literally morally good.

Now the skeptic is most likely yelling at the computer screen right about now, articulating the following response: If this whole post was simply to show that moral terms cannot be applied literally but only analogously, then nothing has been solved. For we can still say that God is analogously evil, instead of literally evil, and the problem of evil still rears its ugly head. However, this is simply not the case, because for a scholastic perfection is the tell-tale standard of goodness, and perfection is achieved when a substance perfectly achieves the ends set down by its nature—that is, when an end is actualized—and evil is seen as a privation—that is, the absence of an end that should have been actualized. Therefore since God is pure actuality and pure being, it follows that he is a perfect being, and thus is good. Furthermore, since God is purely actual then he contains no privations, and thus no evil—again, with the understanding that these terms are being used analogously when applied to God.

So, in the grand scenario of things this means that the problem of evil is a category mistake when promulgated to question the existence of God. The whole talk of good and evil, well behaved and misbehaved, morally culpable or morally virtuous, simply doesn’t apply to God. God is not evil, and he is not good, as long as these are predicated literally.

The inconsistency of Bart Ehrman

Despite the hostility of evangelical Christians towards the work of Bart Ehrman, I usually line up behind his scholarship. I agree with his views regarding Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, Jesus’s divinity as being projected on him by his followers, contradictions in the gospels etc. And for the most part I have found him a valuable resource regarding enlightening laymen about the details and conclusions of New Testament scholarship.

However, recently I had been rummaging through his popular works—along with his latest book How Jesus Became God—and found some glaring inconsistencies that make me question any type of confidence I previously had in his scholarship. I will only highlight a couple of examples here.

The first book I read from Ehrman was his Jesus Interrupted, wherein he really just attempts to shine the light of scholarly consensus on issues of the New Testament. Now, take a look at what he says here:

[H]istorians have problems using the Gospels as historical sources, in view of their discrepancies and the fact that they were written decades after the life of Jesus by unknown authors who had inherited their accounts about him from the highly malleable oral tradition. (p. 13)

 Examine the first aspect of this sentence. Ehrman seems to insinuate that the Gospels are dubious as historical sources. Yet, compare this with his claims in Did Jesus Exist?:

If historians prefer lots of witnesses that corroborate one another’s claims without showing evidence of collaboration, we have that in relative abundance in the written sources that attest to the existence of the historical Jesus. (p. 92)

 Let me say right away that these claims do not directly contradict the above claims by Ehrman, and that is not my assertion here. Rather, my point is that Ehrman seems quick to discredit the Gospels as valuable historical sources in one case, yet he is eager to uphold them as the exact opposite in order to bolster his argument in another instance. This is inconsistent.

Now examine the latter part of Ehrman’s claims above in Jesus Interrupted, namely, his comment regarding the problems of oral tradition. In said book Ehrman expands on this comment and compares the oral tradition of the Jews to a game of telephone carried out between different countries, different languages, and different contexts over forty or more years. He then claims that, with this analogy in mind, we would therefore expect the Gospels to be riddled with discrepancies and contradictions. This, again, would seem to frame the historicity of the Gospels in an unfavorable light. Yet, here are Ehrman’s comments on oral tradition in DJE:

Where did all these sources [for the Gospels] come from? They could not have been dreamed up independently of one another by Christians all over the map because they agree on too many of the fundamentals. Instead, they are based on oral tradition. (p. 86)

 Again, Ehrman’s claims on oral tradition are not in direct contradiction here. But, in one instance he highlights oral tradition as the main reason for the contradictions and discrepancies of the Gospels that make salvaging historical material from them extremely difficult, yet, in another instance he asserts that the very same oral tradition is a necessity for the agreement of the Gospels and is something that is quite valuable for the historical study of the Gospels.

Now, while we’ve only examined inconsistencies in Ehrman’s books so far, I maintain that he has in fact outright contradicted himself. For instance, one of the main points utilized to combat Jesus-Mythicism in Ehrman’s book DJE is his claim that the immediate followers of Jesus did not regard him as divine in any sense of the word:

[J]esus could not have been invented as a dying-rising god because his earliest followers did not think he was God. (p. 222)

 And again:

That the earliest Christians did not consider Jesus God is not a controversial point among scholars…[S]cholars are unified in thinking that the view that Jesus was God was a later development within Christian circles. (p. 231)

 These sentences are unequivocal. It is quite clear what Ehrman is asserting here. Jesus was not seen as God by his immediate followers, rather, this title was simply thrust upon him by Christian followers of a subsequent time. Got it. But then Ehrman, in his new book How Jesus Became God, writes this gem: 

The idea that Jesus is God is not an invention of modern times…it was the view of the very earliest Christians soon after Jesus’s death. (p. 3).

 Uh, say what? Now Jesus’s earliest followers believed he was God. Which is it? Ehrman subsequently elaborates in the book that “soon after Jesus’s death, the belief in his resurrection led some of his followers to say he was God” (p. 83). So, here is where Ehrman, I claim, explicitly contradicts himself. In one of Ehrman’s books Jesus’s immediate followers do not take him to be God, and such a title is only given to him decades later, whereas in Ehrman’s new book Jesus’s immediate followers labeled him divine right from the get-go. This is clearly a contradiction, to say the least.

Now, it could be the case that Ehrman simply changed his mind due to an examination of the evidence. There’s nothing wrong with this, right? Well, no. However, Ehrman makes no insinuation that this is what happened. Moreover, Ehrman always writes with the conviction like he’s giving you just the facts. I mean just look at his quote above from DJE; his assertion is explicit, and uncompromising. And anyone reading those sentences would never think that there was intellectual room to disagree. Yet, a couple years later the sentence is turned on its head, by the same person who wrote it.

So, the point is that Bart Ehrman, the layman’s tour guide of critical scholarship, is not always reliable as an authority in his own field of study. And these examples are not the only ones, trust me. Ehrman is inconsistent, and sometimes self-contradicting, and the even bigger lesson to be learned here is the subjectivity involved in scholarship today. We often hear of the “consensus of critical scholars,” but how reliable is this consensus, and how much heed should we pay to it when even the best known scholars can’t get their facts and convictions straight? I’m not saying we should completely jettison the so-called scholarly consensus, but perhaps such a consensus is not as valuable as we once thought.