In his book The Ultimate Superstition, he has openly criticized the “new atheism” movement. in particular, he has considered writers intellectually superficial in their treatment of religious belief. why do you think that is?
For one thing, new atheist writers tend not to know much about the ideas they criticize. they tend to attack “straw men” and engage their opponents at their weakest points, rather than their strongest points. any philosopher knows that when dealing with critics or opponents, you always want to meet them at their strongest point. but new atheist writers tend not to do that. of course past atheists have sometimes been prone to that too, but part of what makes the new atheist movement different from previous generations of atheists is that it has become something of a mass movement. p>
The tendency to attack figureheads and cartoons and not do basic homework before attacking religion has now become more widespread than in previous generations. that is part of what distinguishes the new atheists. I have found, in dealing with newer atheist writers, that they tend to focus almost obsessively on a small set of arguments for religious belief.
You are reading: Books about god’s existence
his favorite target is william paley, for example, who is the most famous proponent of the design argument. I myself don’t think the argument from design is a very strong argument. I don’t think that’s a very important argument, historically, for the existence of god. but I do think it’s a better argument than the New Atheists give it credit for. But nonetheless, it’s just not a very important argument for the existence of God, and certainly not nearly as challenging or powerful as the kinds of arguments that are advocated in the books we’re about to discuss. In particular, it is not as powerful or central as the arguments in Thomas Aquinas or Leibniz or ancient thinkers like Aristotle and Plotinus.
but the new atheists tend to focus on him obsessively and almost exclusively as if he were the only significant argument for the existence of god. Part of the reason for this is that at least some of the newer atheist writers, like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, approach it from the point of view of biology. And since Paley’s way of presenting the design argument is to emphasize the complexity of biological organisms, he seems to be in the ballpark of a writer like Dawkins or Coyne. so they tend to focus on that because it’s more in line with what they know and feel like they have something to say. but this does not mean that it is objectively as important an argument as they tend to claim. that’s part of what makes the new atheism superficial. it focuses on arguments that, historically speaking anyway, are far from the central arguments for god’s existence.
With contemporary philosophy of religion and analytic theology, there is often a high level of conceptual rigor and sophistication. but it seems to be the kind of literature these writers don’t get involved with at all.
You’re right, they don’t interact with that stuff at all. They seem to be committed a priori to the belief that no religious believer could have anything interesting to say about the existence of God or the nature of God. when you try to engage them in a serious discussion and ask them to look at what these analytical theologians have to say, or what a prominent thinker of the past like saint thomas aquinas or his contemporaries has said, their typical response is to say no no we need to waste our time engaging with such writers because we already know that their conclusions are wrong and that the arguments for those conclusions can be nothing more than rationalizations of bias.
“Any philosopher knows that when dealing with critics or opponents, you always want to meet them at their strongest point. but new atheist writers tend not to do that.”
The irony, of course, is that by taking that kind of attitude, they are actually manifesting a kind of prejudice, in the sense of prejudging something, and a kind of intolerance, in the sense of closing their minds to the possibility that the other party has something of interest to say. it is the same kind of prejudice and bigotry that they accuse religious people of. it’s quite ironic. and the cognitive dissonance there and the inconsistency is so obvious and overt that it’s quite surprising that they don’t see it. but a lot of these guys don’t see it. it’s even truer of the myriad followers they’ve gained.
In philosophy in general, decisive ‘bring down’ arguments against any assertion are rare. you can question the reasoning of an argument and say that a conclusion does not follow, but the idea of definitively settling once and for all such a question as whether objective morality exists seems almost unthinkable. But there seems to be a real bias against the idea that we can even discuss the possibility of God being on the table.
yeah, there’s kind of a double standard here. it’s a double standard that you find not only among new atheist writers but even, unfortunately, among some academic philosophers. In virtually every other area of philosophy, even the most notoriously bizarre arguments and ideas are taken seriously, such as: how do I know that the table in front of me is real and not just a dream? True, there are hardly any philosophers who would take seriously as a living option the idea that the world of our experience is a complete dream or hallucination. but certainly every philosopher would say that whether or not we think for a moment that the conclusion is plausible, we should take the arguments for that conclusion seriously and examine them, see what might be wrong with them, and also consider how a radical skeptic can defend itself against our criticism.
philosophical ideas are generally treated as if they were always on the table. they are always worthy of our consideration and discussion and perhaps there is some aspect or hidden wisdom behind the argument that we have not yet noticed. therefore, it is always important to keep them in the philosophical discussion. And yet arguments for the existence of God are often not given the same consideration. people do not pay them the same compliment of treating them as if they were worthy of continued consideration. The idea is that as long as some thinker of the past, like David Hume or Immanuel Kant, has raised some objection to them, then the arguments simply fail and they are not worth considering as anything more than museum pieces.
before we move on to your book choices, what do we mean by “god” here? Are we talking about the tenets of what might be called “classical theism” or are we talking about the god of a particular religious tradition?
brian davies, author of a couple of the books we’re going to discuss, makes a very useful distinction. he is not the only person to have drawn it, but he is perhaps the most prominent in contemporary philosophy of religion. this is a distinction between “classical theism” on the one hand and “theistic personalism” on the other. theistic personalism is also sometimes known by the name “neotheism”, to contrast it with classical theism. this is a very important distinction to keep in mind when evaluating the arguments for the existence of god.
the distinction is basically this: the theistic personalist or the neotheist basically starts by thinking of god as a kind of person, like us but without our limitations. classical theism takes a very different approach. I do not mean that classical theism does not think of God as something personal. That’s not the point. The point, rather, is that the theistic personalist starts with the idea that god is a person in the sense of being a member of a general type or category, namely the category of “person,” along with us. /p>
god is a person just like we are, or just like an alien might be, except that god doesn’t have the limitations on his power, knowledge, or goodness, etc., that we do. That is the starting point of neotheism or theistic personalism, as Davies understands it. Writers in this tradition would be philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne. I would also put William Paley in this category. This is their starting point or way of thinking about God and everything they say about the nature or existence of God reflects that starting point. and the end result is that they usually end up with a rather anthropomorphic conception of god.
Classical theism, as you might guess from the label, is the tradition represented by ancient thinkers like Aristotle and Plotinus, by medieval thinkers like Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, and by modern thinkers like Leibniz. classical theism has a very different starting point. You may end up attributing to God personal attributes such as intellect, love, free will, etc., but your starting point is very different. For classical theism, whatever we want to say about God, the central idea is that God is the ultimate explanation for why something exists. and why something exists here and now, how the world is maintained at a given time, and not just an explanation of what caused the big bang or whatever.
there are all sorts of other things we can say about god, but the starting point is the idea that god is where the ball stops metaphysically. when classical theists make an argument for the existence of god, or explain the nature of god and try to give an explanation of what god is, they always start with this idea that god is the ultimate source of reality, of why is there something in it. existence at all instead of nothing.
“for classical theism, regardless of what we want to say about god, the central idea is that god is the ultimate explanation of why something exists. ”
For a classical writer like Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas or Maimonides, this is how we have to start. whatever else we say about god and the nature of him has to be guided by that fundamental consideration: what does god have to be like to be the ultimate explanation of why something exists? the end result is that they end up with a much less anthropomorphic conception of god. even when they attribute things like intellect and will to god, these terms are understood to have a very different meaning than when applied to human beings.
Three of his five books refer explicitly to the work of the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Can you give me an idea of who he was and his status as a philosopher?
thomas aquinas is generally considered the greatest philosopher of the middle ages (he lived in the 13th century) and is also considered the greatest advocate of natural theology. “Natural theology” is a term that I prefer to the more common label for the subject we are talking about, namely, the philosophy of religion. natural theology is traditionally distinguished from “revealed theology.” the idea is that ‘theology’ means knowledge about the existence and nature of god, and a revealed theology would be the knowledge of the existence and nature of god that we acquire through some kind of divine revelation, through a prophet who god has sent, or through a holy book he has inspired.
by contrast, natural theology is the idea of knowledge about the existence and nature of god that we arrive at simply by applying our natural powers of reason. we reason philosophically, say, from the existence and nature of the world to the existence and nature of a divine cause of the world. most importantly, the claims made are based on philosophical arguments rather than appeal to divine revelation.
“natural theology is the idea of knowledge about the existence and nature of god that we arrive at simply by applying our natural powers of reason…crucially, the claims that are made are based on philosophical arguments rather than appeal to divine revelation. ”
Thomas Aquinas is a Christian theologian as well as a philosopher. Certainly, much of what he has to say about God is based on what he considers to be divinely revealed sources, such as the scriptures and the teachings of the church. but, in any case, much of what he has to say is based on purely philosophical considerations. so i would say that saint thomas aquinas is generally considered to be the greatest of the thinkers who approach the question of the existence and nature of god through natural theology.
One of the reasons Thomas Aquinas is so important has to do, of course, with the power of his own ideas. by anyone’s count, he had a very powerful intellect. But another reason Thomas Aquinas is so important has to do with the way he borrows from the past. that is why he can be thought of as a representative thinker of the classical theistic tradition. when you read what thomas aquinas has to say on the subject of natural theology, he is deeply influenced by ancient thinkers like aristotle, most famously, but also by the neoplatonic tradition that is represented by writers like plotinus. And then there were medieval Jewish and Islamic thinkers like Maimonides and Avicenna, who read and processed the ancients and provided a filter through which Thomas Aquinas himself came to read them.
so when thomas aquinas writes about god, he has this very rich tradition to draw inspiration from. he is giving you a synthesis of what he considers to be the best ideas of all these previous writers. So when you study Aquinas and learn what he said on this subject, you are at least indirectly coming to understand some of what these early writers said. thus, Aquinas is not a sui generis thinker.
We should probably start with the man himself. his first book is summa theologiae, questions about god edited by brian davies and brian leftow. why did you choose this?
The volume is essentially the first quarter or so of the first part of Summa Theologiae, where Aquinas addressed the issue of the existence and nature of God. This is the part of the book where Thomas Aquinas addresses the issue from the point of view of natural theology, as opposed to revealed theology. Later in the summa, of course, he brings up considerations of revealed theology, when he discusses certain aspects of the nature of God, such as the doctrine of the Trinity. but, in the material collected in this particular volume, he approaches the subject entirely from the perspective of philosophy. therefore, even someone who does not share St. Thomas Aquinas’s commitment to Christianity would find much value in this book, and non-Christian theists would find nothing with which they would necessarily disagree.
are you making a cumulative case of first arguing for the existence of god and then talking about the nature of god?
It is in this material that he presents his famous “five ways” to argue for the existence of god. that comes very early in the discussion and is part of how he gets the ball rolling in the god discussion. I must say a little about the five ways because they are so commonly misunderstood. First of all, the five ways are not original to Aquinas and he certainly would not claim that they are original to him. they are essentially five lines of argument that were up in the air, so to speak, at the time he wrote. They were fairly well-known lines of argument, standard moves, you might say, when making a case for God’s existence. that’s the first thing to notice: they are not original and they are not presented as original by aquinas.
The other thing to note, which is an extremely important point that is often overlooked, is that Thomas Aquinas did not intend these to be stand-alone pieces of reasoning that would convince even the most hard-core skeptic on a First reading. all five ways are typically read these days out of context. they are often the only thing a modern reader reads of Aquinas. a modern reader could find them in an anthology, and they are only about two pages long. Therefore, they are taken out of context and read as if Thomas Aquinas intended them to be a single source for learning about the existence and nature of God. naturally, a modern reader reads them and thinks of all sorts of objections someone might make against them. The modern reader will then conclude that Thomas Aquinas is overrated, that he did not think of these obvious objections, and that he must have been really naive if he thought anyone would find these arguments convincing.
“The five ways are not original to Thomas Aquinas and he certainly would not claim that they are original to him. it’s essentially five lines of argument that were up in the air, so to speak, at the time he wrote ”
but that’s pretty unfair because they weren’t meant to do that job. they were meant to do a very different job. in the context of the first part of the summa theologiae, they are merely intended to briefly summarize, one might say in almost wikipedia-entry style, these five lines of argument that would have been familiar to readers of their day. As I tell my students, when you read the five ways, think of it as the kind of thing you might read about in an encyclopedia article when what you’re looking for is just an overview of the basic idea. you are not looking for a defense that will convince the most inveterate skeptic. the most inveterate skeptic about evolution or quantum mechanics is not going to find an answer to all his objections by reading an encyclopedia article on one of those topics. that’s not what he’s supposed to do an encyclopedia article.
and so an atheist is not going to find the answers to all the objections he may raise in this little two-page selection from the summa. that was not what aquinas was trying to do. he was trying to summarize lines of argument that he develops in much more detail elsewhere and that other writers have developed elsewhere because, again, they are not the private property of saint thomas aquinas. they were common lines of argument that readers of his day would be familiar with.
If these arguments are not original to him, does Thomas Aquinas himself offer them innovations? Does he develop them in a way that no one else has before?
there are aspects of some of the arguments he gives for the existence of god that reflect his distinctive philosophical point of view. one of those is an argument we’ll talk about later when we discuss another of my book choices. But in all five forms, especially, what is most striking about the arguments is what Aquinas has in common with earlier thinkers in the tradition, rather than how he differs from them.
can you give a representative argument of the five forms?
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The first of the five ways is also known as the “motion argument.” it begins with Aristotle’s analysis of how change works. Thomas Aquinas points out in the argument that we see in the world around us that changes of various kinds occur. it could be what Thomas Aquinas would call local motion, where an object moves from one point in space to another. it could be a qualitative change like when an object changes color, like a banana going from green to yellow. or it could be a quantitative change like when a puddle changes size. What Aristotle famously argues is that what any such change implies is the actualization of a potential. it implies something that goes from potentially being a certain way to actually being that way. in the case of the banana, it goes from being potentially yellow to actually being yellow. This is how change is possible, contrary to pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides and Zeno, who denied that change is possible. So how does change actually happen? the way the first way proceeds is to say that the only way any potential becomes real is if there is something already real that makes it happen: something real that actualizes the potential. the coffee in the cup next to me starts out hot, is potentially cold, and that potential is actualized; it actually gets colder when the cold air in the room around it chills the liquid in the cup.
As that example illustrates, we have a kind of regression of causes or changers. one thing is being updated by another that is updated by another and so on. What Thomas Aquinas is concerned with in this argument, like Aristotle, is a series of changers or drivers that do not extend back into the past but rather, one might say, “down” here and now. Ultimately, Thomas Aquinas thinks that for any change to happen here and now, there must be something here and now that makes it possible. if what is causing it to happen is something itself changing, then there must be some other factor here and now that is causing it. the only way this can be stopped is if there is something here and now that can change everything else, that can actualize all those potentials, without actualizing itself. this is something that can move without being moved and change other things without being changed. And this is what Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas call the “unmoved mover” of the world, or as I prefer to put it: the “unactualized actualizer” of the world. this is a cause that updates other things without updating itself because it is already purely or completely current. that is the philosophical core of saint thomas aquinas’ conception of god. everything else he says about god and the nature of god, when he does natural theology, is essentially based on an analysis of what something has to be like to be an unactualized actualizer. extract all the various divine attributes from that basic concept.
can you suggest how, from a discussion of the idea of an unupdated actualizer, you can go in the direction of the other classical divine attributes?
The basic way it works is this. Once Thomas Aquinas arrives at a first cause, a causeless cause, which is what he calls “pure actuality,” then we begin to wonder about particular aspects of God’s nature, such as the question of whether God can change. As I have already indicated, if change implies the actualization of potential and God is purely actual and has no potential, then naturally he is not capable of change. however, if he is not capable of change, and we think of time as essentially the measure of change, which is the way aristotle and aquinas think of it, then god cannot be in time either. anything in time is going to go from potential to actual and if god is purely actual then he must therefore be outside of time. it must be timeless or eternal.
In the analysis of Thomas Aquinas, and here again he draws on Aristotle, material things always exhibit potentiality in their nature. That is really the central idea of the matter of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. matter is essentially the potential to take form. so if god is entirely actual – if god is pure actuality without potentiality – then there must be nothing material in god either. matter always implies the potentiality to change. think only of ordinary experience. something material could be divided into its constituent parts and undergo changes in that way. something that is immutable, however, because it is pure actuality without potentiality, therefore it must be immaterial, as well as timeless and immutable.
“However, if he is not capable of change, and we think that time is essentially the measure of change, which is the way that Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas think of it, then God cannot be in time either.”
and then we come to other attributes like omnipotence. For Aquinas, what it is to be powerful is essentially to be able to actualize potential. it is the ability to change or alter other things, to produce effects. according to thomas aquinas analysis, anything that is changing will be traced back to immobile engine activity or “updater not updated”. therefore, there is no power being wielded in the world, and nothing happening in the world, that does not ultimately stem from what the unupdated actualizer is doing. in that case, all possible or actual power exercises are ultimately attributable to the immobile engine. he is the source of all power. and therefore is almighty.
then there is also the question of monotheism. what aquinas is going to argue is that the only way you can make sense of there being more than one member of some category of things is if there is some potential that one member of the category exhibits and the other member does not. but if we are dealing with something that is purely real and in no way potential, then there will be no way, even in theory, to distinguish one member of that class from another. there’s not going to be any potential that one of them has that the other doesn’t. for example, the way we distinguish between two human beings or two dogs or two chairs has to do in part with the fact that they are associated with different bits of matter. there is some matter that makes up my body and there is some matter that makes up someone else’s body. but, as I said before, matter is for Thomas Aquinas associated with potentiality.
Since an immobile prime mover has no potentiality and is purely real, and therefore immaterial, then you will not be able to distinguish one prime mover from another by associating them with different material bodies. it will turn out that any other way in which you try to distinguish one motionless mover from another will similarly bring up the idea of potentiality. power is excluded from the very nature of a stationary motor and so is the possibility of there being, even in principle, more than one stationary motor. then, we have the idea of divine unity or monotheism.
A crude form of this argument that is endlessly repeated in textbooks goes like this: (i) everything that exists has a cause; (ii) the universe exists; (iii) therefore the universe has a cause. this naturally invites the objection ‘well, what caused god?’ can you explain why this form of argument and this objection is so wrong?
This is a very common objection. one might even say that it is the central objection atheists tend to have to the very possibility of a first-cause argument for the existence of god. If everything has a cause, then what caused God? if you say that god doesn’t have a cause, then why can’t we just say that the universe doesn’t have a cause either? in which case, the first cause argument for god fails. that’s the objection. but it’s a very bad objection.
one of the interesting things about this is that you find that the people who raise this objection, and it’s not just popular atheist writers like new atheists, but also professional academic philosophers, never quote any real philosopher giving the plot. who oppose they can never quote a philosopher who actually gives the “everything has a cause, so the universe has a cause” argument. certainly you will not find it in Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. it is a kind of urban legend that is constantly attacked even though it is not an argument that any prominent philosopher has ever given.
Thomas Aquinas not only doesn’t make that argument, but he would actually reject the premise that everything has a cause. What Thomas Aquinas commits himself to is not the thesis that everything has a cause. instead, his arguments start from premises such as “anything that undergoes a change requires a cause” or, to be more precise: “anything that passes from the potential to the actual requires a cause”. or it could be formulated in a different way by saying “everything that is contingent requires a cause”, meaning that everything that exists but could theoretically have ceased to exist requires a cause. but that is as different from saying that everything requires a cause, as saying that ‘triangles have three sides’ is different from saying ‘all geometric figures have three sides’. is a very different claim.
“They are never able to quote a philosopher who actually makes the argument ‘everything has a cause, so the universe has a cause.’ you won’t find it in Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. it is a kind of urban legend that is constantly attacked even though it is not an argument that any prominent philosopher has ever given.”
For Thomas Aquinas, what makes something need a cause in the first place is precisely that it has a potential that needs to be actualized. then, there has to be something already real that makes that happen. but if there is something that has no potential to be actualized, then not only does it not need a cause, because there is nothing potential there to be actualized, but it couldn’t even theoretically have had a cause in the first place. Of course, someone might try to disagree with the reasoning that leads Thomas Aquinas to the conclusion that there is an immobile mover or purely real actualizer of the world. but raising the objection ‘if everything has a cause, then what caused god?’ it just misses the Aquinas point altogether. It is based on the assumption that Saint Thomas Aquinas is committed to the premise that everything has a cause, which he does not. And it completely ignores the very reason Thomas Aquinas characterizes God as causeless. he is not making an arbitrary exception to a general rule. rather, the point is that what makes something need a cause in the first place is that it has a potential that needs to be actualized. this precondition that something needs a cause does not apply to god.
let’s see your second option. This is Thomas Aquinas’ thought of Brian Davies. Of the voluminous studies on Aquinas, why have you chosen this one?
I was an atheist for about ten years and only became a theist in the early 2000s. The reason I went from atheism to theism was largely due to my study of Thomas Aquinas. I entered Aquinas’s study preparing for lectures I was giving in philosophy classes. I wanted my students to understand why anyone would have found arguments like Aquinas convincing in the first place, even though I myself at the time did not. so I went back to secondary literature in the course of preparing for my lectures. I came to see Brian Davies’s book on Thomas Aquinas as one of the best examples of this literature. It is one of the most lucid and complete but succinct summaries of the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
davies explains aquinas in a way that is not only clear but also written from the perspective of someone whose training was in analytic philosophy. Davies is really someone to read for any analytic philosopher who wants to understand Aquinas. I have found this book really useful from that point of view. It explains very lucidly what Thomas Aquinas has to say on topics like the ones we talked about earlier in the first part of the Summa Theologiae, but it also gives an overview of what Thomas Aquinas has to say on other topics. for example, on distinctively Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the Incarnation and what Saint Thomas Aquinas has to say on issues of philosophical anthropology, free will, ethics, and what contemporary philosophers would call the philosophy of mind. All in all, it provides the best overview of Aquinas’s thought that is available these days and, as I say, is especially useful for someone whose background is in analytic philosophy.
you mentioned that davies is looking at the philosophical analysis of doctrines like the trinity and the incarnation of saint thomas aquinas. obviously thomas aquinas builds on this foundation of classical theism, but presumably you can’t reason your way to the christian doctrine of the trinity from scratch. How does Thomas Aquinas integrate revelation within his natural theology framework?
the way thomas aquinas divides the territory is that he thinks there are some things we can know about god through purely natural reason. From the point of view of a modern reader, it might surprise how much Saint Thomas thinks we can know that way. we can know not only that there is a god – from the point of view of saint thomas aquinas this can be strictly demonstrated through philosophical arguments – but that we can deduce a large number of divine attributes: that god is all-powerful, all-knowing, outside the time and space , and so on.
There are other things about the nature of God, however, that in Aquinas’ view cannot be known through philosophical reasoning alone. they could not be known simply by the application of our natural powers. if we are to know them, then we must rely on special divine revelation. God has to reveal them to us through some prophet or sacred text or the church, for example. the doctrine of the trinity and the doctrine of the incarnation would be two examples of this. now, does that mean that saint thomas aquinas thinks that these are not ideas amenable to rational investigation? no.
It’s true, he thinks we can only know about them through divine revelation, but there are two things that need to be emphasized here. first of all, thomas aquinas would not for a moment deny that when we ask “how do we know that these doctrines really have been divinely revealed?”, we have to be able to give a rational answer to that. he does not think that the fact that divine revelation has occurred is in itself something that we have merely to appeal to faith to know. he thinks that it is necessary to be able to give rational arguments for the conclusion that an act of divine revelation has really occurred. therefore, even what he has to say about distinctively Christian doctrines does not float in the air without any rational foundation. He thinks that we can know these things only if God reveals them, but he also thinks that we should be able to give some rational argument for the conclusion that these doctrines really have been divinely revealed. and he thinks such arguments exist.
“Thomas Aquinas does not believe that the fact that a divine revelation has occurred is in itself something that we have to simply appeal to faith to know. he thinks that he needs to be able to give rational arguments for the conclusion that an act of divine revelation has really occurred.”
and once we have these doctrines through divine revelation, we can proceed to investigate them rationally. we can give a philosophical analysis of the doctrine of the trinity and ask about the content of the doctrine. what exactly is he saying? Does the doctrine contain any self-contradiction that makes it objectionable from the point of view of reason? Thomas Aquinas thinks that we can prove that there is, in fact, no contradiction. even if he too thinks that human reason can never fully penetrate it, human reason can show that any attempt to show that the doctrine is somehow inconsistent or self-contradictory is unsuccessful. Although reason cannot discover doctrines such as the Trinity on its own, it can know that they are divinely revealed and can rationally investigate them once they have been revealed.
your next choice is the way of saint thomas aquinas to god: the test in de ente et essentia of given kerr. tell me about this book.
The argument for the existence of God that Given Kerr discusses and defends in this book is a very interesting argument in a couple of respects. First of all, this is an argument that does not appear in an obvious way in the list of the five ways of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae. Its status relative to the rest of what Thomas Aquinas has to say on the subject of natural theology is a matter of debate among Thomists, that is, among the followers of Thomas Aquinas. Some would argue, and I have argued this in my book on Saint Thomas Aquinas, that the Ente et Essentia argument is implicit in at least one of the five forms of Thomas Aquinas. other interpreters would argue that it is completely different from any argument he gives in all five forms. But many twentieth-century Thomists took the view that the del dente argument is actually the central Thomist argument for the existence of God; This more than any other argument reflects Aquinas’ understanding of how we reason from the world to God. It comes closer than any other argument to the core of God’s nature, for Saint Thomas Aquinas. that is the opinion that some have taken, in any case.
so what’s the argument? The argument is essentially this. In this little book “On Being and Essence,” which Aquinas wrote very early in his career, Aquinas made a distinction between the essence of a thing and its existence. the essence of a thing, one might say, is what a thing is. the existence of a thing is the fact that it is. Suppose you were explaining the nature of certain creatures to someone, say a child, who had never heard of them before. So, you explain what a lion is. you give a complete description of the “essence” of a lion, of what it is to be a lion. then you give a complete description of the essence or nature of a tyrannosaurus rex. and then finally you give a full description of the nature or essence of a unicorn. then you ask, of these three creatures I described to you, one of them still exists, one of them used to exist but became extinct, and the third was never real in the first place. Based on the description I gave you of the essences of each of these creatures, tell me which is which. and, as Saint Thomas Aquinas would point out, the child would be incapable of doing so. knowing the essence of a lion, a tyrannosaurus rex, and a unicorn couldn’t tell you which of those creatures, if any, exist. the existence of a lion is distinct, therefore, from the essence or nature of it. these are two different principles or aspects of one thing.
The argument begins with this distinction between the essence and the existence of a thing. This is a distinction that does a lot of work in Thomas Aquinas’s work elsewhere, but the way it plays a role in Thomas Aquinas’s argument for the existence of God is as follows. Thomas Aquinas thinks that anything in which there is a distinction between its essence and existence requires a cause for its existence. with a lion, for example, there is nothing in the essence or nature of a lion that implies its existence. his existence has to come from something outside her. must be added, one might say. it is not built-in. and that is true not only when the lion is born for the first time, but in every moment in which he exists. its existence must be added to it from without, precisely because it is different from its essence or nature. for a lion to exist here and now, even for an instant, there must be something that adds existence to the very essence of him here and now. there must be something that gives it existence here and now.
but if that thing which is imparting existence to it is in the same metaphysical boat, so to speak, if it is itself something whose essence and existence are distinct, so that it also needs existence to be added to its essence or nature —then that thing will also require some cause for its existence here and now. So, we have a regression. The only way we can break this backsliding, in Aquinas’ view, is if we arrive at a cause that imparts existence to other things without drawing it from something else. this is something that has its existence built in, you could say. this would be something whose very essence is simply existence. there is no difference in him between his essence and nature, on the one hand, and his existence on the other. rather, its entire essence or nature is simply existence. To use elegant jargon, it is what Saint Thomas Aquinas calls “being subsistent in itself”. this, says aquinas, as he does in the five paths, is what we call god. then he would proceed to argue that whatever is so, whatever is self-subsistent, would have to have the various divine attributes.
the need for a cause of something ‘here and now’ is mentioned, but we are also talking about something outside of time. how does thomas aquinas understand causality, where something out of time can cause a temporary effect?
This is one of several areas where explanation of Aquinas’s theological language becomes very important. Thomas Aquinas is committed to something commentators often call “the doctrine of analogy.” the idea here is that there are three basic ways we use language. we could use the language unambiguously, where we use two different terms in exactly the same sense. if I talk about a baseball player swinging a baseball bat and a cricketer swinging a cricket bat, we are using the word ‘bat’ in the same sense. There are differences between baseball bats and cricket bats, but they are essentially the same type of thing. a second way we can use language is equivocally. if i talk about a baseball bat and then i talk about a bat that flew into the attic and inspired bruce wayne to become batman, here i am using the word ‘bat’ wrongly. in one case I am using the word ‘bat’ to refer to a stick used in a certain sport, in the other case I am using the word ‘bat’ to refer to a certain flying animal.
But Thomas Aquinas maintains that there is a third way we can use language, which he called the “analog” use of language. the analogical use of language is a middle ground between the univocal use and the equivocal use. and it is not a metaphorical use. To be more precise, metaphor is a type of analogical use of language, but it is not the only one. there are analogical uses of language that are more literal than metaphorical but are not yet univocal or equivocal. an example of this would be the term “good”.
“When we say that God has power or we say that God has goodness, we are not saying that he has exactly what we have, but more of that. but neither are we saying that what he has has nothing to do with what we call power or goodness in us.”
Think about how we might describe a meal as good. you could say that the pizza I had for dinner was a good pizza. Or you can describe the book you are reading as a good book. or you could describe someone as a good man. Thomas Aquinas would say that when we use the term “good” in these three contexts, we are not using the term univocally. the goodness of food is very different from the goodness of a man. I guess a cannibal could use the terms in the same way, but unless we’re talking about a human being as a kind of food, then we’re not using the word in the same way. the moral goodness of a human being and the nutritional goodness of food or the literary goodness of a book are not exactly the same. but we are not using the word in a wrong way either. It would be wrong to say that the goodness of a human being or the goodness of a book have nothing to do with the goodness of food, just as being a baseball bat and being a bat flying through the attic have nothing to do with the goodness of food. relationship. we are using the word in an ‘analogical’ way, for Thomas Aquinas. we are saying that there is something in the goodness of a book that is analogous to the goodness of food. and there is something in the goodness of food that is analogous to the goodness of a human being. it’s not the same thing, but it’s not completely related either.
for Saint Thomas Aquinas, everything we say about God has to be understood in this analogical way. when we say that god has power or we say that god has goodness, we are not saying that he has exactly what we have but more of that. but neither are we saying that what he has has nothing to do with what we call power or goodness in us. what we are saying, rather, is that there is something in god that is analogous to what we call power or goodness in us, etc. So, to get back to this question of god being a cause, the way god causes things is not quite the same as the way one thing in the world of our experience can cause another thing.
The way things in the world cause each other, for example, is sometimes through physical contact, like when one billiard ball hits another. but that can’t be the way god causes things in the world or makes something exist here and now for example because god isn’t a physical object and therefore doesn’t have a physical surface that he can make contact with with someone else. physical surface. and also in all other ways, god is different from a physical cause. So when we describe God as a cause, this would be a classic case for Thomas Aquinas when we use a term analogically rather than unambiguously. we are saying that there is something in god that is analogous to what we call causality in our experience, although it is not exactly the same.
can you tell me why you chose this book specifically?
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kerr’s book is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s really the first book-length presentation and defense, that I know of, of this particular argument by Thomas Aquinas. Anyone who wants to study this particular argument of Thomas Aquinas in depth needs to read Kerr’s book. It is also a book that is written, as is Brian Davies’s book, from the point of view of someone who is well versed in contemporary analytic philosophy, and thus familiar with the moves that analytic philosophers would make. contemporary scholars, and the concerns or questions they might have. kerr is very important to anyone who wants to see how the ideas of Thomas Aquinas could be brought into the conversation with contemporary academic analytical philosophy.
his next book is the reality of god and the problem of evil by brian davies. So far, we have been talking about arguments for the existence of God. but it seems that the problem of evil in its various forms is the most prominent argument against the existence of god. how convincing do you think it is?
I don’t think the problem of evil is a very convincing argument when considered as an objection against the existence of god. brian davies would agree with that. That does not mean, however, that evil is not mysterious or that the question of why God would allow evil is not mysterious. Those are very deep and mysterious questions. However, if the claim is that the existence of evil is somehow incompatible with the existence of god, thus constituting a refutation of the existence of god, I don’t think that’s a very strong argument at all. and neither does davies.
What is so special about Davies’s approach in his book?
He approaches the problem of evil in a way informed by the understanding of the existence and nature of god that is represented by Thomas Aquinas. In this book, Davies looks at the problem of evil through a Thomistic lens. One of the things he wants to emphasize is how different the classical theistic tradition’s approach to the problem of evil is from the kind of approach you see in many contemporary philosophers of religion like Alvin Plantinga or John Hick or Richard Swinburne. this is where this distinction I made earlier, between classical theism on the one hand and theistic personalism on the other, plays an important role. the theistic personalist, as i mentioned earlier, is someone whose starting point in thinking about god is the thesis that god is like us, a member of the general class or category of ‘persons’, and he is different from us in that he does not it has the limitations that human persons have.
if you approach the question of the nature of god in that way, then it’s very easy to start thinking of god as some kind of moral agent, just as we are. this is to think of him as someone who has certain moral duties, someone who exhibits certain moral virtues, etc. And then the problem of evil begins to seem like it is a question of how God can be morally justified in allowing the evils that he allows. Questions arise such as: Is God violating any duty by not eliminating evil? Is God in any way less than virtuous by failing to eliminate evil? this is how the problem of evil begins to look if you think of god as one person alongside others.
“in analysis, there is no strict inconsistency between the existence of god and the existence of evil. ”
what davies emphasizes in this book is that from the classical theistic point of view, from the point of view of someone like thomas aquinas, this is simply the wrong way to approach the question. The conversation gets off on the wrong foot if we think of God as some kind of moral agent who, like human beings, has certain moral obligations and can be intelligently said to have or lack certain moral virtues, etc. As Davies emphasizes, for a classical theistic writer, God is not a moral agent. It does not mean that we cannot attribute attributes such as goodness and love to God. Davies wishes to emphasize that he does not deny this. It certainly does not mean that we should not attribute to God certain personal attributes such as intellect and will. Davies, like Aquinas, would emphasize that we must also attribute these things to God.
The point, however, is that it is a mistake to think that this implies that God is some kind of moral agent. One of the reasons it is wrong is that the kinds of things we usually attribute to moral agents are not intelligibly attributed to God. for example, we think that a moral agent is brave or cowardly. someone can intelligibly tell himself that he is brave or cowardly just because he faces certain dangers. courage is a matter of doing the right thing in the face of danger, so we attribute courage to someone precisely when he does it.
but god is never in danger. God is outside of time and space. God is immaterial, so he has no body. There is no such thing as God being injured or in danger of contracting disease or otherwise capable of being harmed in any way. So it doesn’t make any sense to attribute to God a virtue like courage or, for that matter, a vice like cowardice. Concepts like these simply have no application to God. If we approach the problem of evil as a problem of how to justify God as a moral agent in the face of evil, we are starting the conversation off on the wrong foot.
Leaving questions of moral agency aside, how does Davies understand the existence of moral values? does he see moral values as ultimately based on the being of god?
For Davies and other Thomists, goodness is based on the nature of things. the correct way to approach the question of goodness is to think of models as the way we would describe something as a good specimen of a kind of thing. we might say, for example, that a certain dog is a good specimen of its species because it exhibits all the characteristics of a dog, all the characteristics that are typical of healthy, fully functioning dogs. it has four legs, a tail, barks, runs around, etc. we would say it is a good specimen of a dog in the sense that a dog that is missing a leg because it was hit by a car, or is sickly and lying lethargically, is not a good specimen of a dog, at least not if we are trying to tell someone who doesn’t know what a dog is what is characteristic of its species.
goodness and badness have to do with how good or bad something measures up to the paradigmatic case of the guy. in the case of a tree, say, a tree with healthy roots and healthy bark is a good specimen tree, while one with weak roots and stripped bark is a bad specimen tree, because it does not live up to the pattern or paradigm of what makes something a fully functional healthy tree. This analysis of good and evil dates back to ancient thinkers like Aristotle, and medieval thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas incorporated it into their own thinking.
For that reason, for Thomas Aquinas, there is much we can know about morality even apart from religion. There is so much we can know about what constitutes a good human life, where we can bracket the question of God’s existence. if what is good for a human being has to do with the nature of a human being, with what leads to fulfilling our nature, the ends and purposes we have to accomplish in order to prosper as the kind of thing a human being is — And human nature being what it is, whether or not it was created by God, it follows that there is much about morality that we can know apart from the existence of God. I do not mean to say that, according to Thomas Aquinas, all aspects of morality can be treated apart from the question of the existence of God. that would not be correct. But at least a large part of morality can be determined by bracketing questions about the existence and nature of God. thus, moral goodness is not directly metaphysically based on the nature of god.
but indirectly it is, because saint thomas aquinas thinks that when god creates the world, when he creates human beings, for example, what he is doing is making things according to divine archetypes, ideas or patterns that exist in the divine intellect. Thomas Aquinas is here based on Augustine and earlier predecessors in the medieval tradition. Thomas Aquinas would take what Plato believes exists in the realm of forms (the shape or pattern of being a human being, a triangle, a dog, etc.) and place them, just as Augustine did, in the divine intellect. . he thinks that when god creates, he is creating something in the world of concrete physical things that exemplifies the archetype or pattern that pre-exists in the divine mind. thus, the natures of things ultimately derive from some idea in the divine intellect.
you can say that, in that sense, the nature of a thing, and therefore what is good or bad for it, is derived from god. but its direct foundation remains in the thing itself. what is good and bad for human beings is based directly on their own nature, rather than on the divine will, for example. that is the important point to emphasize. the reason it is wrong for us to murder or steal is not because god has arbitrarily decided to decree that we should not steal. it is rather because given the nature we have, we cannot prosper if we kill and steal from each other. that would be true for aquinas even if it turns out that god doesn’t exist. It would still be wrong for us to murder and steal because it is contrary to what is required for us to flourish as the kind of things that we are.
you said that even if god didn’t exist, it would be wrong for us to do certain things because they go against our fixed nature. but where would this fixed nature come from, if there were not a divine blueprint that established the existence of these essences?
thomas aquinas certainly thinks that the existence of anything, even for an instant, depends on god keeping it in existence. So ultimately we wouldn’t have the nature we do if God didn’t keep us in existence. but that is true for all features in the world. Nothing would exist or operate as it does if God didn’t keep it going. For Aquinas, there is nothing special in that sense about our essence or teleology that requires God to keep them in existence. again, it is true for all aspects of the world.
if we say that god is neither a person nor a moral agent, what distinguishes this view from a deistic understanding of god? this is the view that god exists, establishes the world, but does not care to interact with or be moved by our suffering.
One thing to emphasize is that while Davies doesn’t think it’s correct to think of God as some kind of moral agent, he certainly thinks we can and should attribute attributes such as goodness and love to God. his point is simply that the way god can be said to be “all good” or “all loving” is at best misleadingly thought of in the model of someone living up to the moral obligations of him . It’s not about exhibiting moral virtues like courage or compassion because, as I say, God cannot be intelligibly said to have the kind of characteristics that virtues like courage demand. How then should we think of God’s goodness?
for davies, as for aquinas, the goodness of a thing has to do with how well or poorly it actualizes the potentials that are inherent in its nature. we say, for example, that a good tree is a good tree because it more fully actualizes the potentials that are inherent in something by virtue of its being a tree. a tree has the potential to sink roots into the soil and absorb nutrients and water through them. in so far as it does, it is a better tree than it otherwise would be. when we come to god, we are talking about something that is completely real. there is no unrealized potential in god at all. And so, if goodness has to do with the actualization and evil with the lack of actualization of a potential, then God, who is always completely actual, would have to be completely good. that would follow from this analysis of what it is to be good. That’s why we have to think of God as perfectly good, even if we don’t think of God as a moral agent.
by denying that god is a moral agent, davies certainly does not mean that god has no interest in how things go for human beings or his creation in general. It certainly does not mean that God is not providential. he would affirm all those things about god. God never does anything without some purpose, or without some good in view. By saying that God is not a moral agent, he is simply trying to avoid anthropomorphizing God and making God seem all too human. one could even say that he is concerned not to trivialize the nature of god’s goodness. the way davies likes to put it is that it’s a mistake to think of the claim that god is all-good as the claim that god is particularly well-behaved, as if god is some kind of boy scout who has won all the merit badges. God’s goodness, to Davies, is greater than that. is higher than that, not less than that.
Another aspect of the question where Davies borrows from Thomas Aquinas and other medieval writers like Augustine is the idea that God allows certain evils to exist because, and only because, he is extracting a greater good from them. . There is always a greater end in sight that God has in mind, even if we don’t. Even if we can’t see the whole picture, God can. The idea is that the way divine providence works ensures that whatever evil God permits will always play a role in bringing about the greater good. there is no arbitrariness or irrationality in it.
his latest book is atheism and theism.
this book is now in its second edition and first appeared in the mid-1990s. smart is one of the most important thinkers in 20th century analytic philosophy. he wrote mainly on metaphysics and the philosophy of science, in addition to writing on ethics. John Haldane is an Analytical Thomist. I think he even came up with the label “analytic Thomism”. he is trained in both the analytic and thomistic traditions and has been very concerned to bring these two traditions into conversation. And that is certainly reflected in this exchange between Haldane and Smart in this book.
“haldane tries to address the concerns an analytic philosopher is likely to have with the kinds of arguments a medieval thinker like Saint Thomas Aquinas would make.”
smart takes the atheist side of the debate and haldane takes the theistic side of the debate. Haldane’s approach is very much in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, which is reflected in the kind of arguments he gives in the book. But he too, as with some of these other writers like Gavin Kerr and Brian Davies, brings Thomism into the conversation with contemporary analytic philosophy. he tries to address the concerns an analytic philosopher is likely to have with the kinds of arguments a medieval thinker like saint thomas aquinas would make. Thus, the book is unique among contemporary books on the subject of the philosophy of religion precisely because Haldane argues from this more classical tradition: the tradition represented by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. And so the arguments he presents are very different from the kind you might see in a contemporary philosopher of religion like Alvin Plantinga or Richard Swinburne or William Lane Craig. then, someone who reads this book is not going to have the same old, the same old. they will find a very different approach than what they might expect or were used to in other literature on the philosophy of contemporary religion.
not necessarily one of those defended by smart, but what do you think is the strongest argument against the existence of god?
I think the strongest argument against the existence of god would be an argument that we simply don’t need to appeal to any divine first cause to explain the existence and nature of the world. That is one of the two main arguments that Aquinas considers to be the main arguments for atheism in the Summa Theologiae, the other being the problem of evil. I think this is a stronger and more interesting challenge to theism than the problem of evil. it is the assertion that god is unnecessary, that he is a fifth wheel. It’s no surprise that I don’t think that argument really works for a minute. At the end of the day, I don’t think that’s a strong argument. but I would say that if someone is committed to atheism and wants to make atheism plausible, then that will be the way to go rather than an argument from evil.
and that would be an evidentiary argument from evil, instead of what is called a logical argument from evil?
A logical argument from evil would be an attempt to show that the existence of evil is strictly logically incompatible with the existence of god. Now I don’t think that kind of argument works, and even contemporary atheist philosophers generally agree that that kind of argument doesn’t work. in the analysis, there is no strict inconsistency between the existence of god and the existence of evil. There is not at least in theory, at least in principle, any example of evil for which God does not have some reason to allow it. therefore, you will not get a logical argument from the evil of the land.
Instead, you would have to opt for an evidentiary argument. This is the kind of argument offered by atheist philosophers like William Rowe. you’d have to show that although, in theory, for any example of evil we find, there might be some reason why an almighty good god could allow it, however, when we weigh the odds, there are some evils where it’s unlikely or unlikely that may a good and almighty god allow it. The existence of such evil gives us good reason to doubt the existence of God or to deny the existence of God, although it does not count as a strict proof. that’s the kind of argument an atheist would have to develop for the problem of evil to get off the ground as an objection to theism.
The problem with that, however, is that if you have an independent proof that god exists, if you have something like a successful version of Aquinas’s five ways, then you already know independently that there is a first cause. of the world that is infinite in power, all good, etc. So you know independently that for any evil to occur, there must be some god-permitted reason, even if we don’t know what that reason is. even rowe would concede that if you have an independent argument for the existence of god, then an evidentiary argument from evil will have no force. An evidentiary argument for evil will have force only if it starts from a position where both sides agree that there are no good positive arguments for the existence of god.
so, for those kinds of reasons, I don’t think an argument from evil is very powerful. If you’re going to defend atheism, you had better go down the road of showing that God is simply unnecessary, that we can explain everything without appealing to a divine cause. I don’t think that approach will work either. one of the problems is this. if you’re going to argue that god’s existence is simply unnecessary, you’re ultimately going to have to deny the principle of sufficient reason, where the principle of sufficient reason is the thesis that for everything that exists and everything that happens, there must be a sufficient reason to explain why it exists or occurred. there are different ways to formulate the principle, but that is one way to do it. In my opinion, I think that if you follow the implications of the principle of sufficient reason, you are going to be led to a first cause of things that exists by necessity; you are going to be led to a necessary being. and when you break down the implications of the idea of a necessary being, you will find that he has all the divine attributes. In other words, if he admits the principle of sufficient reason, he will inevitably be led to theism.
“an evidentiary argument for evil will have force only if it starts from a position where both sides agree that there are no good positive arguments for the existence of god.”
then if you are going to avoid theism, you will ultimately have to deny that the world is intelligible and that we can ultimately make sense of it. you’re going to have to deny the principle of sufficient reason. but the moment you do that, you finally end up unraveling the very project of giving rational explanations, whether in philosophy or science. science and philosophy collapse together with natural theology. there’s really no way the atheist would have his cake and eat it too. or we have a world that really is intelligible, that we can make sense of, in which case we are going to have to compromise with the principle of sufficient reason and be driven inevitably to theism. Or, if we are to avoid theism, we are going to have to deny the principle of sufficient reason. but there is going to be no way to do it consistently without ultimately denying the possibility of a philosophical or scientific explanation in general. so I think this other approach to trying to justify atheism is not going to work
why do you say this inevitably leads to theism instead of, say, deism? could it not be that the universe is set up and then left completely alone?
the arguments for the existence of god that I think are the most powerful take you to the existence of a god who not only got the ball rolling thirteen billion years ago with the big bang, but who preserves the world in existence from moment to moment moment. This is actually the standard view in classical theism, whether we’re talking about Aristotle, Plotinus, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, or Anselm. The idea is that the fundamental way in which God is the cause of the world is not by virtue of having performed a single act in the past, but has to do with keeping the world in motion from moment to moment. if you can come to that, you have already ruled out deism. A deist conception of god is the idea of a cause that just got the ball rolling but has disappeared and for all practical purposes may no longer exist. that is why deism, historically, was a kind of springboard from theism to atheism. if god doesn’t need to be there to keep the world going, then maybe he was never there in the first place. but the kind of arguments we see in Aquinas are arguments precisely for a god who is active at every moment the world exists.
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