The Metaphilosophy of Religion: Classical Theists versus Theistic Personalists, I

A certain narrative pervades natural theology, particularly in Catholic quarters. This narrative is that analytical philosophy of religion, though greatly beneficial in resuscitating the intellectual respectability of theism, has lead philosophers down a blind alley by introducing a substantially false understanding of God termed by critics ‘theistic personalism’. This position, held by the majority of analytical theists, especially Protestants, stands opposed to and serves to obscure the traditional understanding of God known as ‘classical theism’, which has been standard from Plato to the early modern period. I hold that excess focus on this narrative has obscured a more fundamental dispute within early analytical treatments of God.

Unfortunately, classical theists have not always been the most clear in defining exactly what theistic personalism consists of beyond the allegation that it anthropomorphises God by making the deity an instance of the kind ‘person’¹. Criticisms of theistic personalism often make use of rhetoric accusing proponents of that position of making God ‘a mere demiurge’, a ‘super-human’ or ‘a being alongside other beings’. The allegation is that along with the sin of anthropomorphism the theistic personalist fails to adequately capture God’s ultimacy or status as the ‘ground of being’, that God is not ‘an X but Xness itself’.

There is something behind these claims but first we should tease them apart from another set of allegations and the metaphilosophical narrative that goes along with them. Classical theist criticism of theistic personalism is not identical with the allegation that this negative anthropomorphic/demiurgic picture of God follows from the abandonment of the analogical theory of divine language. This is the narrative of Radical Orthodoxy, which blames Duns Scotus for the ‘apocalypse of being’ leading ultimately to some Nietzschean death of God scenario². Classical theism itself does not commit one to such claims (in fact most classical theists, yours truly very much included, are proud to name Scotus as one of the great representatives of their tradition).

Instead the classical theist criticism is more reasonably taken to be that theistic personalists reject many of the attributes pre-modern philosophers considered part and parcel of the divine nature, and which are needed for an adequate understanding of God. Prime examples of these would be immutability, timelessness, and simplicity³. Taking our cue from Edward Feser’s characterisations here theistic personalism could be defined as theism with:

1. God is an instance of a kind (e.g. person).

2. God is not simple (i.e. denial of divine simplicity).

Whilst one definitely sympathises with the weak and often misinformed objections to some of the properties classical theists attribute to the deity (the insinuation that classical theists thought God was some giant reified existential quantifier for instance), the above criticisms start to lose their clarity upon analysis. Added to this is the difficulty, to be explored in future posts, that the scholastics themselves were by no means unanimous in what they took as the right way to interpret these questions.

Take the first one, that God is an instance of a kind. This is taken to mean that God exemplifies the property ‘being a person’ just as humans, Martians and angels do. Unless we try to sneak in a stipulation for analogical predication, the problem with God being an instance of a kind is surely that God’s nature is partially dependent on a universal, and not a very exclusive one at that. This however depends on a realist understanding of kinds. It's exactly these worries (i.e. that God’s ultimacy is compromised if He is perceived as dependent on abstract entities) that have motivated quintessential theistic personalist philosophers such as William Lane Craig and his followers to abandon realism in favour of nominalism about universals. God and creatures share no property in common—because there are no properties to share—though certain propositions can be said to be true both of God and creatures in a univocal way. These individuals would say they are doing just as much as classical theists to safeguard God’s status as the ground of being.

As to the second claim, that God does not have metaphysical or mereological parts (the further thesis that God is identical with His Existence is a specifically Thomist addition) this depends on what ontology and theory of mereology one adopts. For instance someone who is an ostrich nominalist and mereological nihilist might see themselves a proponent of that view of the deity, since on their theory no fundamental entity has either parts or properties⁴. Likewise for someone who endorses a coarse-grain account of properties on which all co-extensive properties are identical (for such an account would make the Divine Attributes necessarily identical just as it would triangularity and trilaterality).  Similar explanatory claims can be made by other positions, e.g. those who hold that God simultaneously creates the property-universals He exemplifies.

Nowadays it’s an acknowledged fact that earlier analytical philosophers of religion have failed to understand divine simplicity and similar theories because they paid little attention to the ontological framework within which the scholastics worked⁵; this is correct but the sword cuts both ways—alleged theistic personalists can claim philosophers of a scholastic persuasion have ignored the differing metaphysical accounts at work and in a fit of pique stipulated that only their chosen ontologies can account for these facts about God.

As a classical theist, I think there is something important about the idea of divine simplicity which the above responses miss—certainly one feels God ought to be as simple as possible, just as He ought to be as powerful as possible. Now, of course ‘possibility’ here cannot to be taken in the metaphysical sense, since all of the individuals will claim God is as simple as metaphysically possible given the relevant ontologies, so should probably be taken in an epistemic sense to mean that it's one of the points for or against a given metaphysical account of deity in as far as it goes to satisfy this sense of ‘ultimism’. To put it in as theory neutral a way, the intuition the classical theist is trying to articulate is that all of the separate divine attributes are in some sense reducible to, or at least grounded in, a deeper unique truth about God. It's wise to undertake pursuit of such intuitions with caution, so one does not commit oneself to a problematic ontology solely for an inflated account of some attribute (the same point applies to theist personalists who embrace nominalism). To give a parallel: few philosophers would be willing to take up Cartesian modal voluntarism or contingency in mathematics on the grounds it made God’s omnipotence all the more impressive.

Unlike simplicity or omnipotence there is another divine attribute that cannot be conceptually weakened, for risk of losing both claims to ultimacy and attendant proofs in natural theology, one that was subjected to heavy attack in the early years of analytical philosophy. It shall be the subject of the second half of this entry.

Footnotes

¹. Conversely analytical philosophers, at least to start with, have been excessively hostile to classical theist claims. For instance thinking a few pejoratives sufficient to dismiss divine simplicity (Quentin Smith) or offering alarmist rhetoric about how that doctrine is incompatible with the personal God of Scripture (Dale Tuggy).

². For examples of the worst excesses of that narrative complete with references see the series of posts labelled ‘Cambridge Phantasists’ on the Smithy blog.

³. The locus classic of such criticisms is normally taken to be Alvin Plantinga’s Does God Have a Nature?, which contains extensive criticisms of divine simplicity albeit re-construed along metaphysical lines its author finds palatable. Indeed, the theist personalist account of God most classical theists have in their mind combines that put forward in this work and Plantinga’s earlier Nature of Necessity. As shall be discussed later, this excess negative focus is unfair and obscures the importance of Plantinga’s work in an area of great importance for classical theists.

⁴. Although William Lane Craig holds to a more sophisticated ‘strong’ nominalist account and does not as far as I know endorse mereological nihilism, he attempts to give a similar gloss on divine simplicity here.

⁵. This is partially due to Nicholas Wolterstorff’s essay ‘Divine Simplicity’. Wolterstorff’s argued that the constituent ontology of scholastics was so different from the relational ontology of many philosophers working today that both parties risked talking past one another.