Transcript

Hey everyone, welcome to the Council of Trent podcast.

I'm your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn.

I just want to let you know I have a new course on the existence of God at the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics.

If you haven't been there yet, you really need to go check it out, schoolofapologetics.com.

They've got probably my favorite course there.

It's not one of my courses because that would be narcissistic; it is Jimmy Akin's Beginner's Guide to Apologetics.

It's just awesome because Jimmy is the best.

In fact, Jimmy is probably a robot the Church sent from the future to help us because he knows everything.

But go to schoolofapologetics.com,

check out my new course Evidence for God, because today, also, this ties into that a little bit, I want to talk about how Christians sometimes get God wrong.

There are different views among philosophers of religion.

How do we understand God?

And so, the title of today's episode is How the Medieval God Can Beat Up the Modern God.

What does that mean?

We often think of medieval philosophers as living in the Dark Ages, and I hate that phrase, by the way.

I think it was Petrarch, a Renaissance writer, who came up with it, which is silly.

It was the time when the light of Christ shined in the world; it was Christendom.

During the medieval period, there were all kinds of advances in technology, the arts, and literature.

In any case, that's a topic for another show, but medieval philosophers gave us a lot of great insights into understanding who God is, and it's very technical and sophisticated.

Ironically, many modern views of God are much less sophisticated and dumbed down compared to medieval philosophers.

When you have these modern views of God that are dumbed down or not as sophisticated or not as fully thought out, you can get into trouble when you argue about atheism, and atheists can put forward serious objections to theism, to belief in God, based on these understandings of God that are really incomplete.

So, to help us dive into that today, I've invited Pat Flynn onto the show.

Pat is at chroniclesofstrength.com.

He's got a lot of podcasting, philosophy, theology, and how to get your kettlebell workouts in.

Pat, welcome to the podcast!

Ben Horn, it is a pleasure to be here.

Thank you for having me on.

Alright, well before we get started, though, can you tell our listeners just a little bit more about yourself?

Yeah, yeah, sure.

What's the condensed version here?

Well, I’m in an online business, faith, and health.

I guess my backgrounds academically are in economics and philosophy, but a lot of people know me for sharing online kettlebell workouts.

So it’s kind of weird; I kind of have a foot in a lot of different worlds.

I am now an affiliate apologist with Catholic Answers, which is a great honor.

I am a former atheist and naturalist who was convinced by the great classical theistic tradition.

In fact, it was this particular model and view of God that moved me away from naturalism to theism and then eventually to Catholicism, right?

So it was really the philosophy of God that served as a significant bridge to religion for me.

So I think maybe that’s the most relevant aspect of my background, probably for the conversation we’re going to have.

Yeah, well let’s jump into that classical theism.

A lot of people may not understand that, but I think that that’s the big difference.

When we talk about the medieval God, we’re talking about a classical tradition, not just a Christian one.

By the way, we have obviously Catholic philosophers like Aquinas and Bonaventure, but also there are Jewish philosophers as well; Maimonides would be one of them, and Muslim philosophers like Avicenna.

These are all, while they differed in important ways from each other, they all held to a very classical view of God.

So I want to talk about classical theism versus what the Catholic philosopher Brian Davies calls theistic personalism.

I think the biggest difference here, that for a lot of people, what is so hard about sharing the existence of God or debating with atheists today, is that many modern people erroneously think God is a being among others.

Then if we want to prove God exists, we have to assemble evidence in the same way we would prove any other individual being exists.

You want to prove Bigfoot?

Go out with your cameras.

You want to prove the Higgs boson?

Turn on the machine that does the scientific experiments.

You know, they think God is just one being among all these other beings, and we’ve got to do our telescopes and microscopes to find Him.

So that’s a very modern view of God: that He’s a being among others, which allows atheists to judge God in a different way than He should be judged, whereas the classical view would be that God just is being.

But that’s not pantheism.

Break this down for us!

Yeah, God is being itself; everything else is being through participation.

So we’re not saying that everything that exists is God when we say that God is subsistent existence itself, because we’re committed to modes of being, right?

Our mode of being is distinct from God’s mode of being, so that’s important to get clarity on that up front to avoid a sort of pantheism or panentheism.

But no, classical theism, as you note, Trent, is both very deep and very wide in its tradition.

I would argue it goes all the way back to Plato, where he sort of identifies the ultimate deity, if you will, with the form of the Good, putting his Demiurge aside, right?

And then it’s sort of developed right on down through the line, certainly into Christianity.

Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas is often seen as sort of the great champion of these developments, but you have classical theists in Hinduism, in Islam, and in Judaism.

So it’s certainly not restricted to Christianity.

In fact, many Protestants are classical theists.

I want to make sure that this is not a Catholic versus Protestant debate.

I mean, this is very popular even among the Protestant Reformers and going forward for several centuries.

It’s much more recent and, I guess, if we had to make a comparison—like what do we mean by the difference here?

To put it in concrete terms, like what we’re comparing would be St. Thomas Aquinas, but even Calvin and other Protestant Reformers had this view that God— and we’ll break down these attributes here shortly—God is infinite.

He is not a being among others; He is not a person among other persons.

He has intellect and will, but He is being itself.

He is the ground of being.

Anything that exists exists because it participates in the fact that God is being, and God gives it being.

So God is being.

He is simple; He’s not composed of parts.

He is timeless, He is necessary, He is immutable; God does not change.

So when you have all of these points together, you have a very robust view of God, whereas a more modern conception— to give a few examples our listeners might be familiar with—would be like how William Lane Craig views God.

Now, I think William Lane Craig has put out a lot of great arguments in natural theology.

I appreciate them.

I am a staunch defender of the Kalam cosmological argument when other Catholics are not.

I think he has actually put some good arguments out there for it as well.

Or Richard Swinburne—sweet Richard!

Richard Swinburne, Eastern Orthodox philosopher, is a great philosopher of religion.

Swinburne would be another good example, a really good example to compare here.

I love listening to him talk.

Well, God, I am absolutely convinced of substance dualism.

I love him!

What it means to be God, though, the problem is you ask Swinburne, What does it mean to be God?

He says, Well, it's not that hard to imagine being God.

Just imagine you, and you don't have a body, you don't get tired, and you're not ignorant.

You're aware of everything, and very soon you arrive at what it means to be God.

So here he’s just saying God is like a big cosmic person like me with infinite powers, but that leads to a bunch of problems.

I’ll give you one that we can start out with.

And that would be the philosopher Stephen Law, who has said, Well, how do we know God is good?

How do we know?

Look at the world around us.

People say, Look at all the good things; that means there's a good God, and He tolerates evil.

And Law says, Well, how do you know it isn't an evil God, and He just tolerates the good things so He can have more evil?

How do you know?

It could go either way.

I've seen others like William Lane Craig and others try to rebut this, but I feel like classical theists have a great retort, and that is because God is being itself; He also has to be perfectly good because of the nature of being.

Why don't you walk us through that?

Yeah, boy, you put a lot of stuff on the table, so let me wade through it bit by bit here.

Really good stuff.

So yes, when we’re contrasting classical theism with the modern God, well, there are a lot of different models of the modern God, so it’s kind of difficult to just dismiss all of them right away.

I think the best thing to do is make the case for classical theism, and that will automatically kind of exclude its competitors.

Right?

Because when I read Swinburne, yes, I think he falls under the sort of broad tent of theistic personalism, but he seems to have different views about God even than Bill Craig.

I was looking around for his book, The Existence of God.

It’s a great book; it’s really good.

But I’ll give you an example of a difference.

I don’t know if he holds this anymore, but among modern philosophers of religion, God’s necessity—the idea that He has to exist—yeah, you could say that’s factual necessity, or just that God is indestructible, that it’s possible He could not have existed, but since He does exist, hey, He ain’t going anywhere, right?

Or logical necessity, which is God must exist just like two plus two equals four.

To deny it would entail a contradiction, right?

And so I know Craig at one point only believed God was factually necessary, then he changed his mind on that.

I don’t know if Swinburne—I think he might believe God is only factually necessary.

Yeah, I think that might be a difference there.

I can’t say because a lot of Swinburne’s work that I’ve spent time with was many years ago, so maybe he has changed his mind on this.

But Swinburne, you know, sort of famously posits bruteness at the sort of ultimate explanatory end, and I think that’s going to be a critical issue that we’re going to want to explore here later on.

So real quick, I want to circle back to some of the other things you said.

Yeah, classical theism is marked by crucial characteristics.

God is absolutely the first cause of all causable things.

There’s nothing back of God, right?

It’s like the buck stops here.

God is atemporal, right?

Strictly timeless.

God is absolutely simple; He’s not composed of parts—physical parts or metaphysical parts.

He’s purely actual; He lacks any intrinsic passive potency.

And I think the kind of core critical development from Aquinas that really sort of cements all this is that God has no distinct nature and no distinct act of existence.

To be God is just to be.

To be God isn’t even a substance, technically speaking; God is a subsistence.

That is something that people need to get clear on, right?

To help people understand that, it’s like if I say a fish is an aquatic animal, Trent is a rational creature, a building is a structure created for people to dwell in, but for God, we would just say God is, and there’d be nothing after that, right?

Yeah, right.

It would be kind of incorrect to say God exists because I think we want to say anything of that type of grammatical structure is actually pointing towards a cause.

Rather, we should articulate it like this, as Barry Miller says: God's existence?

We should just have “exists!”

with an exclamation point.

Which is, I think, that’s right, but it shows a radical transcendence of God.

So one of the—you brought up Stephen Law and the evil God challenge.

Yeah, so part of this comes down to method and procedure, right?

Like what sort of is motivating somebody toward a particular model of God?

In the classical tradition, what motivates classical theism is that we start with what’s in front of us, right?

We start by sort of carving reality at its joints.

We start in philosophy of nature and then move to metaphysics, right?

And this is where you try to make sense of common experiences—things like change, things like compositeness—and you start to realize, okay, how do we make change intelligible?

Well, we have to kind of carve being into—right?

There has to be actual being and potential being to sort of give us the conditions to render change intelligible.

And then we start to get sort of causal principles from this, right, that push us towards an unactualized actualizer, an unchanged changer, to make sense of why there are any changing things at all.

Right, so just follow me broadly, right?

So say that there are certain features or aspects or categories of reality that are not intrinsically completely intelligible, right?

They’re always sort of pointing beyond themselves for a source of intelligibility or explanation or cause or something like that.

What might some of these features or categories be?

Well, again, traditional philosophers have said it seems like changing things, it seems like composite things, it seems like qualitatively finite things—things with a real distinction between their essence and active existence—which would be a type of composition, right?

These things are not explanation enders, right?

You’re saying we can always ask, “Why do they exist?”

Right, yes, they don't terminate explanations, and they don’t provide a sufficient condition for being—that’s the key.

So if reality were only these types of things, the traditional cosmological argument just says if that’s all reality were, there would not be a sufficient condition for being, and none of those things would actually exist.

But given that they do exist, we actually have to escape those categories, right?

We have to make a category shift.

We can't explain these changing things by more changing stuff.

We can't explain contingent things with more contingency.

We can't explain composite things with more compositeness.

We can't explain more sort of arbitrarily limited or bounded things with something that is itself arbitrarily limited and bounded.

That is not an explanation ender.

So whatever we need to render reality philosophically and scientifically intelligible, says the traditional metaphysician, we need something that could actually be—as radical as it sounds—a sort of self-explanatory fact, right?

Something that could be intrinsically completely intelligible.

And what could that type of thing possibly be, right?

It seems like we need that type of thing, but what on earth?

Literally nothing; it's literally nothing on earth that could be that.

It would have to be none of those things.

I think what happens here is with modern philosophers of religion, people say, Oh well, God; God is that ultimate explanation.

And many atheists will say, Well, why is it God?

What caused God?

Maybe there was a super God.

And if God is just a big cosmic person who is all-powerful and all-knowing, you would still ask, But why does it stop there?

But classical theism gives us a principled reason to say this is why God is the ultimate foundation, and there can’t be anything beyond God, specifically His simplicity—and then how that ties into Him being all good.

I definitely want to explore that more.

Yeah, and what I’m saying here is, like, put the term God aside and just ask what could possibly be an explanation ender.

That’s what I’m asking people to consider.

And then you realize, well, it would have to be something that escapes all those categories that could not be explanation enders, right?

That’s good!

I love this because it’s saying instead of starting with, Here’s why God exists, we’re just doing an investigation.

Alright, because this is a question I ask atheists a lot.

Could there be an ultimate explanation of reality that is not God?

Like, I just start there, like, Hey, can we just find some common ground here?

Could there be an ultimate explanation of reality that’s not God?

And I would ask, well, what properties does it have?

Ideally, if we’re reasoning correctly, it turns out this ultimate explanation does have divine attributes.

Because what you’re saying is it’s a way to remove the prejudice.

It’s like, Look, let’s just talk about ultimate explanations, okay?

Don’t worry about God for a second, but what would this, what explains there are changing things, there are things made of parts, there are things that don’t have to exist?

So it sounds like we’ve got to get to something that’s ultimate—that doesn’t change, that doesn’t have parts, and has to exist.

Uh-oh, now we’re getting divided: whose nature does this exist?

Unless you want to posit brute facts, right?

And it’s not enough to just call something necessary.

Atheists and naturalists call physical things necessary—many of them, anyways, right?

Like take Graham Oppy.

When I read him, it seems like he just wants to call some initial physical state necessary, and then through a model of indeterministic causation, get everything else, right?

Right, okay, I think that’s horribly inadequate, right?

Because I don’t think that’s an adequate explanation.

Right.

Because if we could ask, you know, Well, why is it this particular initial state of the universe that’s the necessary foundation?

It seems like it could have been something different than that.

But if you have an idea of God that could have been different in many ways—that isn’t this infinite act of being itself—then you have problems.

But it seems to me, then that with divine simplicity, oh well, this explains it because the ultimate explanation of reality couldn’t have any parts.

If something has parts, you know, there’s something more basic than it that keeps the parts together—that is the ultimate explanation.

That would be God.

So that explains why God is the ultimate foundation of reality.

He’s just the most simple thing, and that’s not going to be simple to understand.

He’s not composed of parts or doesn’t change; He is the source of all change but does not undergo change Himself.

That helps us to not think of God like we would as kids—like, Oh, God is up in heaven wondering what I’m doing, and He’s surprised at what I do.

It’s a very anthropomorphic view of God.

But also, it helps, I think, the convertibility of being and goodness.

Yeah, yeah, because in the classical view—let’s talk about that.

Yeah, well, can I say one more quick thing?

Right?

So I ultimately think that the fundamental difference between God and creature is compositeness.

I think compositeness actually helps to explain why things are contingent, and it goes right down to the metaphysical level.

Once you have God, whose essence just is His act of existence, there are so many advantages to this.

Yes, you have little puzzles and difficulties you have to work through to make sense of simplicity and challenges like that.

I’ve talked about those infinitely on my podcast before, and they can be worked through.

But there are so many advantages; it secures a robust monotheism, an ultimate explanatory stopping point, and draws a really clear distinction between what is created and their Creator.

Now, as you also said, this will tie into the point about the evil God challenge.

Traditional metaphysicians are trying to make sense of what’s in front of us, and it seems like in front of us there are good things, and they ask, Well, what is goodness?

Right?

And what they’ve sort of discovered, and I think this is right, is that goodness is really sort of a due being, right?

It’s just being under the aspect of desirability or success.

It’s something having the sort of features that are relevant to it, right?

And there always has to be a certain degree of success, like goodness, before we can ever consider something bad.

It has to have enough relevant features to even be considered a certain type of thing; that has to be there before we can consider.

Because we can talk about goodness in a moral and a non-moral sense.

That’s a good tree.

It’s blossoming.

It has its branches; it's not decaying.

A good squirrel runs and scampers and gathers its nuts, but a bad or defective squirrel could even be said to be missing a leg and can't find an acorn to save its life.

A tree that’s not budding.

But then in the moral world, we feel something similar.

Like a bad person lacks the virtues they ought to have.

So it seems like goodness is when you have the being you ought to have, and badness occurs with a lack of being.

It’s nothing over and above good, right?

So that’s why it’s convertible.

It’s also an attributive rather than a predicative adjective, which is just a fancy way of saying the semantic content of goodness sort of shifts and slides depending on what we’re talking about, right?

So to know what a good squirrel is tells you nothing about what a good tree is, right?

Right, yeah, you have to understand squirrels, trees, or humans.

You have to understand the nature of the thing before you can say that it’s good or bad.

And then you get to God, just as pure, perfect being, as purely actual being.

And goodness really is just the actualization of potential relevant to a particular thing.

God is purely actual, so it’s just going to follow from metaphysical necessity that God is purely and perfectly good, has no wrinkles, lacks privations, defects whatsoever.

So the evil God challenge is just not even relevant to classical theism, right?

So classical theism can be completely unbothered by this type of issue.

Yeah, so it’s like asking, like, Well, how do you know God is good?

That would be like asking back a few, you know, a decade ago or so how the meter was calculated.

The meter was calculated; there’s a bar of like iridium in France that was the standard bar, and this bar was a meter long.

The length of this bar simply determined what a meter was.

So it’s asking, like, I know something’s a meter.

Oh, well, you take out your tape measure.

And well, how do you know the meter bar is a meter long?

Well, because it just is the standard of what it is.

That’s what it is.

Now we use, I think it’s like decaying cesium atoms or something like that, so it’s more precise than the meter bar, which wasn’t exactly a meter.

But the point is, asking why something is good makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense to ask why God is good, because God is goodness.

So it doesn’t make sense to ask why He is good.

Well, He is; that’s what goodness is.

He’s the fullness of being; He doesn’t lack anything.

Why are all mothers parents?

Right?

Well, that statement indicates confusion, right?

Yeah, and also this is why I think it’s so important to talk about method, right?

We don’t think about classical theism just sort of independently as another competitive model of God in worldview comparison in modern philosophy of religion debates.

We think of it as sort of the entailment of a very traditional way of looking at the world—a very traditional way of doing philosophy of nature and metaphysics.

That’s what convinced me.

Now, I think you can put classical theism into these sort of worldview debates, right, and say, Look, it’s a theory with great simplicity.

In fact, it seems like the simplest possible fundamental theory you could get, right?

I mean, what’s going to beat divine simplicity?

Enormous predictive success, all that good stuff, right?

But that isn’t how people thought about it traditionally.

That’s a very kind of new way of comparing worldview paradigms, and that’s fine; that’s interesting.

But it’s far less interesting to me than actually just doing the metaphysics.

And another upshot, Trent, I know you wanted to maybe talk about Euthyphro’s dilemma a little bit as well.

Oh yeah, so that’s the idea with God and morality.

So why is murder wrong?

If it’s wrong because God says so, well, could He have said murder is right?

If He can, He’s like this big cosmic tyrant.

But if it’s wrong because it just is wrong, and well don’t worry—God will always do the right thing—it sounds like there’s something over and above God, a rule book that He checks to see what’s right and wrong.

But if that’s the case, if something’s over and above God, that would be God.

So it seems like we’re in a bit of a dilemma here—it’s called the Euthyphro Dilemma.

Yeah, and this goes back to one of Plato’s famous dialogues: Does God or gods, as it is originally, will something because it’s good, or is something good because God wills it?

For the theists, as you pointed out, like, none of those are particularly attractive because, in one sense, it seems like there’s something sort of over and above God, which most theists don’t want to accept.

And in another sense, it seems to make morality arbitrary, which most people don’t want to accept, right?

It seems like some things just are sort of inherently bad.

So classical theism, again, has resources here.

I think this is sort of like one of those modern objections that’s almost completely irrelevant and just bounces off classical theism like the evil God challenge, right?

Because if we have this convertibility principle and we have God as subsistent being, it’s just going to follow that God is subsistent goodness.

And so that God wills good things is neither arbitrary nor dictated by something over and above God; it’s just God acting in accord with His nature, right?

So the way we split the dilemma, using Plato’s language, is not that we only have two choices to say, Is something good because God wills it?

Or does God will it because it’s good, like goodness is outside of Him?

The way you split the dilemma is that God wills it because He is good, or He is goodness itself.

And so naturally, what He wills automatically will be good in that respect because if God just is perfect goodness and just is the divine will and just is immutable and necessary being, then there could be no question of God willing in accordance with some standard of goodness independent of Him or being arbitrary because God just is the subsistent good itself, right?

And everything acts according to its nature.

The Catechism has a great paragraph to summarize this.

It’s paragraph 271 in the Catechism, talking about God’s omnipotence and how no, He’s not going to become an omnipotent cosmic bully.

It quotes Aquinas, and it says here in paragraph 271: “God’s almighty power is in no way arbitrary.

In God, power, essence, will, intellect, wisdom, and justice are all identical.

Nothing therefore can be in God’s power which could not be in His just will or His wise intellect.

To wrap everything up, Pat, maybe you could just share with us some areas or resources you would recommend for people to learn more about this classical theistic tradition?

And you can shamelessly plug any of your own!

Well, thank you very much!

I mean, there’s so much more to explore here.

I mean, even with divine simplicity, we just have to be very careful to say that, you know, we’re using stretched concepts, right?

Zero bounding and all this language actually comes from Barry Miller, so he would be one resource I would recommend.

If you can get your hands on Barry Miller's work, which is actually really hard to do, unfortunately, he’s brilliant, especially Fullness of Being.

If you want to make sense of traditional commitment to divine simplicity in conversation with modern analytic philosophy, I would point people strongly there.

Another sort of contemporary philosopher who sort of blends the new and the old—traditional metaphysical ideas with contemporary analytic philosophy—would be William Vallicella.

His work is really good.

If you’re interested kind of in the more technical weeds, some good popular-level introductions would be the work of Father Brian Davis, which he recommended, and the work of Eleanor Stump.

She’s got a great book called The God of the Philosopher and the God of the Bible, which not only unpacks the motivations for classical theism but shows you how it is compatible with Scripture.

Right?

And I think that’s a concern of many of these sort of modern models of God; what’s motivating them is they think there’s a tension or incompatibility there.

So if that’s a concern of yours, get Eleanor Stump’s book.

It’s a short little book, The God of the Bible, the God of the Philosopher.

And then I’ve had many conversations on my podcast about some of the technical aspects of this.

I would search for my conversations with Dr. W. Matthews Grant, where we discuss divine simplicity and how it holds up under stress testing different objections to try and break the model in relation to contingent creation or contingent knowledge and stuff like that, and show how robust and durable this model actually is under stress testing, which I think is really important.

He’s got a great book as well on how divine simplicity actually helps to make sense and secure libertarian freedom, which is another, I think, major upshot.

So that’s a lot of stuff.

That’s a fun one!

You could go very deep on these topics, and it’s important to do that.

I recommend for our listeners to check out John DeRosa’s Classical Theism podcast; he has a lot of great interviews there on this subject.

We mentioned Brian Davies.

I teach a class at Holy Apostles College and Seminary, an online apologetics class, and the textbook I assigned for that is Davies' Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion.

That’s a very nice starter on a lot of these questions, so I recommend that for our listeners to check that out.

Pat, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Thank you, Trent!

Oh, and real quick, because you mentioned my other website before, Chronicles of Strength, but I also have a new YouTube channel now called Philosophy for the People, which I co-host with Dr. Jim Madden.

So if you like this type of stuff, that would be the more relevant place to go at this point.

Alrighty!

Thank you so much again, sir, and thank you guys for checking us out.

I hope this was edifying for you all, and I hope that you have a very blessed day.

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