The authors make several points that
are not only fascinating, but also contribute greatly to a rich conception of
God. First, they rightly note that several of God’s attributes serve to enhance
the others; it is suggested that one is needed in order to describe the other.
They provide the illustration of God’s omnipotence and His omniscience by
writing, “Arguably, a being without omniscience would have less power than one
with omniscience. The attributes of God . . . form a coherent whole” (185).
This insight allows the Christian to explain why it can be thought that God has the particular attributes He
does.
Taliaferro and Marty are not
intending to delve into every single challenge that has been or could be
leveled against the coherency of God. The scope of their essay is to defend the
coherency of this conception of God and His interconnected properties as they
relate to six areas: “necessary existence, incorporeality, essential goodness,
omnipotence, omniscience, and eternity” (185). Their goal is to show that each
of these areas survives popular attempts to show logical contradiction.
For the uninitiated reader, the
authors do an excellent job of explaining what it means to be logically
coherent. If it is possible that some thing exists or obtains, then it is
coherent (186). The person who wishes to understand whether or not the concept
of God is coherent must understand both logical consistency (being free from
internal contradiction) and certain metaphysical concepts, like what it means
to be a person, possess certain properties, and so on.
The discussion on incorporeality is
helpful as well. Incorporeality is the idea that God is not literally
materially embodied. While Christ was incarnate, it was not a case of God’s
being identical with a particular body. However, some philosophers object that
an incorporeal agent is a “contradiction in terms” because every idea that is
coherent about every agent is about a material or embodied agent, not an
incorporeal one (189). The correct response is to show that while a property
may be completely common (so as to be universal among all known examples), it
is not necessarily the case that such a property is essential for that being.[1]
Another interesting objection
offered is that such talk about incorporeal agents is meaningless because it is
not subject to scientific investigation or testing. The authors’ response is to
distinguish between intentional and nonintentional explanations of events. For
them, science can only concern itself with nonintentional explanations.
Intentional explanations would include things such as values, designs, and
purposes (whereas nonintentional explanations lack these facets) (191-93). By
showing that science cannot account for intentional explanations (like the
reading and writing of a book), they show that science cannot rule out a priori an incorporeal agent such as
God.
Their discussion on omnipotence and
the various puzzles that have been thrown at it may be the best section in the
essay. They consider three sets of arguments against omnipotence, including the
problem of the stone. What makes this section so good is that instead of
conceding ground to the objector (by postulating that perhaps God can perform evil acts), they develop an
underlying principle of God-ness that undercuts all such objections as these. They claim: “the ability to do evil
is not a power that is proper to a maximally excellent being” (197). When
applied in conjunction with God’s not being able to do a logical contradiction
(since, like evil, it is not something to be done), the contentions that God
cannot be omnipotent melt away.
Finally, their discussion about
omniscience affords several answers to a couple of major objections. The first
is the objection that divine foreknowledge entails that no future contingents
are free. The authors argue from the symmetry of the past and our knowledge of
it. They claim, quite rightly, that our knowledge of the past does not
undermine the free aspect of those actions, so why would it in the future as
well (198)? The next objection rests on the idea that in order to be
omniscient, one must have experiential knowledge of colors, and that God, being
incorporeal, could not have this experience, and thus does not know the concept
of red. They challenge this assumption by stating that it is surely possible
for humans to understand certain concepts without experiencing them, and so it
would be for God as well (200-01).
While this was an excellent essay
overall, there were a few issues that could have been treated better. First, the
discussion on necessary existence is bound to confuse the average layman. This
is because the authors did not distinguish between an internal critique and an external
critique. Most of the section deals with why Dawkins cannot claim that the
universe is necessarily existent (as God is), but the actual treatment of the
following objection is short. The objection is that we can conceive of a
universe without God, so that God really is not necessarily existent. The
seemingly obvious reply is to state that what the objector is doing is
epistemically possible (that is, for all he knows, the state of affairs of
God’s nonexistence and the universe’s existence is possible), but not
metaphysically so. In order to show it is metaphysically possible, the objector
has to have “an argument that God’s existence may be known to be impossible”
(188). While they do toss this bone, many readers are not prone to understand
the thinking behind this nor the brief discussion following that focuses on
conceiving of God’s existence. While I agree with their conclusions, the
average reader is likely to think this is some verbal sleight of hand because
of the lack of explanation.
Second, the authors’ discussion of
the problem of evil was more or less waved away as a concern but not one they
had space to address. While it is appreciated that the problem of evil would be
an essay unto itself, surely they could have discussed some part of it or
sketched a brief solution for one or two pages. To their credit, they do appeal
to a couple of solutions, but these solutions are literally given in name only.
While the section on omnipotence was
quite good, I thought they might have missed an extra opportunity to show why
the particular objections were faulty. One such objection included “Molech,” a
being that is just like God but who lacks essential goodness (196). It would
seem that such a being is not even logically possible. This is because both God
and Molech would be necessarily existent. Both of them would share the property
of creative ultimacy. Creative ultimacy would entail that all beings are under
the creative control of the one who possesses this property. It would then
follow that both God and Molech
possessed this property, meaning both God and Molech would be under the
creative control of each other. This would mean that both God and Molech were
actually contingent, and neither of them were necessarily existent. This means
that, as an internal critique of coherence, Molech fails (on incoherence
grounds, ironically).
Next, although they did a good job
explaining coherence itself to the reader, they did have one misstep. In
attempting to explain metaphysical concepts, they introduced the idea of a
person without a body, claiming this “is not a bona fide possibility” (186). Why think this is so? God is a
person, and yet, as a being, He is not embodied.[2]
Even if this is so, this is such a confusing example that the reader may be
distracted by this element.
Finally, the discussion on God’s
eternality seemed to be quite weak. While they may or may not be correct, it
seemed their response to the simultaneity objection was question-begging. The
objection is supposed to show that God cannot be eternal (where eternal means
timeless), and yet their response is that God is not temporal (which is to say
timeless, which is to say eternal). It would not help any reader struggling
with the coherency of God’s eternality to resolve the issue.
The essay by Taliaferro and Marty set the tone for the
rest of the section on the coherence of theism. Their goal was not to answer
every objection, nor was it to deal with every attribute of God. Rather, their
goal was to take six of the most well known attributes of God and answer the
most popular objections against their coherency. While at times their analysis
seemed incomplete or even misleading, the majority of it was both well written
and insightful. They did accomplish their goal quite well. This essay would be
recommended for a popular audience who was mostly unfamiliar with Christian
responses to these problems. It should only be used as a springboard into a
deeper investigation into these issues (as I believe the authors both
understood and intended).
[1] Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Eugene, OR:
Wipf and Stock, 2001), 63.
[2] While God the Son is surely
embodied, the Triune God certainly was not.
