The Coherence of Theism
4
The Attributes of God
1. Omnipotence
The claim that God is omnipotent is the claim that God has unlimited power to perform basic actions. While there is no strict logical incoherence in postulating the existence of such a being (the description A being with unlimited power does not involve a contradiction in the way that square circle does) it is sometimes claimed that omnipotence is broadly incoherent on two grounds: It has paradoxical consequences and it is incompatible with the existence of preventable human suffering.
The first type of objection is usually made by describing some action such that a limit is imposed upon God whether he performs it or not. Consider the question, "Can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift?" or, "Can God create a universe too wayward for him to control?" If God can create such a universe, to take the second example, then there is an action he cannot subsequently perform; namely, control it; and if he can not create such a universe, then there is a different action that he cannot perform; namely, create it. Either way, the argument goes, there will be an action God cannot perform and so omnipotence is logically impossible.
To see why this objection fails, we need to understand omnipotence in a more careful way. Theologians have always understood omnipotence to mean the power to perform any logically possible action. To note that God could not create a square circle imposes no limit on his powers because creating a square circle is not an action whose difficulty lies in the brute force required to perform it. In fact, it is not an action at all; rather, the sentence Create a square circle is a logically incoherent combination of English words which have no referent in the set of all logically possible actions that belong to omnipotence.
This refinement defangs the objection completely. Stones so heavy that unlimited forces cannot lift them and Universes so wayward unlimited forces cannot control them both belong with square circles and married bachelors to a class of logically impossible entities. [1] The limitations in question are limitations not of power but of logical possibility. In a like case, the Bible teaches that God, being perfect, can do no evil and this "limitation" can be understood in the same sense as those just discussed: A morally perfect being who acts immorally describes a logically incoherent state of affairs. God cannot logically be expected to perform an action such that, if it is performed, that action has the entailment that God did not perform it.
The second objection to the coherence of omnipotence finds a contradiction in the conjunction of omnipotence, moral perfection, and the existence of preventable human suffering. The claim is that if God is all good, he would want to end human suffering; and if he is all powerful, he would have the ability to do so. Of all the objections to the coherence of theism, this one requires the most attention. I therefore address it separately in the next chapter.
2. Omniscience
The claim that God is omniscient is the claim that God knows all true propositions and believes no false ones. There is no strict logical incoherence in postulating the existence of an omniscient being because the description A being who knows all true propositions does not contain a contradiction. However, objections to the broad coherence of omniscience are sometimes raised based on set theory, the impossibility of actual infinities, incompleteness theorems and human free will. I will now briefly discuss these in the order just given.
The proponent of the first objection begins by noting that a Set of all sets is an incoherent concept because it generates a new set not included in that superset of "all" sets. [2] He then attempts to apply this paradox to the concept of a Set of all truths and claims that it is inapprehensible—and therefore incoherent to suppose that any being could be omniscient. However, the problem only arises from an arbitrary and unnecessary insistence on the conceptual constructs of naive set theory. It is perfectly coherent to quantify omniscience in other ways. For example: The statement, For any proposition p, if it is true, God knows it, nicely captures what the theist wants to say about omniscience and entails no contradiction.
The proponent of the second objection assumes that omniscience entails the apprehension of an infinite number of discrete propositions. To show that this is incoherent, he then appeals to a thought experiment by the mathematician David Hilbert which appears to illustrate the impossibility of an actual infinite number of things. Before this objection can be appreciated, I need to give a brief sketch of the thought experiment in question and I will do that now.
Hilbert asks us to imagine a fully occupied hotel with infinitely many rooms. One might think that, since the hotel is fully occupied, it could not accommodate a single new guest. However, by moving the guest in Room 1 to Room 2, the guest in Room 2 to Room 3, and so on, to infinity, Room 1 will be made available and no guest will be without a room. What's more: If every guest moves into a room whose room number is double that of his own (that is, if the guest in Room 1 moves to Room 2, the guess in Room 2 to Room 4, Room 3 to 6, and so on, to infinity) all of the infinitely many odd-numbered rooms will be available and the hotel will be able to accommodate an infinite number of new guests—and since this process can be repeated indefinitely, the hotel will be able to accommodate infinitely many new guests infinitely many times.
Hilbert's Hotel is absurd. And since nothing hangs on the presentation of the problem in terms of guests and hotel rooms, it has led some philosophers to believe that an actually infinite number of entities of any sort is unactualizable. However, even allowing that this is so and applies equally to concrete entities in space as to propositions in an immaterial mind, omniscience need not be conceptualised as comprising an infinite number of discrete propositions. On the contrary, many theologians throughout history have construed God's omniscience as a single undifferentiated intuition of all reality. A helpful analogy to this understanding of divine cognition is the visual field which we take in as an undifferentiated whole even though it may be atomised into infinite points.
The third objection to omniscience concerns incompleteness theorems. [3] These are theorems in mathematical logic which demonstrate that no consistent system of axioms is capable of proving all arithmetical truths. In essence, the claim here is that if there exist unknowable truths then the sum of all truths is incompletable and omniscience impossible. However, this objection is based on a slight mischaracterisation of the problem. What these incompleteness theorems actually demonstrate is not the unknowability of some mathematical truth p but rather its underivability from the axioms of the relevant theory. We can therefore reframe the problem by saying that according to these theorems p does have a truth value—but one that is inaccessible by inference. And this is an important point because the theist is not claiming that God progressed from a state of nescience to a state of omniscience by inference but that omniscience belongs to him as an essential attribute.
The fourth and final objection to the coherence of omniscience claims that it is incompatible with human free will which the theist also wishes to uphold. That is, if God foreknows all human actions, free will is illusory: We must (it would seem) act exactly as it was foreknown by God that we would act. It is now agreed this objection commits a modal fallacy and is invalid; moreover, many theologians are happy to constrain omniscience to Knowing all truths it is logically possible to know and exclude from this category freely willed actions—a move that simply removes the apparent tension. I will now briefly discuss both of these points.
Modal logic is concerned with the ways in which propositions are either necessarily or contingently true or false; and a modal fallacy involves imputing necessary truth to a proposition that is only contingently true. Take the following example,
|
The first statement is necessarily true in virtue of its logical form; the second is contingently true because, while John is unmarried, it is logically possible for him to marry. The fallacy therefore lies in mistakenly extending the scope of necessary truth in the first statement to include the second which is only contingently true. And the same fallacy is committed in the objection under discussion.
A) God foreknows that John will marry Jane.
B) John marries Jane. C) Therefore, necessarily, John married Jane; i.e., had no choice. |
In this case, the necessary truth of God's foreknowledge of John's future choice, given John's future choice, is mistakenly extended to include the choice itself when this is actually contingent on John's free will. To express the key point very simply: God's foreknowledge does not determine our choices; our choices determine God's foreknowledge. What follows from God's infallible foreknowledge of p is just that p will happen but not that p will happen necessarily. It is possible that p, being contingent, could not have happened—but in that case, God's foreknowledge would have been different. In this sense divine foreknowledge may be likened to an infallible barometer which, while it will tell you with infallible correctness what the weather will be, does not itself cause the weather.
The misstep made here is tricky but, as I said, uncontroversially recognized as a misstep. However, some theists avoid the apparent tension altogether by adopting a position called Open Theism. This is the view that it is impossible even for God to know what free agents will do and therefore omniscience needs to be understood in a similarly careful way to omnipotence with respect to logical possibility. That is, just as God cannot be required to do what it is logically impossible to do, so God cannot be required to know what it is logically impossible to know. Swinburne, who affirms Open Theism, adds, "Since God is omnipotent, it will only be because God allows there to be free persons that there will be any free persons. So this limit to divine omniscience arises from the consequences of his own choice to create free agents." Unlike the logical constraints on omnipotence with respect to actualising impossible states of affairs, God could abolish the logical constraints upon omniscience with respect to the choices of agents with free will by abolishing the free will or the agents. It is a contingent, rather than a necessary, limitation.
It is important to remember that, if God exists, it does not matter which if any of these ways of understanding his omniscience is true. The fact that even one of them is logically possible suffices to discharge the objection that the concept of omniscience is logically impossible.
3. Omnipresence
The claim that God is omnipresent is often misunderstood. For this reason it will be helpful to begin by specifying what the claim is not. When the theist says that God is omnipresent he wishes to refute the idea that God is localised at any particular place either in the universe or in any other realm such as "heaven." [4] However, the theist does not propose as an alternative the view that God is spread throughout space like an invisible gas. This would have an unwanted consequence for it would mean that God is never fully present anywhere: There would be a certain cubic volume of God in your room, a larger cubic volume of God in St Paul's Cathedral, and the greater portion of God suffused throughout the observable universe. A more satisfactory description of omnipresence would be to say that it is a way of understanding the claim that God is a disembodied mind who is able to move any part of the universe as a basic action and who does not look out on the universe from any particular location but knows without inference every state of affairs within it. [5] We could further simplify this by saying with William Lane Craig that, "God is cognisant of, and causally active at, every point in space."
There is no strict logical incoherence entailed by this description of divine omnipresence. However, it has been suggested that it is incompatible with a further claim which the theist wishes to make; the claim that God has personhood. The proponent of this objection begins by insisting that having wants and fears is essential to persons. He then claims that only a person who sometimes takes steps towards things can rightly be said to want them; and only a person who sometimes runs away from things can rightly be said to fear them. A person who is simultaneously present everywhere can do neither.
However, this objection shows a failure of imagination with respect to the many ways in which an omnipresent person who can affect the world through basic actions could give expression to his desires and fears. If he wants a man on a journey to change direction, for example, he may cause a landslide blocking his path; if he fears a man will die of thirst, he may intervene in natural processes to make it rain—and so on. "It is important in this connection," writes Swinburne, "not to overemphasize the extent of God's non-embodiment in the view of traditional theism. The view of traditional theism is that in many ways God is not related to a material object as a person is to his body but in other ways he is so related." The key differences are that the world plays no role in mediating God's perceptions; there is no material object in which disturbances cause God pain; and God could annihilate the universe by a basic action and continue to exist without it.
4. Necessity and Eternality
In making the claim that God is necessary, theologians have wanted to say two things. Firstly, that while the universe could not exist without God, God existed before the universe and could, if he chose to, annihilate the universe and continue to exist without it. And secondly, that God's existence with or without the universe is not an accidental feature of ultimate reality; rather, God's nonexistence is impossible. This second claim has traditionally been understood in one of two ways, both of which further entail God's eternality: In the weak sense of factual necessity and in the strong sense of logical necessity.
The claim that God's existence is a factual necessity is the claim that while it is logically possible that there is no God the impossibility of his nonexistence is implied by his attributes if he in fact exists. We can easily understand what is meant by this understanding of God's necessity by postulating the existence of a single absolutely indestructible elementary particle. It is logically possible that no such particle exists; but if it did come into existence then, by definition, it could not thereafter cease to exist. In a like case, it is logically possible that there exists no being like God but if a being like God does in fact exist, there is nothing that could possibly bring about his nonexistence and so his existence is factually necessary. So described, the factual necessity of God if God exists is not incoherent in either the strict or the broad sense. It is simply a tautology of logic, such as, If it is raining, then it is raining, which it would be incoherent to deny. This assumes, of course, that in view of God's other attributes it would be incoherent to suppose that God could destroy himself.
The stronger claim that God's existence is a logical necessity is the claim that it is logically impossible for God not to exist. Strictly speaking, a proposition is logically necessary if its negation is a logical contradiction. The proposition God does not exist is not a logical contradiction. It follows that if it is incoherent to deny the existence of God, it will be incoherent in the broad sense; that is, to see why it is incoherent we will need to follow out the entailments of the nonexistence of God. The Ontological Argument, which I discuss here, argues for the logical necessity of God from first principles; and in Part II, I will be presenting arguments which show that in the absence of God we cannot make sense of mental and moral experience. The Modal Cosmological Argument, as we shall see, is reducible to the proposition, If a contingent being exists, then a Necessary Being exists. Copleston argued that this is a logically necessary proposition but not, strictly speaking, an analytic proposition. And this is because it is logically necessary only given that there exists a contingent being, which has to be discovered by experience, and the proposition, A contingent being exists is not analytic. “Though once you know that there is a contingent being,” he emphasised, “it follows of necessity that there is a Necessary Being.”
However, in this chapter I am not concerned with whether God actually exists but only with whether it is coherent to suppose that God exists; and presently, with whether it is coherent to suppose that his existence is necessitated. I will therefore conclude as follows: It is not incoherent to suppose that if God exists his existence is factually necessitated in the way I have defined. The stronger claim that it is logically necessitated, and which entails that God actually exists, needs to be made at greater length.
5. Perfect Goodness
Here I will find Swinburne's definition of perfect goodness helpful: A good person is one who performs good actions of many kinds and few bad ones; a perfectly good person is one who performs only morally best actions of many kinds and no bad ones. However, this understanding of perfect goodness needs to be qualified slightly.
Swinburne reminds us that sometimes there are situations in which there is no morally best action. Suppose, for instance, that you are faced with two people who will die without your help and you are only able to help one. In this situation (all other things being equal) helping Person A and helping Person B are what Swinburne calls "equal best" actions. Faced with a choice of equal best actions, a perfectly good person is free to choose arbitrarily between them. A perfectly good person can also choose arbitrarily, Swinburne suggests, when faced with situations in which there is an infinite spectrum of increasingly good actions and so, again, no best action. For example: Suppose, what is reasonable, that creating people, planets and stars is a good action. The universe contains finite quantities of all of them. Wouldn't a better world be one with more of each? Yes but there is no limit to how many there could be and so no best action. Even if there were infinitely many people, planets and stars there could always be a few more. So here too there is no morally best action.
The concept of equal best actions and the concept of infinite spectrums of increasingly good actions help us to make sense of moral perfection and divine freedom. Consider: If creating the universe and not creating it were equal best actions (perhaps because one action affords finite creatures the opportunity to know God and the other avoids moral and natural evil) then either action would be consistent with the moral perfection of God and God could create or not create the universe by an act of free will. The properties of the objects it contains would likewise be open to infinitely many equal best variations and, as we have just seen, there is no morally best number of objects and so the size and population of the universe is also a matter of free will.
It would seem, then, that there is no strict incoherence in the claim that God is perfectly good because the proposition, There exists a being who in every situation always performs either a morally best or an equal best action or else chooses arbitrarily from an infinite spectrum of increasingly good actions contains no contradiction and is further compatible with divine freedom of the will in an infinitely large number of situations. But are there any a priori grounds for thinking that God is perfectly good?
The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz offered one intriguing argument for the mutual inclusiveness of omniscience and moral perfection. The argument unfolds from the observation that all freely willed action strives towards some goal and that all goals are the pursuit of an apparent good entertained by the agent. Importantly, this also holds for morally bad actions. A thief, for instance, seeks the “good” of an increase in his personal fortune and his action is to be understood as bad insofar as it pursues this small selfish good at the cost of a significant decrease in the total good—the unhappiness he brings to his victim; the mistrust and unease he inspires; his subversion of laws that conduce to social harmony and so on. However, since the “apparent good” of any action is also dependent on our knowledge, increases in knowledge will refine our judgment of good and evil and, with that refinement, improve our morality. This is not to imply that a wrongdoer is entirely unaware of the wrongfulness of his actions; but it is to say that he fails to or refuses to recognise the importance of a greater good beyond the limited good he arrogates to himself. By contrast, an enlightened mind is not subject to the selfish impulse to seek some small good at the cost of a decrease in the total good—and in a divine mind this principle is developed to its ultimate logical consequence. Being disembodied, a divine mind is free from carnality; being omniscient, it is free from irrationality; being omnipotent, it is free from want. Its greatest pleasure, according to Leibniz, is found, "in recognising that it perform virtuous deeds and in pursuing goals which promote universal perfection." Perfect knowledge, in short, produces a perfect awareness of and pursuit of the good. And since God's knowledge is perfect, his goodness is perfect too.
As already noted, the most famous objections to the existence of God is that the joint claims that God is morally perfect and omnipotent are incompatible with the existence of evil and suffering. In the next chapter, this claim will be carefully evaluated and found to be fully resolved by the so-called "Higher Order Goods Defence."
6. Conclusion
I have now discussed all the key attributes of God in classical theism. Omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, necessity and eternity were all shown to be coherent in both the broad and the strict sense I defined. And while the problem of evil has yet to be discussed, nevertheless, the concept of God is emerging as a logically coherent one. As a final point it is worth adding that several more of the attributes of God discussed above cohere logically in the way that omniscience and moral perfection were shown to do. For instance: If God is omnipotent, there is no point in space that he could not affect by a basic action—which is consistent with his omnipresence; and if he is omnipresent, there is no point in space which he could no directly perceive—which is consistent with his omniscience. A lack of knowledge, moreover, would impose constraints on omnipotence and so omniscience and omnipotence also cohere by logical necessity.
Having established that God is coherent in abstracto let us now consider whether it is coherent to suppose God exists in view of the fact of human suffering.
The misstep made here is tricky but, as I said, uncontroversially recognized as a misstep. However, some theists avoid the apparent tension altogether by adopting a position called Open Theism. This is the view that it is impossible even for God to know what free agents will do and therefore omniscience needs to be understood in a similarly careful way to omnipotence with respect to logical possibility. That is, just as God cannot be required to do what it is logically impossible to do, so God cannot be required to know what it is logically impossible to know. Swinburne, who affirms Open Theism, adds, "Since God is omnipotent, it will only be because God allows there to be free persons that there will be any free persons. So this limit to divine omniscience arises from the consequences of his own choice to create free agents." Unlike the logical constraints on omnipotence with respect to actualising impossible states of affairs, God could abolish the logical constraints upon omniscience with respect to the choices of agents with free will by abolishing the free will or the agents. It is a contingent, rather than a necessary, limitation.
It is important to remember that, if God exists, it does not matter which if any of these ways of understanding his omniscience is true. The fact that even one of them is logically possible suffices to discharge the objection that the concept of omniscience is logically impossible.
3. Omnipresence
The claim that God is omnipresent is often misunderstood. For this reason it will be helpful to begin by specifying what the claim is not. When the theist says that God is omnipresent he wishes to refute the idea that God is localised at any particular place either in the universe or in any other realm such as "heaven." [4] However, the theist does not propose as an alternative the view that God is spread throughout space like an invisible gas. This would have an unwanted consequence for it would mean that God is never fully present anywhere: There would be a certain cubic volume of God in your room, a larger cubic volume of God in St Paul's Cathedral, and the greater portion of God suffused throughout the observable universe. A more satisfactory description of omnipresence would be to say that it is a way of understanding the claim that God is a disembodied mind who is able to move any part of the universe as a basic action and who does not look out on the universe from any particular location but knows without inference every state of affairs within it. [5] We could further simplify this by saying with William Lane Craig that, "God is cognisant of, and causally active at, every point in space."
There is no strict logical incoherence entailed by this description of divine omnipresence. However, it has been suggested that it is incompatible with a further claim which the theist wishes to make; the claim that God has personhood. The proponent of this objection begins by insisting that having wants and fears is essential to persons. He then claims that only a person who sometimes takes steps towards things can rightly be said to want them; and only a person who sometimes runs away from things can rightly be said to fear them. A person who is simultaneously present everywhere can do neither.
However, this objection shows a failure of imagination with respect to the many ways in which an omnipresent person who can affect the world through basic actions could give expression to his desires and fears. If he wants a man on a journey to change direction, for example, he may cause a landslide blocking his path; if he fears a man will die of thirst, he may intervene in natural processes to make it rain—and so on. "It is important in this connection," writes Swinburne, "not to overemphasize the extent of God's non-embodiment in the view of traditional theism. The view of traditional theism is that in many ways God is not related to a material object as a person is to his body but in other ways he is so related." The key differences are that the world plays no role in mediating God's perceptions; there is no material object in which disturbances cause God pain; and God could annihilate the universe by a basic action and continue to exist without it.
4. Necessity and Eternality
In making the claim that God is necessary, theologians have wanted to say two things. Firstly, that while the universe could not exist without God, God existed before the universe and could, if he chose to, annihilate the universe and continue to exist without it. And secondly, that God's existence with or without the universe is not an accidental feature of ultimate reality; rather, God's nonexistence is impossible. This second claim has traditionally been understood in one of two ways, both of which further entail God's eternality: In the weak sense of factual necessity and in the strong sense of logical necessity.
The claim that God's existence is a factual necessity is the claim that while it is logically possible that there is no God the impossibility of his nonexistence is implied by his attributes if he in fact exists. We can easily understand what is meant by this understanding of God's necessity by postulating the existence of a single absolutely indestructible elementary particle. It is logically possible that no such particle exists; but if it did come into existence then, by definition, it could not thereafter cease to exist. In a like case, it is logically possible that there exists no being like God but if a being like God does in fact exist, there is nothing that could possibly bring about his nonexistence and so his existence is factually necessary. So described, the factual necessity of God if God exists is not incoherent in either the strict or the broad sense. It is simply a tautology of logic, such as, If it is raining, then it is raining, which it would be incoherent to deny. This assumes, of course, that in view of God's other attributes it would be incoherent to suppose that God could destroy himself.
The stronger claim that God's existence is a logical necessity is the claim that it is logically impossible for God not to exist. Strictly speaking, a proposition is logically necessary if its negation is a logical contradiction. The proposition God does not exist is not a logical contradiction. It follows that if it is incoherent to deny the existence of God, it will be incoherent in the broad sense; that is, to see why it is incoherent we will need to follow out the entailments of the nonexistence of God. The Ontological Argument, which I discuss here, argues for the logical necessity of God from first principles; and in Part II, I will be presenting arguments which show that in the absence of God we cannot make sense of mental and moral experience. The Modal Cosmological Argument, as we shall see, is reducible to the proposition, If a contingent being exists, then a Necessary Being exists. Copleston argued that this is a logically necessary proposition but not, strictly speaking, an analytic proposition. And this is because it is logically necessary only given that there exists a contingent being, which has to be discovered by experience, and the proposition, A contingent being exists is not analytic. “Though once you know that there is a contingent being,” he emphasised, “it follows of necessity that there is a Necessary Being.”
However, in this chapter I am not concerned with whether God actually exists but only with whether it is coherent to suppose that God exists; and presently, with whether it is coherent to suppose that his existence is necessitated. I will therefore conclude as follows: It is not incoherent to suppose that if God exists his existence is factually necessitated in the way I have defined. The stronger claim that it is logically necessitated, and which entails that God actually exists, needs to be made at greater length.
5. Perfect Goodness
Here I will find Swinburne's definition of perfect goodness helpful: A good person is one who performs good actions of many kinds and few bad ones; a perfectly good person is one who performs only morally best actions of many kinds and no bad ones. However, this understanding of perfect goodness needs to be qualified slightly.
Swinburne reminds us that sometimes there are situations in which there is no morally best action. Suppose, for instance, that you are faced with two people who will die without your help and you are only able to help one. In this situation (all other things being equal) helping Person A and helping Person B are what Swinburne calls "equal best" actions. Faced with a choice of equal best actions, a perfectly good person is free to choose arbitrarily between them. A perfectly good person can also choose arbitrarily, Swinburne suggests, when faced with situations in which there is an infinite spectrum of increasingly good actions and so, again, no best action. For example: Suppose, what is reasonable, that creating people, planets and stars is a good action. The universe contains finite quantities of all of them. Wouldn't a better world be one with more of each? Yes but there is no limit to how many there could be and so no best action. Even if there were infinitely many people, planets and stars there could always be a few more. So here too there is no morally best action.
The concept of equal best actions and the concept of infinite spectrums of increasingly good actions help us to make sense of moral perfection and divine freedom. Consider: If creating the universe and not creating it were equal best actions (perhaps because one action affords finite creatures the opportunity to know God and the other avoids moral and natural evil) then either action would be consistent with the moral perfection of God and God could create or not create the universe by an act of free will. The properties of the objects it contains would likewise be open to infinitely many equal best variations and, as we have just seen, there is no morally best number of objects and so the size and population of the universe is also a matter of free will.
It would seem, then, that there is no strict incoherence in the claim that God is perfectly good because the proposition, There exists a being who in every situation always performs either a morally best or an equal best action or else chooses arbitrarily from an infinite spectrum of increasingly good actions contains no contradiction and is further compatible with divine freedom of the will in an infinitely large number of situations. But are there any a priori grounds for thinking that God is perfectly good?
The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz offered one intriguing argument for the mutual inclusiveness of omniscience and moral perfection. The argument unfolds from the observation that all freely willed action strives towards some goal and that all goals are the pursuit of an apparent good entertained by the agent. Importantly, this also holds for morally bad actions. A thief, for instance, seeks the “good” of an increase in his personal fortune and his action is to be understood as bad insofar as it pursues this small selfish good at the cost of a significant decrease in the total good—the unhappiness he brings to his victim; the mistrust and unease he inspires; his subversion of laws that conduce to social harmony and so on. However, since the “apparent good” of any action is also dependent on our knowledge, increases in knowledge will refine our judgment of good and evil and, with that refinement, improve our morality. This is not to imply that a wrongdoer is entirely unaware of the wrongfulness of his actions; but it is to say that he fails to or refuses to recognise the importance of a greater good beyond the limited good he arrogates to himself. By contrast, an enlightened mind is not subject to the selfish impulse to seek some small good at the cost of a decrease in the total good—and in a divine mind this principle is developed to its ultimate logical consequence. Being disembodied, a divine mind is free from carnality; being omniscient, it is free from irrationality; being omnipotent, it is free from want. Its greatest pleasure, according to Leibniz, is found, "in recognising that it perform virtuous deeds and in pursuing goals which promote universal perfection." Perfect knowledge, in short, produces a perfect awareness of and pursuit of the good. And since God's knowledge is perfect, his goodness is perfect too.
As already noted, the most famous objections to the existence of God is that the joint claims that God is morally perfect and omnipotent are incompatible with the existence of evil and suffering. In the next chapter, this claim will be carefully evaluated and found to be fully resolved by the so-called "Higher Order Goods Defence."
6. Conclusion
I have now discussed all the key attributes of God in classical theism. Omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, necessity and eternity were all shown to be coherent in both the broad and the strict sense I defined. And while the problem of evil has yet to be discussed, nevertheless, the concept of God is emerging as a logically coherent one. As a final point it is worth adding that several more of the attributes of God discussed above cohere logically in the way that omniscience and moral perfection were shown to do. For instance: If God is omnipotent, there is no point in space that he could not affect by a basic action—which is consistent with his omnipresence; and if he is omnipresent, there is no point in space which he could no directly perceive—which is consistent with his omniscience. A lack of knowledge, moreover, would impose constraints on omnipotence and so omniscience and omnipotence also cohere by logical necessity.
Having established that God is coherent in abstracto let us now consider whether it is coherent to suppose God exists in view of the fact of human suffering.
Footnotes
[1] All paradoxes of this sort can be simplified to the question, "Can God abrogate his own omnipotence?" As Swinburne notes, it is logically possible that the answer to this question is yes but God never chooses to do so. In this scenario, too, the paradox is circumvented: God, being omnipotent, can perform the proposed action but, in choosing not to, remains omnipotent.
[2] This is a simplified sketch of Russell's Paradox.
[3] See Godels Incompleteness Theorems.
[4] And, a fortiori, the comical depiction of God in pop culture as a giant bearded humanoid in a toga and sandals. William Lane Craig suggests that this unfortunate meme has its origin in Michelangelo's fresco The Creation of Adam and then adds, perhaps correctly, that the famous image has done more damage to the proper understanding of God than any other. However, God is said to be a disembodied spirit in the very first verses of Genesis and no biblically-literate Christian should ever have understood the word God to mean anything else.
[5] To create agents with moral liberty and constrain them from moral evil is simply to deny them moral liberty. It is logically possible, though hugely improbable, that a planet of agents with moral liberty will by chance alone do no evil. But, needless to say, this state of affairs does not obtain on our planet.
[6] The question arises whether God can freely withhold his love and if not then how, given my argument, it can be genuine. However, the difficulty only arises in the case of finite persons created by God for the purpose of knowing and loving him and each other. For if God created us with an immutable and irresistible love for himself and each other, that love would have its origin in something external to ourselves—namely, God—and would not therefore be freely given and genuine. But since God's love is past eternal and has no cause external to himself, it is genuine even though by a necessity of his divine nature he is incapable of withholding it.
[1] All paradoxes of this sort can be simplified to the question, "Can God abrogate his own omnipotence?" As Swinburne notes, it is logically possible that the answer to this question is yes but God never chooses to do so. In this scenario, too, the paradox is circumvented: God, being omnipotent, can perform the proposed action but, in choosing not to, remains omnipotent.
[2] This is a simplified sketch of Russell's Paradox.
[3] See Godels Incompleteness Theorems.
[4] And, a fortiori, the comical depiction of God in pop culture as a giant bearded humanoid in a toga and sandals. William Lane Craig suggests that this unfortunate meme has its origin in Michelangelo's fresco The Creation of Adam and then adds, perhaps correctly, that the famous image has done more damage to the proper understanding of God than any other. However, God is said to be a disembodied spirit in the very first verses of Genesis and no biblically-literate Christian should ever have understood the word God to mean anything else.
[5] To create agents with moral liberty and constrain them from moral evil is simply to deny them moral liberty. It is logically possible, though hugely improbable, that a planet of agents with moral liberty will by chance alone do no evil. But, needless to say, this state of affairs does not obtain on our planet.
[6] The question arises whether God can freely withhold his love and if not then how, given my argument, it can be genuine. However, the difficulty only arises in the case of finite persons created by God for the purpose of knowing and loving him and each other. For if God created us with an immutable and irresistible love for himself and each other, that love would have its origin in something external to ourselves—namely, God—and would not therefore be freely given and genuine. But since God's love is past eternal and has no cause external to himself, it is genuine even though by a necessity of his divine nature he is incapable of withholding it.