Debates concerning the existence of God typically run aground on prior unresolved metaphysical questions. Any debate with a Thomist about the existence of God turns into an exposition of a number of metaphysical notions – potentiality, actuality, matter, form, essence, existence, motion, cause, and effect.

Skeptics tend to quickly recognize that they are not only being asked to accept the existence of God, but an entire metaphysics. Often enough, the effect is not only a continuing disbelief in God, but an even greater incredulity towards Thomist metaphysics.

If the skeptic is asked not only to believe in an ultimate ground of the universe (i.e., God), but also that the universe is explained by philosophers rather than scientists, they may rightfully decide that the theists premises are more absurd than their conclusions.

This article takes up the question just what metaphysical principles skeptics ought to be asked to accept in the context of arguments for God's existence. Our particular focus concerns the relation between Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics and the modern empirical sciences. Our contention will be that the modern empirical sciences presuppose a latent Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics, and that the history of science verifies the core contentions of Aristotle and St. Thomas. Our approach follows that of the great 20th century philosopher, Bernard Lonergan.

We grant, however, that certain forms of Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics have put themselves in opposition to the sciences by supposing that in addition to the forms of physical things which the empirical sciences grasp, there are also intelligible forms grasped either by the metaphysician or by the ordinary person. For example, in addition to the form of the tulip grasped by the plant biologist, some would assert another form accessible either to the philosopher qua philosopher, or to human beings by virtue of common sense. However, we reject this view as both incompatible with the sciences and mistaking the nature of metaphysics.

We will conclude that matter, form, and existence; act and potency; substance and accident; and being are known tacitly (or operationally) by the empirical sciences and that one cannot be a scientific realist and reject these metaphysical notions.

1. Matter and Form

All human knowledge begins with something unknown to us. What are the celestial bodies? Why do things fall to the ground? How is it that plants grow? Why do we get sick? The empirical sciences provide answers to these "what", "how", and "why" questions.

The march of the sciences follows a predictable cycle.

Level 1: Experience. First, we encounter something we do not understand. This could be the experience of water freezing and melting, observations of retrograde motion, the distribution of prime numbers, or plotted data reported from a particle accelerator.

Level 2: Understanding. Second, we seek to understand by getting a better look, reframing the problem, performing thought experiments, proposing new theorems, etc. That is to say, we formulate possible explanations. We do not simply seek more facts, we seek more facts insofar as they may prompt a Eureka moment that explains a set of facts. We do not seek more data for its own sake, we are after an insight that may be suggested by the data.

Matter and form correspond to experience and understanding in the course of explaining the physical universe. That is, matter corresponds to what is known by scientific observation as needing explanation. Form corresponds to what the scientist articulates as a possible explanation of the data.

The positive role of metaphysics is not to establish particular scientific answers (forms), but primarily to reflect upon the regular, general structure of scientific knowledge, and secondarily on the history and discoveries of the sciences, in order to discover their universal structure and significance.

2. Common sense and scientific understanding

The distinctions between matter and form, representation and understanding demarcate the sensible and the intelligible. Insofar as something is visible or tangible, sensible or imaginable, it remains on the first level. Aristotle distinguishes sensible and intelligible form. Insofar as something may be sensed or imagined, it remains on the level of experience. Conversely, insofar as something is understood, it cannot be seen or imagined.

Take, for example, the triangle. Can one imagine a triangle? Although we can call to mind a triangular shape, one cannot actually imagine a triangle. For a triangle is composed of lines and vertices which have no breadth. But a line or point which has no breadth is visually indistinguishable from emptiness.

Or take mass. Weight corresponds to something feeling heavy or light. But how heavy or light something feels depends on the bodies around it. Mass is classically defined not in relation to the experience of heaviness or lightness, but in relation to force and acceleration. Were it defined in relation to an experienced quality such as heaviness or lightness it could not explain those qualities. That is to say, it is not a descriptive term, but an explanatory term. Explanatory terms are not directly related to any particular sensible experience, but to other terms in an abstract, theoretical framework such as classical mechanics or general relativity.

This distinction between descriptive and explanatory terms corresponds to the levels of experience and understanding. Insofar as a term is descriptive, it is defined in terms (at least partly) of what is sensed or experienced. Explanatory terms cannot presuppose the experiences they are supposed to explain, and so they are abstract. Heaviness is descriptive, mass is explanatory. "Hot" is descriptive; temperature is explanatory. "Fast" is a descriptive term, while acceleration and velocity are explanatory. Six feet tall is descriptive; a thing's coordinates in Minkowski space are explanatory.

The Aristotelian notion of intelligible form displaces the world of common sense. The things we thought most familiar to us become quite strange. The ability to pick out everyday objects such as water, trees, or cows does not grasp what these things really are. In the Aristotelian terminology, when we teach a child "this is the color red" or "this is a cow, and that a horse", we are offering merely nominal definitions. We are explaining the use of words, not the natures of things. We are merely associating words with sensible similarities or family resemblences, we are not understanding things as they are in themselves. Animals, after all, are able to distinguish roses from replicas. But the reality of things is hidden to them precisely because they cannot construct abstract explanatory schemas.

3. Essence and Existence

From the limitations of mere understanding enters the notion of existence. Early modern scientists proposed the existence of an aether to explain the propagation of light. It was a sensible enough idea – it was coherent and had explanatory power – but it turned out not to actually exist. The question of essence and existence, then, is the question of whether what possibly explains the data (i.e., concepts, theories) actually does so, or whether it can be supplanted by a better explanation. Thus, to use the Aristotelian terminology, essence (meaning primarily form) is related to existence as potency to act.

This leads to the notion of pure act – that is, God. If for limited minds essences relate to existence as potency to act (because there is the question whether a more comprehensive act of understanding could displace the current theory), it is possible to hypothesize a complete act of understanding which, as complete, cannot be revised. The primary content of that act of knowledge would be, by definition, purely actual. And that pure actuality is, of course, God. But as yet, this is merely a hypothetical limit case.

4. The full picture

The full picture, then, of the metaphysical elements looks like this

Were we to the complete scientific explanation of our universe, we have three distinct components: that which is grasped in the data as needing explanation (i.e., the matter), that which is grasped initially by an insight and articulated in an abstract theoretical framework which would explain the data (i.e., the form), and that the fact that possible explanation on the second level in fact does explain the data and will not be replaced by a more adequate explanation (i.e., existence).

This division is irrefutable. For insofar as scientists have something to inquire into, insofar as they hypothesize explanations, and insofar as they settle which explanations are sound, they operate on the level of experience, understanding, and judgment. Insofar as knowledge is empirical, scientists must engage all three levels. And insofar as scientific inquiry reaches its objective, there is a component to be known by experience (matter), understanding (form), and judgment (existence).

5. The Existence of God

We have seen that, in the empirical world, scientific realism commits us to the view that things are composed of matter, form, and existence. There is nothing to a thing above what is captured in these categories. The particular content that fills out each of these categories is to be determined by the relevant particular sciences.

Moreover, we have seen that the more general categories of potentiality and actuality apply to matter-form-act composites. If something is merely an aggregate of lower level events, if there is nothing that answers the question "why isn't this just an aggregate explained by lower-level categories?", then there is not a thing but an aggregate of things. Put differently, if there is nothing to understand, there is nothing. (Which is why there cannot be paranormal phenomena without an explanation.)

As matter is what is able to be explained by form, so form is what can explain underlying materials. But just because something could be an explanation does not mean that it is in fact an explanation. To do that, one must identify the conditions which, if satisfied, would render the explanation final. Grasping form as actual, not merely possible, is necessary for a complete act of knowledge. Thus, form, of itself, is in potentiality to existence.

Our purpose has been to show that the metaphysical categories employed by Thomists in arguing for the existence of God are not abstruse philosophical matters, but necessary if empirical sciences can get at the truth. Though their names are perhaps foreign, they are defined in relation to familiar cognitional operations.

To the objection that some Thomists have supposed that formal causes are not the provinces of the sciences, I will simply quote with approval Bernard Lonergan's assessment:

One takes the descriptive conception of sensible contents, and without any effort to understand them, on asks for their metaphysical equivalents. One bypasses the scientific theory of color or sound, for after all it is merely a theory and, at best, probable; one insists on the evidence of red, green, and blue, of shapr and flat; and one leaps to a set of objective forms without realizing that the meaning of form is what will be known when the informed object is understood.

Such blind leaping is inimical not only to science, but to understanding.

So the extent that Thomists wish to lecture scientists on to the "true" nature of time and space, I happily concede that they are not only not advancing understanding of the natural world, but they are misconceiving the nature and role of metaphysics.

I have not addressed the actual arguments for the existence of God. Those arguments have not been made here. However, the basic categories which they suppose cannot be rejected without rejecting science as knowledge. The validity of the basic terms have been established. Physical things are composed of matter, form, and actuality. Immaterial things, if they exist, lack the material component. Non-divine immaterial things can be understood via distinct acts of understanding and judgment, and so they are composed of form and actuality. God, on the other hand, is the primary content of a single act of unrestricted act of understanding, which – it turns out – cannot be distinguished from that act of understanding.

Wheaton College’s decision to suspend a Christian professor who proclaimed that Muslims and Christians worship the “same God” has sparked a debate among Christians. Despite the dogmatic differences between Christians and Muslims, is the same God the object of our worship and belief?

Ours is not the first age in which a Christian culture has clashed with the Islamic world, nor the first in which Western states have lived in fear of violence or occupation. It is not even the first time that Christian university professors overtly influenced by Islamic thought have engendered controversy.

I refer, of course, to the Middle Ages. Many luminaries teaching at medieval Christian universities in the shadows of a militant Islam were strongly indebted to the likes of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn-Rushd (Averroes). Thomas Aquinas, as is so often the case, is a paradigm instance, drawing on Muslim thinkers for fundamental elements of his thinking about God.

St. Thomas, of course, draws heavily on Islamic thinkers for his famous “five ways” to demonstrate the existence of God and for his strong distinction between essence and existence. The affinity, however, goes much deeper than the genealogy of ideas: St. Thomas’ insistence (echoing St. Paul) that God may be known partially through ordinary experience would be completely unintelligible were Christians and Muslims (and pagan philosophers in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions) not referring to the same God.

In fact, in his Summa Contra Gentiles, St. Thomas opens the chapter on the demonstrations for God’s existence by pointing out that not only Catholic teachers, but also “philosophers” (by which he means both pagans like Aristotle and Muslims like Averroes) have already proven God’s existence. In fact, after concluding that there exists a transcendent, immutable, and metaphysically necessary Source of physical, contingent beings, Aquinas concludes without hesitation that “This we call God”—with the “we” including not only Catholic teachers, but also pagan and Muslim philosophers.

In the present controversy, some Christian thinkers have taken up the opposite position, arguing that Muslims do not believe in the “same God” as Christians do, because they deny the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. There is a certain truth to this. Americans who think that our President is well-motivated and those who do not in some sense do not in the trivial sense believe in the existence of the “same” president, as they disagree about certain of his attributes. Yet in the more substantial sense, they clearly are referring to the same person.

The classic philosophical distinction here is the distinction between what we designate (i.e., that to which we refer) and what we signify (i.e., what we mean to say about that to which we refer). For instance, certain medievals believed that Aristotle authored the Liber de Causis. Today, scholars believe it to be a much later work of neo-Platonic metaphysics. Do modern day scholars and the mistaken medievals believe in the same Aristotle? Of course they do. They refer to the same person even if they believe very different things about that person.

Lydia McGrew conflates this distinction when she claims that, because Christians do not believe that God is the author of the Koran, while Muslims do, that therefore Christians and Muslims do not refer to the same God. But this is no more plausible than that those who believe Aristotle authored the Liber de Causis and those who don’t aren’t referring to the same Aristotle. Moreover, McGrew argues that:

“The Muslim, whose religion changes the concept of God in important ways from that of the Judeo-Christian tradition, claims that there is an essential continuity [with the Judeo-Christian concept of God], but the Christian, as long as he remains a Christian and not a Muslim, should reject this.”

No one would dispute the fact that Christians and Muslims do not have the same concept of God. Tertullian and Athanasius did not have the same concept of God either, but that did not mean that they were not referring to the same God. The question is not whether concepts of God differ (they do), but rather whether by those concepts thinkers intend the same (non-conceptual) reality. This is not to deny, of course, that these conceptual distinctions are of the utmost importance, nor is it to say that Christians should be careful to distinguish Christian dogma from that of the Islamic faith.

Peter Leithart advances a similarly mistaken case. He does acknowledge the distinction between what we signify and that of which something is signified. Yet he argues that Islamic and Christian doctrines differ to such a great degree that they could not refer to the same being. He offers this analogy:

“Bob believes in a Thomas Jefferson who was not from Virginia, had no hand in writing the Declaration of Independence, never heard of Monticello, was not the Third President; Fred believes in a Thomas Jefferson who did all those things. As the false believes and misrepresentations pile up, we have to wonder if Bob hasn’t confused Thomas Jefferson with a pretender.”

But this analogy is a bad one, by the lights of classical theism, and for important reasons. We come to know God through his effects, through what he does in the world. But coming to know God differs from the way we learn about persons. In the case of the Liber de Causis, for instance, historians attempt to establish who the author is by proposing a class of possibilities, and then by narrowing that class until—ideally—only one member remains. Historians might start very generally by limiting the class to those kinds of entities that are generally capable of writing philosophy (human beings). (This step is often implicit.) Then, considering the Proclean elements in the work, a historian can narrow the class of possible authors significantly by restricting it to those who lived after Proclus (thus excluding Aristotle). Other evidence may indicate it was written in Arabic. Historians then try to determine from the evidence whether the author is a Christian, Jew, or Muslim. This is just good detective work: establish a list of suspects and winnow it down.

Yet God as conceived by monotheists (which includes, at the very least, Christians, Jews, and Muslims) is not the sort of being who can belong to a class. Being divine is not a matter of having a specific way of being the way humans do; and we do not distinguish monotheists from polytheists by saying that, for the former, there happen to be only one instance of the sort of beings contemplated by the latter. God is not a specific being that stands among other beings. God transcends this sort of being altogether. As Aquinas puts it, God is subsistent being itself and belongs to no genus.

When we reason from effects to their divine cause, then, we could not place God as an individual in a class; and if we intrepid metaphysical detectives do so, whatever entity we find at the end of our investigation will not be God (though it might be a god on the order of Baal).

Because Leithart misses what is distinctive about monotheism, he attempts to equate Islamic worshippers with pagans who worship Baal or Molech. Baal and Molech were deities in the polytheistic sense; that is, powerful beings that were still beings in the world, have a specific way of being, and can belong to a class. But for monotheists, it is not as though there is some type of genus to which YHWH, Allah, Baal, and Molech might belong, only that monotheists believe this set only has one real member (disagreeing about which candidate it is). God simply is pure being, and therefore there cannot (logically or metaphysically) be more than one God. Nor does “one” here mean numerically one, in the sense that there is only one Peter Leithart. God’s “oneness” refers primarily to his metaphysical simplicity (i.e., the fact that no real distinction obtains between God and his attributes, nor is there any composition between act and potency). God is not numerically one, because to be numerically one is to be marked off from other beings by virtue of some finite mode (e.g., being here rather than there). The initial way any monotheist distinguishes God from pretenders to the name is to deny the limited mode of creaturely existence to God—regarding him as the infinite Source of all being.

Leithart concludes with a surprisingly radical claim: “In the New Testament, ‘God’ just means “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ or ‘the Father of Jesus who raised Him from the dead.’ Those who disbelieve the gospel are talking about some other being than this.” This directly conflate the distinction between what we say of a reality and that reality of which we speak, a distinction Leithart acknowledges as valid. More striking is that Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries disbelieved the Gospel, weren’t Trinitarians, and didn’t believe that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob raised Jesus from the dead.

In a subsequent article, Leithart attempts to distinguish Jews from Muslims by citing “countervailing considerations.” But he simply ignores the laws of logic. If those who disbelieve in the Gospel do not believe in the same God as Christians, and non-Messianic Jews do not believe in the Gospel, then it follows ineluctably that non-Messianic Jews do not believe in the same God as Christians do. To avoid this conclusion, Leithart must deny the major premise, which was his whole point. To simply cite “countervailing considerations” amounts to nothing more than an enumeration of the reasons why he should reject the position he was defending in the first place.

This is not to say that there is nothing to be gained from McGrew and Leithart. Both call attention to the importance of attending to God’s revelation in history, and the specificity of God’s speech to mankind. Moreover, both seem quite rightly concerned with a watery ecumenism that would naturally lead many Christians to believe that Christian dogma is not important. McGrew’s particular insistence on the importance of the historical genealogy of doctrine strikes at something that should be central to any comparison of the Muslim and Christian faiths.

But the full truth of the dispute is not merely a technical point in the philosophy of language. Most of the great religious traditions of the world have a remarkable convergence in their belief in a transcendent and absolute Source of the physical world. The fact that they have very different beliefs about this Source, and that these differences are tremendously important does not change the fact that what monotheists disagree about (and worship) is the same God. Knowledge of God, as St. Paul declares, is given through nature, and so naturally manifests even outside the boundaries of the Christian faith. (And, in fact, the position of McGrew and Leithart not only contradicts that of St. Thomas, it entails the rejection of St. Paul.) If Christians are to engage fruitfully with those of the Muslim faith, they should emulate St. Paul and St. Thomas by expounding on beliefs common to monotheism and knowable by reason, while also defending the revelation of God in Christ. Moreover, to non-believers, Christians should be clear that, for all their numerous and critical differences, the monotheism that pervades mankind is deeply united in its conviction that all we have is a gift from the one true God.
 
 
(Image credit: Unsplash))

NOTE: This is the third and final part of a three part series on classical theism by theologian Thomas M. Cothran. Be sure to read part one and part two.

Any defense against Stephen H. Webb’s critique of classical theism must, then, defend some particular form of classical theism that does have an ontology. Webb declares that “Aquinas is the best representative of what is often called classical theism,”¹ and so for the remainder of this article, we will consider whether Webb’s arguments hold as against Aquinas, unless Webb has made clear that the target of his criticism belongs to a different school.²

Aquinas is a hylomorphist. Webb identifies hylomorphism as the doctrine that “all beings except Being itself are composed of form and matter,” which is decidedly incorrect. Neither Aristotle nor Aquinas—hylomorphists par excellance—believed that all beings save one are composed of form and matter. Aristotle taught the existence of a number of separate immaterial substances³ and Aquinas believed that angels were immaterial forms.

But Aquinas does believe that physical things are composed of matter and form. Form refers to any way in which a thing is actually determined. Being green, positively charged, dry, or 6 feet long, or having a location, a certain mass, or subatomic spin—all these are “forms” in the general sense in which Aquinas uses the term. “Matter” simply refers to the potentiality in a thing to take on different forms (in the case of accidental change, such as when an apple ripens) or to the potentiality in a thing to cease existing by having its matter incorporated into something else (in the case of substantial change, such as when an apple is eaten). Matter is then the principle that permits a thing to change and that, in the same stroke, renders the thing liable to extinction.

That matter itself is potential, and not actually anything is a crucial point. And only if one misses this point will Webb’s claim that modern science has overturned the classical understanding of matter be plausible. We know more about the nature of blood and the composition of human tissue than did the ancients or the medievals. We know that the fundamental elements resemble the periodic table more than the fourfold of earth, air, fire, and water. Does this mean we know more about matter? If we discover capillaries in the lungs, striation in muscle tissue, the atomic number of a carbon atom, or the charge of an electron, we have gained knowledge of forms inherent in the world—we have learned something about the way things actually are.

Matter in itself is not actually anything; it is the potential of some thing to change or to cease to be. For this reason, it is wrong to say that carbon is, strictly speaking, matter (though it is material).⁴ Matter refers to the potential to take on different forms. No discovery of modern science overturns this notion of matter—as philosophers such as David Oderberg have pointed out, modern science must actually presuppose this, however tacitly—particularly in studying the basic elements of the universe. To say that a being is material is to say that it is composed of form (actual determinations of the thing) and matter (the potential to take on different determinations). There is no being called “matter”; matter, strictly speaking, is a constitutive principle of material beings.

Because matter refers to that principle in a being which could be otherwise or not at all. No material being exists necessarily, and every material being depends for its existence on parts. Because a statue is made of bronze, there is no necessity that it go on existing. The statue can be melted down and the matter reshaped into something else. Likewise, I am a material being. Some day my matter will be set loose from the human form, and I will cease to be. To be material is in principle to be capable of change and extinction.

Claiming that God is material, then, is to declare God contingent, and consequently to deny that God is a necessary being. Such a move is jarring, of course, because God would be dependent upon not only prior parts, but upon some further necessary being—a being that could not but exist and be what it is.

Conclusion

David Bentley Hart has observed that monotheism and polytheism do not differ by the number of deities they posit, but by what they mean by “divinity.” It was quite common in the ancient world to speak of anything that was intelligent, immortal, and powerful as a god. The revelation of monotheism is not that there is only one of these powerful beings loose in the heavens, but that all beings derive from something not itself a being—at least, a being among other beings. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures assert this ontological difference by dividing all that is into created and uncreated being.

The notion of an infinite cause of finite being that transcends the cosmos believe is signified by the word “God” with a capital “G” (or in Greek, “ho theos,” preceded by the definite article). A being within the world who is distinguished from us by powers such as immortality, greater knowledge, and so on, but who is nevertheless a being in the cosmos is traditionally referred by the word “god” with a lower case “g”, or else been called angels or demons.

Hart notes that the comparatively recent trend of insisting that God is a finite spirit whose existence and personhood are more or less like our own has been called “theistic personalism,” but holds that a better title would be monopolytheism. Monopolytheists assert that there is only one God, but they understand divinity as the ancient pagans did—as simply referring to a powerful spirit within our world of space and time.

Yet one might question the monopolytheist label as descriptive of Webb’s position not because of the “poly” but because of the “mono.” After all, one carbon atom shares the same form as another, but is a different entity because it is composed of different matter. If the eternal Word is essentially material, then he must be a different entity than the Father. Just as I am constituted as a different being than another person by virtue (at least in part) of the difference in what I am made of, so the Father and Son would be different, even if they shared the form of divinity. Or else Father and Son share the same matter, in which case they are but different aspects of the same being. Webb’s view is ineluctably heretical—either polytheistic or modalist. It is no coincidence Webb’s conception of the divine is based on “Mormon metaphysics”; Mormonism is explicitly polytheistic. Accepting the consequences of God’s materiality puts one outside the ambit not only of what is intellectually respectable, but also what is permissible for a Christian to believe.

By now, it should be clear that atheist readers should neither adopt Webb’s criticisms nor confuse his theology with orthodox Christian dogma. And while I have as yet only seen little evidence of the former, there is abundant evidence of the latter. In fact, the new atheists seem insistent that the monopolytheist notion of God is native to Christianity, while the monotheistic notion is some sort of recent academic fabrication. The traditional notion of God as infinite, transcendent, and simple, while neither entailing nor presupposing the doctrine of the Trinity, in fact is necessary for it. The philosophically defensible notion of divinity (the “monotheistic” or classically theist notion) is integral to Christian dogmatics. For this reason, Christians can merrily agree with the attacks of a philosophically dessicated and theologically unsound notion of divinity we too easily find misnamed “Christian.”

NOTE: This is the second of a three part series on classical theism by theologian Thomas M. Cothran. Read part one here.

Stephen Webb not only misstates what classical theists believe, he misstates why they believe it. Consider, by way of example, Webb’s review of David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God. Webb claims that Hart infers “the main tenets of classical theism … from the deceptively simple premise of God’s immateriality.” Webb attributes a similar line of reasoning—namely that “being immaterial, God is not limited in any way”—to classical theists in his book Mormon Metaphysics.¹ But classical theists, including Hart, can (and for the most part do) believe in all manner of immaterial things—angels, concepts—without ascribing to them divinity or infinity. Classical theists, including those Webb cites as representative, simply do not argue that immateriality entails divinity or infinity.²

Webb’s review proceeds to claim that Hart “does not mean that God is literally infinite.” This is quite an odd statement, since an insistence on God’s infinity has been a core theme of Hart’s work for well over a decade. Hart, in fact, clearly and repeatedly insists on a positive notion of divine infinity not only in the Experience of God,³ but also his more substantial Beauty of the Infinite and sundry essays such as “The ‘Christian Infinite.’”⁴

These sorts of misreadings are not limited to contemporary authors. Webb attributes to Plato (among others) the notion that God is “pure being” when famously, for Plato, being is subsequent to the one in the metaphysical order. Webb claims that “Christians worshiped Jesus for several centuries before any of them thought to argue that God created the world out of nothing ….”⁵ In fact, the Old Testament narrative probably presupposes creation ex nihilo⁶, and the doctrine is rather baldly stated in 2 Maccabees 7:28. The doctrine can be found quite early among Christian sources such as The Shepherd of Hermas and Irenaeus’ Against Heresies circa 180 AD.

The result of all of this is that it is quite difficult to find anything salvageable in Webb’s critique of classical theism, since he accurately presents neither what classical theists believe nor the arguments they actually give for their beliefs. Atheist polemicists unfortunate enough to adopt Webb’s account of classical theism would resemble a ragtag legion lost on the wrong continent, without enough of an idea what the foe looks like to identify him in the unlikely event that they someday meet. Webb sometimes abandons even the semblance of rational argument and stoops to accusing classical theists of bad faith, as when he says “for me, [Hart’s] mantra that ‘God is outside of space and time’ is most certainly false, and I think he knows that too.” If there is one thing popular anti-atheists do not need to learn from theologians, it how to make nasty personal attacks.

Why Is God Immaterial?

If classical theists don’t affirm God’s transcendence in bad faith or because they think God is imaginary, what reasons do they have for so overwhelmingly conceiving of God as immaterial? The Christian answer comes quickly enough from Scripture. The Gospel of John stoutly declares that ”God is a spirit,” and, as Jesus himself says, spiritual things “lack flesh and bone.” The Hebrew scriptures define idolatry as the confusion of God with any particular reality on earth, below the earth or in the heavens, the Wisdom literature praises God’s transcendence, and the New Testament indicates the abyss of God’s transcendence through Jesus Christ’s very imminence.

It is unclear whether Webb intends to indict the author of John’s Gospel with those “elite theologians” embarrassed by Christian doctrine. Yet the theological reason that Christians do not believe God to be material does not hinge on this or that text considered in isolation, but on the basic notion of God that emerges from the Scriptures: as the Creator of the universe, the ultimate source and origin of all that has being.

Webb, on the other hand, proposes a material god, a god with a body.⁷ Such a deity cannot be the creator of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, for reasons Philip Cary cites in his review of one of Webb’s books. All material beings depend for their existence on something more fundamental—that out of which they are made. Yet any god who is dependent for his existence on something else is only a proximate, and not an ultimate, source of being.

Take the classic example of a statue. A statue can be made out of bronze while sharing the same form, say, of Richard the Lionheart. The material is not really identical to the form—since the same material can be reshaped to become a pillar or a number of coins—but it is necessary to the statue’s existence. The statue depends on the material out of which it is made, and we rightly speak of the bronze as a cause of the statue. Material entities have material causes.

If God were a material being, then, he would be caused and dependent. God would not be the ultimate origin of all that is; he would himself depend on something more basic. No Christian could affirm this, of course, because it puts God on the side of the caused and the contingent. It is, therefore, straightforwardly the case that asserting the materiality of God is inconsistent with the Christian doctrine of creation.

The Intrinsic Connection Between Classical Theism and Christian Doctrine

Webb also thinks the doctrines of divine immateriality and the Incarnation are ill suited for one another. For example, in “Plato is not Paul” he says “I don’t believe that God is outside space and time for the simple reason that I believe Jesus Christ is in heaven, fully bodied, and ruling over the world.” And indeed, readers unfamiliar with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation might find themselves confused: if Jesus is God and Jesus is a material being, why shouldn’t way say that God is a material being?

Yet for the Christian, this objection runs immediately into problems: if we attribute materiality to God, why not attribute ethnicity to God. Does it belong to God to be semitic? The way that Christians have thought about this answer traditionally has been to say that Jesus had two natures: human and divine, and that those two natures are unmixed. Indeed, the denial of this point places one outside Christian orthodoxy.⁸ Not everything true of Jesus with respect to his humanity can be affirmed straightforwardly of his divinity.

Christians, then, can attribute material being to God in much the same sense as they can attribute to him an ethnicity or being the son of Mary. But this does not commit us to say that God qua God is a material being. The eternal can become united, in history, to the temporal. While perhaps paradoxical, it is obviously not contradictory.

Indeed, it is the notion of a material deity which cannot be reconciled to the doctrine of the Incarnation. Webb’s materialism would mean that the Incarnation would no longer be the singular event in which the infinite and eternal takes up the finite and temporal. It would be simply the reincarnation of a certain extra-terrestrial. Christians, after all, believe in the eternal Logos who took on flesh, not in bad late night science fiction.

The classical theistic notion of God is not only necessary to maintain Christological doctrine; it is requisite for Trinitarian dogma. Webb makes several strange claims on this point. He claims, for instance, that classical theists consider “Jesus Christ identical with God the Father”⁹, when, in fact, any orthodox Christian denies this. Webb veers to the other extreme when he says that “[n]o classical theist has ever given a convincing account of how God can be without parts and yet composed of three persons.”¹⁰ But of course, no orthodox Christian thinks that the divine persons are “parts” of God.

Webb frequently misstates what divine simplicity is understood to be. For example, Webb claims that simplicity and immateriality are equivalent: “divine simplicity can be stated in many ways, but it basically means that God has no parts. Or you could just say that God is immaterial (since anything material can be divided).” Webb’s assumption that simplicity just is the same as immateriality rather obvious errs, of course, in that there are immaterial things that are not simple—such as angels or concepts. Moreover, as William Vallicella has pointed out, Webb’s summary of simplicity is deficient: divine simplicity excludes not only parts, but metaphysical composition between act and potency, thus ruling out any real composition of essence and existence, substance and accident, matter and form, and so on.¹¹

Far from being at odds with the Trinity, the doctrine of simplicity is a necessary component to any sound Trinitarian dogma. There is one God. Yet simplicity, while excluding composition and extension, does not exclude all real relations. Were the persons “parts” of God or distinct accidents that belong to God, the triunity of God would contravene simplicity. However, the persons are subsistent relations. None of the arguments used to establish God’s simplicity would exclude subsistent relations; and, indeed, when the notions of simplicity and subsistent relations are combined we are given a perfectly consistent (though obviously not comprehensive) way of affirming the unity and triunity of God.

If Webb’s theological arguments run afoul both of the historical record and logical coherence, what of his philosophical argument? Is Webb right that classical theism asserts God’s immateriality because it misunderstands the nature of matter?

Webb’s exposition of how the Western philosophical tradition understands matter is, unfortunately, unreliable at best. In the first place, Webb misunderstands what classical theists typically mean by “matter.” For example, he attributes to classical theists the view that matter is “a substance that makes up everything we know, [and] is unknowable.”¹² Yet perhaps the most elementary point about the classical Western understanding of matter and substance is that matter is not a substance.

Webb goes on to claim that the traditional notion that matter is a limiting factor is true “if matter is the inert stuff that is destined to disappear when our souls enter into the afterlife. But what would happen to these assumptions if we thought that matter is more like the fields of energy that animate the whole cosmos rather than incredibly small particles held together by external forces?”¹³ But precious few classical theists think of matter as “incredibly small particles held together by external forces.”¹⁴ Webb’s assertion that classical theists talk about “bare matter in its most elementary form,”¹⁵ wildly conflates the most basic metaphysical categories of theists like Plato, Aristotle, Origin, Aquinas (etc.) are.

But then, classical theism as such entails no particular position on the relation of matter and form (other than their distinction). Indeed, though none of the classical Western traditions actually resemble Webb’s portrait, classical theists do not hold to a single doctrine of what matter is. Being a classical theist does not commit one to any particular Greek, Latin, German, of Indian view of material being. Webb’s attempts at refutation are directed only at his Frankensteinian creation, and do not come near any particular living species of theism.

NOTE: Stay tuned for part three of this series on Friday.

NOTE: This is the first of a three part series on classical theism by theologian Thomas M. Cothran.

Over the last few years, Stephen H. Webb has waged a crusade of sorts against classical theism, especially with respect to its notion of divine transcendence. Webb has authored, by my count, no less than 10 articles on the subject at First Things¹, and similar critiques have also been central to his books Mormon Christianity and Jesus Christ, Eternal God. Perhaps surprisingly, Webb is not an atheist. He is a philosopher and theologian, and a Roman Catholic.

To hear Webb tell it, the core tenets of classical theism are foreign to Christianity, emigres of Greek extraction. Webb concedes that the mainstream Christian view since the Patristic era has been classically theist. He suggests, however, that this consensus was established by “elite theologians” because of their “embarrassment” of more original but less sophisticated Christian doctrines. At this decisive and distant moment in history, elite theologians opted for Plato against Paul.

The classical notion of God which emerges from this Hellenic, Jewish, and Christian synthesis is, on Webb’s account, inconsistent (or at least sits ill at ease) with traditional Christological and Trinitarian dogma. Moreover, classical theism’s insistence on God’s transcendence rests on a scientifically outmoded and philosophically defective view of matter.

Webb therefore levels two distinct charges:

Theological charge: classical theism’s assertion of divine transcendence is incongruent with Christian doctrine.

Philosophical charge: classical theism’s assertion that God transcends matter is based on an antiquated notion of matter.

Although Webb is a religious believer, atheists may be tempted to coopt some of his arguments to the service of anti-theist polemic. If the classical notion of God—that is, God with an capital G, rather some object in the universe—can be eliminated, then the remaining gods will quickly topple with the merciless onslaught of the empirical sciences. If Webb’s critique of classical theism is right, then most mainstream religious traditions have been, at a stroke, debunked—along with the main thrust of the classical Western metaphysical traditions.

And, while atheists will not agree with Webb’s theology, his theological argument that Christianity and classical theism do not agree with one another directly serves the anti-theist cause. For if Webb is right, Christians can be separated from the theistic herd and, deprived of its intellectual resources, made easy prey. After all, if Christians do not subscribe to divine transcendence, then they (unlike classical theists) cannot entirely avoid the stereotyped notion of God as a bearded man in the sky, or a glorified extra-terrestrial.

Faulty notions that originate within Christian theology often migrate to the secular world. For example, the voluntarist notion of freedom—unconstrained choice—originated in debates about God’s omnipotence but migrated to political philosophy with—to my mind—some unfortunate and overlooked consequences. My purpose in this three part series, then, is simply to caution atheists against the effects of taking up certain theological castoffs. The attempt to present classical theism as an academic luxury divorced from any organic connection to living faith runs contrary to both Christian history and the substance of Christian beliefs.

Classical Theism Defined

What is classical theism? Classical theism refers very generally to the way most of the great theological and philosophical traditions have conceived God: as the cause of all finite being, the ground of the good, eternal, immutable, transcendent of space and time, perfect, omnipotent, immaterial, infinite, and omniscient.

These very general lines are, of course, construed differently in the various traditions, but the general picture stands out clearly. Classical theism is perhaps most readily explicable by its negations: God is not a being that has come to be, he does not change, he is not limited by space or time, nor indeed limited in any way. God is not an effect, he does not depend on anything more fundamental. God is not a finite spirit flitting about the cosmos like a ghost; he is not a being differentiated from other beings simply by a greater degree of power or knowledge. God’s mode of existence differs from ours as the infinite to the finite.

This view is, by and large, held by the mainstream of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions; it is the common inheritance of the most influential classical forms of the Western metaphysical traditions; and it may be found by many forms of Hinduism, Taoism, and certain quarters of Buddhism.

By identifying these similarities, however, I certainly do not mean to give the impression that classical theism is a single tradition. It is a post-hoc identification of the convergence on a general sense of what is meant by “God.” Not every classical theist affirms everything I’ve listed (certain Greek thinkers didn’t think of God as infinite, for example.) And even while agreeing on the general marks of divinity, how those are construed differs even within particular religious traditions. God’s omnipotence, even within medieval Catholic theology, was construed very differently by Aquinas and Occam. Careful thinkers avoid reducing classical theism to one of its articulations.

Still less does classical theism entails a particular ontology—whether Platonist, Aristotelian, Thomist, Hegelian, Vedantic etc. There is no “classical theist” theory of being or of matter. Classical theism is a common notion of God abstracted from the great religious and philosophical traditions. It is not a single school of metaphysical thought.

Despite these differences between concrete religions and philosophical traditions, the convergent belief that all finite being depends on an eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, and transcendent source—God with a capital “G”—is strong enough to identify classical theism and to talk about it coherently.

What Does Webb Think Classical Theism Is?

What I have just said about classical theism should be entirely uncontroversial. Unfortunately, Webb’s portrayal of classical theism is tendentious, inaccurate, and often unrecognizable.

Consider Webb’s essay “Is God More Like A Rock Or The Idea of a Rock?” Webb characterizes “classical theism [as] a formidable consensus that includes Plato, Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas.” Webb explains classical theism in terms of the following dilemma:

Is God more like a rock or the idea of a rock? If you had to choose one or the other, which would it be? … Rocks represent matter at its most obdurate state, while ideas transcend matter altogether. Ideas are the proper activity of the intellect. They live in minds, while rocks don’t live at all.

Classical theism takes the option that God is “much more like an idea of a rock than a rock,” because classical theists deny that God is a discrete being in the world. For classical theists, “God is absolutely simple, immaterial, and indivisible…. That makes God much more like an idea of a rock than a rock.”

Classical theists conception of God as more mental than real is accompanied by an eschatology.

All physical things, according to classical theism, will come to an end when God is all in all, because matter, being formless, is the absence of the divine…. We will arrive in eternity to find ourselves in the mind of God. There will be no bodies, or persons, since persons are bodies with their own individual thoughts. Needless to say, God will no longer think about rocks, or even the idea of a rock, since God’s thinking is identical to his creating. Will God even, in the end, think about us?

This description of classical theism is so idiosyncratic that neither Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, nor even Origen would count. Aristotle fails to qualify because he regards the physical world as eternal; Aquinas, Origen,² and Augustine because they, like all orthodox Christians, believe in the resurrection of the body; Plato because he regards pure being as second in the metaphysical order. Indeed, if Webb has mapped out the criteria to be a classical theist, then it appears that “classical theists,” like their God, exist only in the imagination.³

Where, then, does Webb’s “classical theism” come from? Webb has cobbled together notions from a broad variety of thinkers—pagans, Christians, Platonists, neo-Platonists, Thomists,—into a sort of Frankensteinian theism. Webb’s description of classical theism eschatology mixes more or less at random the Christian scriptural tradition (”when God is all in all”) with Plotinian eschatology, Platonic and Aristotelian notions of matter, and elements of subjective idealism. The result is a set of doctrines that bear no organic relation to one another and that is not actually held together by any real thinker. The difficulties and incoherences Webb notices in the resulting Frankenstein results from its piecemeal creation in Webb’s writings, but are not often present in any particular theist’s articulation of his beliefs.

But one does not need to know the ins and outs of the history of metaphysics or the distinction between real and intentional being to know something is wildly off with Webbs’ account. And the initial implausibility descends to patent absurdity upon reflection. Someone who regards something as existing mentally but not really thinks of it as imaginary. When I think of Sisyphus’ stone as having mental but not real existence, I think of it as imaginary. This is not to say that I think of Sisyphus’ stone as mental rather than real and that I also think of it as imaginary. To believe something has mental but not real existence is just what it means to hold something as being imaginary. As with Sisyphus’ stone, so with God. If Webb is right about what classical theists believe God to be, then classical theists advocate belief in a God they themselves think of as imaginary (or at least more imaginary than real).

Some of the trouble seems to arise from Webb’s misunderstanding of how the classical tradition uses the word “Idea” (eidos). Webb is very specific about what he understands “ideas” to be: the sort of things that “live in minds.” Rocks, on the other hand, exist independently of our minds. But this is not at all how classical theists use the term “idea.” “Idea” is a term of art in Greek philosophy. The Platonic tradition uses “idea” to refer to a subsistent form; that is, a form that exists independently of both our minds and of matter. The Oxford Guide to Philosophy, for example, points out that our modern notion of idea as “entities that exist only as contents of some mind … must be distinguished from Plato’s Ideas or Forms, which are non-physical but exist apart from any conscious beings.”⁴

For the Aristotelian tradition, on the other hand, the eidos exists as a form typically (though not always) in composition with matter. In no case does “idea” refer primarily to a concept living in our minds, as Webb thinks.

Webb’s account confuses classical theism with contemporary religious non-realism—namely, the notion that there really is no God outside how we choose to think of the world. When one has conflated Thomas Aquinas with Don Cupitt, one has left the realm of the history of ideas altogether.

NOTE: Stay tuned for part two of this series on Wednesday.

Last December, an article by Daniel Linford entitled "Do Atheists Reject the Wrong Kind of God? Not Likely" appeared at Scientia Salon. Certain recent "popular books,” according to Linford, have advanced a "mystical" notion of God, arguing that contemporary atheists have directed their disbelief only toward "smaller" conceptions of the divine. Three contemporaries are singled out: Karen Armstrong, John Haught, and David Bentley Hart.

On what Linford denominates the "mystical" view, God is radically transcendent, not a being within the cosmic order, and cannot be circumscribed by human language. Many of the atheist assaults are directed against a God who is, more or less, a being among beings, and a person much like us. Linford believes that sophisticated thinkers have sought to outflank such arguments by moving to higher ground, positing a God who escapes our language and ways of thought.

But the higher ground strategy fails, according to Linford, for three reasons. In the first place, it is unclear (to Linford) why God must transcend our language and our concepts, rather than having some other sort of transcendence. Instead of expanding on this objection, Linford merely directs the reader to arguments made elsewhere by Alvin Plantinga.

The second reason the retreat to mysticism fails, according to Linford, is that God’s revelations to us cannot be trusted if we cannot really know God’s character for truthfulness. After all, if we must deny that God is good or true in any sense that we can recognize, we can't very well claim that our defective notion of God's goodness or truthfulness precludes divine trickery (for leading one to err is precisely what a defective understanding of something does).

As a third ground for rejecting the notion of a radically transcendent God, Linford claims that God's absolute unknowability deprives us of any criteria with which to determine what phenomena would count as evidence for God. In the case of a more anthromorphic God—a God who is good like us, compassionate like us, thinks like us, and so on—we could know what would count as evidence for his activity. If we know what God is like, we can know what God is likely to do. But if we cannot know God's nature, then we cannot know what God would do. We could not determine in advance what effects such a God would render in the world, and therefore, could not know what to look for.

I suspect some readers will find these arguments puzzling on their face. I do. Who, for instance, thinks that assertions of God's transcendence of space and time, the web of language, or finite minds is limited to mystical theology? In fact, the vast majority of the great theistic traditions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, many forms of Hinduism, certain forms of Buddhism, the classical philosophical tradition, and so on—regard God as transcendent in precisely such a sense. The misapprehension that belief in God's transcendence is a recent concoction from university educated theologians who have modified theology to their more sophisticated tastes—or to escape atheistic criticism—is almost as widespread among popular atheistic tracts as the notion divine transcendence is in the theology, spirituality, scriptures, etc. of the great theistic traditions. Aside from the Mormons who doggedly visit my home with some regularity, I know of no religious believers who believe God to be a finite spirit within the imminent order—with the probable exception of the aberrant (historically speaking) tradition of theistic personalism.

But these are mere quibbles compared to the real difficulty with Linford's case. Linford confuses the claim that what God is, God's essence, cannot be captured in language with the claim that we can have no knowledge of God whatsoever. Put in a more technical vocabulary, Linford confuses the claim that earthly minds cannot have quidditive knowledge of God’s essence with the claim that we cannot have any knowledge of God.

Over and over again, one finds Linford supposing that God is powerful or loving "in no way that we can understand ...," or that God's goodness "cannot be understood by finite humans," or that if "the mystical theologians wish to say that God is truthful and trustworthy ... this would involve knowing things about God's goodness which the mystical theologian maintains we cannot know."

But do mystical theologians claim we know nothing about God? Let's consider the example of St. Thomas Aquinas, apparently regarded by Linford to be a mystic. Linford claims that Aquinas believes that "we do not even know what it means to say that God exists," and he cites the Summa Theologica Ia, Q. 3, prologue as proof. Such a claim seems, to anyone who has read Aquinas, misleading at best. The prologue Linford cites runs as follows:

"Once we have ascertained that a given thing exists, we then have to inquire into its mode of being in order to come to know its real definition (quid est). However, in the case of God we cannot know His real definition, but can know only what He is not; and so we are unable to examine God’s mode of being, but instead can examine only what His mode of being is not….
 
By excluding from God certain things that do not befit Him, e.g., composition, change, and other things of this sort, it is possible to show what His mode of being is not. So, first of all, we will inquire into His simplicity, by which composition is excluded from Him (question 3). And because among corporeal things the simple ones are imperfect and mere parts, we will inquire, second, into His perfection (questions 4-6); third, into His infinity (questions 7-8); fourth, into His immutability (questions 9-10); and fifth, into His oneness (question 11)." - ST Ia, Q. 3, Prologue (Freddoso Trans.)

The very text that Linford cites as evidence that "we do now even know what it means to say that God exists" says that we can know that God exists, is metaphysically simple, that he is perfect, infinite, and one. Linford's unwary readers might, I think, feel misled. If we know nothing of God, how can we know God is simple or infinite? The answer is that Aquinas hardly believes we don’t know what it means to say that God exists, but rather that we don’t comprehend God’s essence. This sort of misleading conflation is foundational for Linford's whole argument.

Such logic fails even for our finite, worldly knowledge. No one would say, for instance, that the pre-moderns knew nothing of water, even though they did understand its essence (H₂0). Nor did the ancients grasp the essence of the stars, but they could nevertheless predict celestial movements. One can lack knowledge of the essence of a thing while still observing many of its properties, characteristics, effects on other things, and so on. One can know quite a bit about something without grasping the thing’s essence.

Linford's mistake seems to come from a misunderstanding of how negation works in theology (mystical or otherwise). He recognizes the alternation between apophatic and cataphatic movements briefly, but misses what is going in the dialectic. One can affirm, for example, that God is like the sun (in that he brings life) but then deny that God does so as a physical entity without going back to square one. The original affirmation is preserved; its limitations denied. Or again, to affirm that God is good, but not good as we are (as relatively fragile beings that must achieve perfection or beatitude from a certain poverty in our being) does not simply negate the whole of the original sense of God's goodness. It only negates the limitations in the original sense, while preserving the affirmation.

Perhaps this sounds more of the soft strains of poetry than the more substantial power of reason. Linford's primary target is Karen Armstrong—though he cites others, such as David Hart and Denys Turner—and Armstrong does sometimes overemphasize the apophatic way beyond what is metaphysically reasonable. However, the central insight that God is radically transcendent, not an entity in the cosmic order, etc. is not only the cornerstone of mainstream theism, it is eminently susceptible rigorous metaphysical accounts. By way of illustration, let us reconsider Linford's three objections.

Response to Linford's First Objection

Linford's first objection to the transcendence of God is that it is unclear why "God has this sort of transcendence—the sort where we do not possess words adequate to describe God—and not some other." Yet, it is immediately and abundantly clear why God—at least the God of classical theism—transcends the sense of ordinary words. Our language is adapted for finite entities and their relations. When we say X is Y, for example, we generally mean that some determinate thing, a this or that, has some relatively determinate property. Gold is yellow, rather than some other color, for example. Ordinary language relies on the finite determinations of finite things.

We use language, then, in light of the finite mode of things, their properties, and their relations. But God—what the great theistic traditions mean by God—is not finite. God is qualitatively infinite, meaning that his nature is not limited or qualified in any way. If there is a God, then, it is perfectly clear why he would transcend our ordinary linguistic habits. The inadequacy of language to express God’s nature follows straightforwardly from the ontological difference between finite and infinite being.

Response to Linford's Second Objection

Linford's second objection is that the restrictions of our knowledge of God on which the "mystical" theologians insist render any revelation unreliable. If we cannot understand the truth or goodness of God, how can we appeal to God's goodness or truthfulness to secure the authority of revelation?

It will be immediately evident to the reader that this again trades on the conflation of essential knowledge, or perhaps perfect knowledge, and non-essential, or perhaps imperfect knowledge. I know hardly anything about tapirs, and certainly don't grasp precisely what it is that makes tapirs tapirs, but I know they do not read Shakespeare. Or, to use a previous example, though premoderns did not understand water in its essence, they knew that it existed and what it could be expected to do. Similarly, we may not fully grasp God's goodness, but this hardly means we have no idea of God's goodness or what it means for us. Our notion of God’s nature can be inadequate as essential knowledge, but nevertheless more than enough to ensure the trustworthiness of revelation.

Response to Linford's Third Objection

Linford's third objection is only slightly more substantial than the first two. Since we do not know what God is in himself, then—so Linford argues—we cannot know what would count as evidence for God. Were "made by God" coded into the genetic code of living beings, we could not use this as evidence of God's existence unless we know that God is the type of deity who would do such a thing. This objection, like the second, conflates essential knowledge with accidental knowledge, and fails for the same reason.

This objection is interesting, though, because it provides an opportunity to illustrate how we can reach negative knowledge of God. Consider the following argument from contingency by way of illustration. Note that by “contingent being,” I mean any being whose essence does not explain its existence.

Premise 1: only contingent beings have a restricted mode of being (i.e., have a determinate, finite, way of existing, e.g., existing this way rather than that).

Premise 2: the existence of a contingent reality caused by a set (whether finite or infinite) of solely contingent realities is inexplicable.

Premise 3: nothing exists inexplicably.

Premise 4: a non-contingent cause must be posited to explain the existence of a given contingent thing (from premises 2 and 3).

Premise 5: there can be no more than one being with an unrestricted mode of being.

Conclusion: there exists one infinite (i.e., unrestricted) being who causes contingent things to be (from 1 and 4).¹

I hasten to add that this argument won't be compelling without auxiliary arguments to establish the premises. The point is to see how an argument for God can move from the existence of contingent beings to the existence of a qualitatively infinite, absolute being (or beings) negatively. If the premises are defensible, one can infer the existence of an infinite being without ever needing to conceive of the essence of that infinite being, simply from the inadequacy of finite being's ability to account for itself. If it is evident from a consideration of the finitude of contingent beings that contingent beings cannot account for their existence, then we can infer (by negation) the need for non-finite, non-contingent being.

On such an account, it would be clear what would count as evidence (indeed, conclusive evidence) for God’s existence: the existence of any contingent, finite thing. And this without the need to grasp God's essence, except apophatically—understanding God as neither finite nor contingent. And, indeed, this "negative way" is often how God's simplicity, infinity, perfection, and absoluteness are traditionally established.

Conclusion

Well, I have complained that Linford has made elementary mistakes about divine transcendence. What constructive suggestions have to offer? How might the interested reader get a foothold in the notion of divine transcendence?

Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses is a wonderful account of the ascent to God by apophatic spiritual practices, using the story of Moses as a metaphor. Readers interested in learning about the more Eastern, mystical notion of God would do well to start there. For those seeking a more philosophical account, Pseudo-Dionysius' Divine Names and Mystical Theology are a wonderful statement of the metaphysics of the East.

Those who prefer a more familiar philosophical style could consult W. Norris Clarke's The One and the Many for a lucid argument for the existence of God using the Thomist categories of essence and existence. Clarke both argues for the existence of God and offers a clear account of the relation of the finite to the infinite. For the more advanced reader, Erich Przywara's recently translated Analogia Entis is perhaps the best statement of God's transcendence. Przywara employs Thomist categories but engages with philosophers such as Husserl and Heidegger, who still loom large on the philosophical scene.
 
 
(Image credit: Telegraph)