3. Coherence of Theism:
i) Trinity
It is commonplace for unbelievers to attack the Trinity as incoherent. And even many believers treat the Trinity as a grand a paradox. And perhaps that is so. But remember that the Bible never presents the Trinity as a paradox. Paradox does not figure in the revealed datum or orthodox definition of the Trinity. Although the Trinity is an object of faith, believing it to be a paradox is not an object of faith and dogma.
Rather, that is a subjective impression on the part of some readers. And their impression is formed on the basis of preconceptions that they bring to the teaching of Scripture. They come to the Biblical witness with a preconception of the one-over-many relation. And the paradox is generated by a particular preconception. It is often rather simplistic, and takes the form of one or another of two opposing level-confusions.
On the one hand, it may operate with an overly abstract model of the one-over-many by reducing numbered objects (1x; 3y) or numerical relations (1x=3y) to sheer numbers (1=3). But the Trinitarian "equation" doesn’t operate at that level of generality. "One God in three persons" is not reducible to "the number one equals the number three." Rather, the relation is more like saying that A and B are the same with respect to C.
On the other hand, it may operate with an overly-concrete model of the one-over-many relation by reducing numbered objects to concrete particulars. We use numbers to count discrete units. One unit of x doesn’t equal three units of x. And this is true enough when dealing with spatially discrete objects, like a loaf of bread. But the members of the Trinity have no physical boundaries. They cannot be divided and subdivided into parts less than the whole.
In addition, it is a mistake to press adjectives like "same" and "different" into relations of strict identity and absolute alterity. We use these words more loosely. Am I the same man I was ten years ago? In some respects, yes; in others—no. But it is possible for two objects to sustain a point-by-point correspondence without reducing one to the other. For example, a symmetry sustains an internal one-over-many relation. Of particular interest are enatiomorphic symmetries, such as we find in tessellation, strict counterpoint and crystallography. This type of symmetry sets up a relation that is both equipollent and irreducible. Although A sustains a closed, one-one correspondence to B, A is not reducible to B. One-to-one is not the same thing as one-of-one.
ii) Divine Attributes
Unbelievers not only allege that the Trinity is incoherent, but that the divine attributes are incoherent, either in isolation or conjunction. They’ll parade paradoxes of omnipotence. They’ll say that omniscience is incompatible with an aspatiotemporal mode of existence. Or they’ll say that benevolence and omnipotence are incompatible with evil.
(a) Omniscience
Before we delve into divine omniscience, it is useful to begin with a definition. The Christian is not interested in defending some abstract attribute or definition, but only in defending the revealed perfections of God in Scripture. As a working definition, I would submit that for God to know everything is for God to know everything that is true, and to believe no falsehoods. The ontological identity of God and truth is a fixture of Johannine theology.
For example, it is sometimes said that God cannot be omniscient because he cannot know what it feels like to taste an ice cream cone or break out in a cold sweat. But bare sensation has no truth-value. To be hot or cold or feel fearful is without truth-value. It is either true or false to predicate fear of something, to say that something is fearful or induces fear in the subject, but fear itself is neither true nor false, and so is not a proper object of knowledge.
Another objection to divine omniscience is that God cannot know what a free agent will do. If we define freedom in libertarian terms, then I would concede the point. But, from a Reformed standpoint, this objection does not pose an impediment to God's knowledge seeing as a Calvinist would deny that sort of freedom to finite agents.
Still another objection is that if God exists outside of time and space, then there are things a spatiotemporal agent can know to which God is not privy. How can God know the color red? How can God know what time it is?
Now these objections rest on some unexamined assumptions. Take a red apple. When I perceive a red apple, do I perceive the red property as it inheres in the apple, or do I perceive the red property-instance in my mind? The apple is a material object, but is my mental impression a material object? The apple occupies space, but my mental image does not. So the way in which I sense a red apple is indirect and immaterial. Although there is a physical and external object, as well as a physical process by which that stimulus is presented to the mind, the universal is not necessarily, or of itself, a physical object, but rather, a symbol or simulation or optical illusion. The process is roughly as follows: sensible>sensation>perception>conception.
Now, if even in the case of sensory processing, the immediate object of knowledge is a concept of the object, then I don't see why, in the case of God, a sensible object cannot be an object of knowledge. There are differences, to be sure. God knows the object without recourse to any sensory input. Indeed, the object only exists in time and space because God instantiated the object according to his prior concept.
Now, not everyone would agree with this epistemology. But, if so, the issue is not distinctive to religious epistemology, but turns on your general theory of knowledge. And it is incumbent on a critic of omniscience to make a separate case for his epistemic assumptions before he is in any position to launch an attack on omniscience from that front.
With regard to time, it is felt that a timeless God doesn't know what time it is. He may know the sequence, but cannot know how far we are into the sequence of unfolding events. However, this way of framing the question conceals a certain bias. For by casting the question in terms of now and then, past, present and future, we already assume the A-theory of time. So before we can adequately discuss God's relation to time, we need to settle on a theory of time. Once again, this debate goes all the way back to Classical Greek philosophy and the Pre-Socratics (e.g., Aristotle, Plato, Zeno, Parmenides, Heraclitus).
Is time like an ever-rolling stream? That's the popular, common-sense view. But what is commonsensical can turn nonsensical in a flash as soon as we ask a few simple questions. Remember Augustine's famous digression on the subject of time in the Confessions? If you don't ask, I know; if you ask, I don't know. What is the present? Is it only a common surface between an unreal past and unrealized future? A wall without depth or duration? That’s the A-theory.
Or is time more like a motion picture? We talk of timeframes, as if time were a series of snapshots on a strip of film. Is the timeline a sequence without succession? Is the passage of time an illusion, like flickering images on a silver screen? Is all of time already in the can? Is all the footage on the reel—from the opening shot to the closing shot? That’s the B-theory. (For an exposition of the B-theory, cf. D. Mellor, Real Time II [Routledge, 1998]; R. Le Poidevin, Travels in Four Dimensions [Oxford, 2003].)
We seem to be faced with a paradox. If tense is real, then that seems to render time illusory by reducing the momentary present to a vanishing borderline between what was and what will be—in which case nothing ever is, but only was or will be. But if time is real, then that seems to render tense illusory, for a future moment or past instant is just as real as the present—but within its own timeframe.
Unless you subscribe to naïve realism, every side must admit an element of illusion into its theory of perception. Just as we don't directly perceive space, we don't directly perceive time. Our sense of time's "passage" is partly inferred from space (i.e., locomotion). But whether the movement is actual or only apparent, like a motion picture or stroboscopic effect, is not a direct datum of experience. And even the awareness of our own "successive" mental states owes more to memory and anticipation than a direct deliverance or immediate presentation of time and tense—like the difference between direct perception or introspection and visual persistence. We enjoy immediate access to our own mental states, but not to the passage of time, for even on the A-theory, consciousness is bounded by the specious present. (Clifford Williams has argued that the phenomenology of time is the same on either the A- or B-theories. Cf. "A Bergsonian Approach to A- and B-Time," RIP Journal of Philosophy 73/285:379-393.)
Now, if we assume the B-theory of time, then knowing the sequence is all there is to know, for time and tense are a given totality. So, on such a view, asking if God knows the time is misplaced.
But which theory is true? It is arguable that the Biblical doctrine of creation throws some weight behind the B-theory. For Gen 1 tells us that the timeline began with God's creative fiat, in which case the Creator falls outside the timeline. And if that is so, then creation is a temporal effect of a timeless act. And in that event, the effect is fully enfolded and unfolded in this singular and indivisible fiat—like a short story or novel or reel of film. The writer or filmmaker exists outside the timeline of the writing or film footage, and the writing or film is finished from first to last.
Incidentally, this is the best way of construing the relation between divine immanence and transcendence. God is "present" or "active" within the world, not by acting in or on the world, but by enacting the world. He not only sets the ball in motion but brings everything into being.
More generally, the Bible has some things to say about the priority of the eternal to the temporal (Ps 90:2,4; 102:25-27; 1 Cor 2:7; 2 Tim 1:9; Tit 1:2; Jas 1:17; Jude 25). It may be objected that words like "before" imply an antemundane timeline. But this overlooks the fact that such words are literally spatial-markers, and only applied to the divisions of time by figurative extension. We're back on the river. The future lies ahead, the past lies behind, and I paddle my way through time, like a rowboat or riverboat on the current of the stream. But this is poetry and picture-language. The "passage" of time treats the viewer as a fixed point in relation to a moving field, but A-theory presentism denies this privileged status to the viewer.
It seems to me that although spatial indexicals are literal, temporal indexicals are figurative. This is not to say that we cannot paraphrase certain temporal relations in nonspatial terms, but when pressed to further define our terms, we fall back on the spatialization of time. We conceptualize temporal indexicals on analogy with spatial indexicals--which are literal (when applied to physical objects).
If so, then temporal relations are not, as humans conceive them to be, an immediate object of knowledge. All we know is the temporal experience--reconceptualized in the spatial metaphor. Hence, temporal relations are objects of direct belief, but not of direct knowledge.
So, at that level, there is nothing for God to know, because there is nothing for the human subject to know. Rather, God knows what we believe--about our temporal location.
Assuming that space and time are different--as, indeed, I believe them to be--temporal indexicals are, in principle, susceptible to a reductive explanation--to a literal object of knowledge, stripped of the spatialization.
And, at that level, God would know more about temporal indexicals than we do inasmuch as he would know what they actually stand for. But their primitive identity is inaccessible to us.
The fact that we apply a spatial grid to our common conception of time raises the question of what would be left of the sequence were we to strip away this picturesque metaphor. Is last month really more distant in time than last week? Or am I allowing myself to be bewitched by a spatial simile? The real sequence would be teleological rather than strictly linear or causal—more akin to a storybook sequence or film footage.
It is often said that our concept of eternity is privative and negative. But I would turn this around. If time and space are limits, then eternity implies an indivisible, unsurpassable plenity of being. To say that God preexisted the world literally means that there is never a time when God did not exist, for time was given in creation, and God subsists apart from the world.
The notion of a negation carries an unduly prejudicial connotation. Even a photographic negative, although lacking the depth, color, scale and orientation of the original, is descriptive of the original; while the developed footage, although a double negation, being at two removes from the original, is even more descriptive of the original.
In this general connection, I'd develop my distinction between a thought and a thought-process. A thought-process is a concrete property-instance of an abstract property. This follows from the fact that the same thought can be multiply-instantiated in more than one subject at more than one time. You and I can share the same thought. I can entertain the same thought at different times. So a thought is an abstract object or property.
A thought can either be exemplified or unexemplified. Unexemplified thoughts are divine thoughts, human thoughts are exemplified thoughts. (The latter could be extended to angels.) Thought is atemporal, whereas a thought-process is temporal.
Thought is ontologically and noetically prior to a thought process. My finite, human thoughts are property-instances of God's thoughts. Whatever I think I think because God instantiated that thought in my mind.
Indexicals are a subset of thoughts in general. They are beliefs about my relative position in time and space.
I believe that it is now 3:38 PM because God instantiated that thought in my mind. Hence, I cannot know and/or believe any indexical information that God doesn't already know inasmuch as God is the source of my indexical beliefs or propositional attitudes in the first place.
(b) Omnipotence
In fielding the paradoxes of omnipotence it is, again, important to keep in mind that what we’re concerned with defending is not some test-tube definition, cooked up in a philosophy lab, but the revealed attributes of God.
The textbook case is the stone paradox, viz., "Can God make a rock so big that he can’t lift it?" But it is hard to know how seriously to take this question. For it conjures up the anthropomorphic image of a sweaty, muscle-bound Atlas having to huff and puff and heave a boulder uphill. Since this is not the Biblical view of God, the question is as silly as it is irrelevant—on par with asking if God can turn green with envy. To the extent that the question can even be retranslated into a coherent proposition, the answer is that God doesn’t make things happen by acting on a medium, but by enacting a medium. And it is not God, but the finite medium, which is subject to spatiotemporal limits.
A further problem with the question is that it conceals a contradiction. The basic form of the question is: Can God do something God can’t to? If God is omnipotent, then is he able to do something he is unable to do? Stripped down to the bare essentials, the question does not amount to a coherent proposition. And as such, it poses a pseudo-task. All we have here is a verbal trick: If God can do anything, then he can even do something he can’t do; but, if not, then he can’t to everything. This is just a game with words, pushing words around—like moving blocks on a scrabble board. But words are not the same as concepts.
iii) Incarnation
It is often alleged that the Incarnation is incoherent. How is a divine mode of subsistence compatible with a human mode of subsistence? How can Christ be mortal and immortal, omniscient and ignorant, omnipotent and impotent, &c.?
Before we broach this question, we need to lay down a few markers. If the critic is alleging a contradiction, then the critic shoulders the burden of proof. In addition, most harmonizations will be underdetermined by Scripture inasmuch as the Bible does not spell out the nature of the relation. It says that Christ enjoys a full complement of divine and human attributes, but does not reveal a detailed model of how they interface. Hence, the main thing is to avoid reductive harmonies (e.g., the docetic, Kenotic, Arian, Apollonarian, Nestorian, Monophysite, & monothelite heresies). The same holds true of the Trinity.
The Bible employs a literary metaphor to depict God’s economic relations (Gen 1:3; Pss 33:6; 139:16; Rev 13:8; 17:8). And a divine Incarnation would be a special case and limiting case of God’s economic relations. Indeed, the Logos—yet another literary metaphor—is an economic title for the Incarnate Son (Jn 1:1-4).
So let us explore the explanatory power of this metaphor. It is often said that all creative writing is autobiographical inasmuch as the author projects something of himself into the characters. And there are cases in which the author writes himself into his own story as the main character, and tells the story from the first person point of view. Dante is a classic case in point.
Now, the writer exists outside his storybook world, outside its spatiotemporal framework. He has his own set of attributes, his own mode of subsistence. Likewise, his literary alter-ego has all the attributes proper to a storybook character situated in a storybook world. And yet there’s a sense in which the author reincarnates himself in his autobiographical character. This figure has the same mental traits and character traits as the author, the same memories, the same know-how. The author can even vest his literary alter-ego with the power to rewrite the story from within.
This is a metaphor, but more than a metaphor. For just as a storybook character was once a figment of the writer’s imagination, we were fictions in the mind of God. And just as a creative writer objectifies his idea in time and space, our Creator objectified his idea in time and space.
There is, of course, a point at which the analogy would seem to break down. For the storybook character is unreal. He is not alive. He knows nothing, feels nothing. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that the dream of artificial intelligence were to come true. Suppose that a writer could, in fact, invest his characters with consciousness—like the old myth of Pygmalion. And even if this is humanly unattainable, the analogy holds at the divine level, for God does invest his imaginary characters with consciousness.
4. Freudian Faith
Freud and Feuerbach attributed faith in God to a mental projection of our inner feelings. By way of reply:
i) This analysis is a half-truth. The Bible treats idolatry as a mental projection. The fallen imagination is an idol-making factory. Because the sinner is apprehensive about the judgment of God, he substitutes surrogate gods whom he can buy off by human sacrifice and other petty bribes.
ii) This analysis can backfire by explaining unbelief as well as belief. Perhaps the atheist is projecting his negative father-fixation. Indeed, a good many infidels fit this psychological profile.
iii) This analysis is too indiscriminate. On the one hand, it assigns faith to a variety of different and divergent motives. Faith is the result of hope or fear or guilt or pride or vengeance, &c. On the other hand, believers come from a broad range of social backgrounds. Believers represent a wide variety of temperamental types, with varying intellectual aptitudes. Some believers were raised in the faith while others came to the faith from an irreligious upbringing. Some switch from one church to another. Some drifted from the faith and returned while others leave and never look back. Some family members remain in the faith while others turn from the faith. Some lose their faith in college while others find their faith in college. Some lose their faith after a personal tragedy while others find their faith after a personal tragedy. Converts give different reasons for their pilgrimage. When a theory is so flexible that it can accommodate contrary lines of evidence, it amounts to a disguised description under the guise of an efficient explanation.
iv) Projective theories have an armchair quality to them. They don’t seem to be based on a wide sampling of case-studies or personal acquaintance with Christians from various walks of life. How many churches did Freud attend? How many devout believers did he know? How many did he interview? How many did he observe up close over the course of a lifetime—from the sandbox and the lecture hall to the dinner table and the deathbed?
