Other emotions such as anger and sorrow cannot. As such they can be literally ascribed to God although the mode in which God experiences them differs from that in which we do so.
God's love and joy are purely active emotions, qualifications of his will. Our love and joy, on the other hand, are both actions and passions, partly voluntary and partly involuntary reactions of our animal nature. Anger and sorrow can be appropriate, and hence good-making, qualities of the person who experiences them. But they are not pure perfections because they entail perturbation and suffering. They cannot, then, be literally ascribed to God. Even so, compassionate sorrow differs from anger.
When God acts as a justifiably angry person would we can ascribe anger to God metaphorically. But nothing in God no internal modification of God corresponds to the feeling or emotion of anger in us. While Aquinas's solution is superior to those of Anselm and Bernard, it does have problems. Aquinas's distinction between anger and compassion may be specious, since it seems that both could be treated in the same way.
Since God's righteousness or love of justice is a pure perfection we can ascribe it to God literally. God's anger can then be interpreted as the way God's righteousness is apprehended by those who have rejected him or recognize that he has been rejected.
God not only acts as a justifiably angry person would act, those acts are the expression of an internal modification namely, his love of justice which is a real property of God's own being. A more important problem, though, may be the fact that the emotion or feeling state which grounds God's acts of compassion, according to Aquinas, isn't literally tinged with sorrow. The most important point in the present connection, however, is this.
The debate between modern theists like Hartshorne, on the one hand, and classical theists like Aquinas, on the other, revolves around the following question: Can a maximally perfect being be touched by suffering? Hartshorne thinks it must since a maximally perfect being would be maximally responsive to the joys and sorrows of others, and would therefore grieve with all who grieve.
Our second example of how a dispute over what constitutes maximal greatness can affect one's concept of God is furnished by a disagreement between the great Vishishtadvaitin, Ramanuja, and the founder of the Dvaita school of Vedanta, Madhva — Vishishtadvaita maintains that God is related to the world as the soul jivatman is related to its body.
They can neither exist nor act apart from them, and they can only be understood in relation to them. The point of saying that bodies are related to souls as accessory to principal is that bodies are also evaluatively dependent on their souls—they have no worth apart from their relation to them. To say that the world is God's body, then, is to say that God is the world's support, controller, and principal. Just as bodies are absolutely dependent on their souls, so the world is absolutely dependent on God.
And, in fact, the dependence in the latter case is even more complete than it is in the former. For souls need bodies to accomplish their purposes whereas God does not need the world. The world's dependence on God, on the other hand, is complete. The upshot is that the body-soul relation is only fully exemplified by the world-God relation.
The world is absolutely dependent on God; God in no way depends upon it. It is worth noting that classical western theism's principal objections to the claim that the world is God's body—that it makes God dependent on the world and subject to its imperfections—aren't relevant to Ramanuja's position. For, in the latter's view, not only does the dependence relation run only one way [from body to soul and not vice versa], but the body's defects do not affect the soul.
Ramanuja and Madhva were both theists, both Vedantins, and both Vaishnavas that is, both identified God with Vishnu , sharing a common allegiance to the same set of scriptures and engaging in similar religious practices. Yet in spite of these similarities, the flavor of their views is quite different. Inconsistency with the divine majesty is itself the criterion of what is unworthy of acceptance.
For example, while Ramanuja has a very strong doctrine of grace, he appears to allow some room for libertarian free will. Madhva does not. Because of the eternal difference in their qualities and potentialities, souls have different destinies.
Thus Dvaita is one of the few Hindu schools with something like a doctrine of eternal damnation. Some souls are permanently bound to this world with its endless cycle of births and rebirths.
It should be noted that Madhva's view was modified by some of his followers. Thus Vyasa Raya [—] insisted that because innate aptitudes for good or for evil are beginningless, they are not caused by God.
Madhva's most striking departure from Ramanuja, however, is his absolute rejection of the notion that the world is God's body. In Madhva's opinion, the Vishishtadvaitin view compromises God's transcendence and independence.
The relation between God and the world isn't a relation between a soul and its body but between a sovereign will and its effect. God's being and activity explain why spatio-temporal things have the properties they do but doesn't explain why they exist in the first place.
Ramanuja, by contrast, thinks that it does. Because bodies depend upon souls for their existence, and the world is God's body, the world depends upon God for its being as well as for its qualities. The world's dependence upon God is thus more complete in Ramanuja's theology than it is in Madhva's. Why, in particular, does Madhva adopt a position which seems inconsistent with his emphasis on God's absolute sovereignty?
The answer appears to Madhva's equally emphatic insistence on God's transcendence and independence. The substratum is the cause of a thing's being or existence; the process of shaping or forming is the cause of its being a particular kind of being or existent, that is, of its having one set of qualities rather than another.
Thus, the potter's activity causes the clay to be a pot ; but the clay gives the pot its being or existence. If God were the cause of the existence of the world as well as the cause of its qualities that is, if he were its material as well as its efficient cause , then God would be the world's substratum. As he in a sense is for Ramanuja. Prakriti is the world's substratum, and prakriti, according to Ramanuja, is an aspect of God's body. But this is inconsistent with God's transcendence and independence of the world.
If God is truly perfect, then, he cannot be the cause of the world's existence. This example is particularly instructive because it illustrates how an emphasis on different aspects of God's perfection the absolute dependence of everything other than God on God, on the one hand, and God's transcendence and independence, on the other can cause theologians with otherwise quite similar views to draw very different conclusions about God.
Are limited deities counter examples to this entry's claim that religious consciousness tends to construe ultimate reality as maximally perfect? Most apparent counter examples are merely apparent. The limited deity is either not thought to be ultimate or it isn't really believed to be limited that is, less perfect than a being could possibly be.
The following two examples illustrate these possibilities. Being perfectly good, the demiurge wishes to communicate his own goodness. Using the Forms as a model, he shapes the initial chaos into the best possible image of these eternal and immutable archetypes. The visible world is the result. The demiurge is the highest god and the best of causes. He is nonetheless limited. For the material he shapes isn't created by him and, because it is disorderly and indeterminate, partially resists his ordering.
The demiurge is not ultimate, however, since his ontological and axiological status is lower than that of the Forms, especially the Form of the Good. Plato's concept of the demiurge thus isn't a counter example to the thesis that religious consciousness tends to construe ultimate reality as maximally perfect. The God of process philosophy illustrates the second possibility. While differences among process philosophers make generalizations difficult, its critics accuse its God of being a mere demiurge, one power among others who, while influencing everything, controls nothing.
Whether God, rather than the process of becoming of which God is a part, is ultimate in this system is a moot point. More important for our purposes, however, is the fact that the God of the most theologically interesting process philosopher is thought to be maximally perfect. Charles Hartshorne agrees that God's power and knowledge are limited.
While God influences everything that transpires he neither determines nor controls it. Nor does God know with any certainty just what the future holds in store. In his view, persuasion or influence is a better or more perfect form of power than control, and knowledge of the contingent future is metaphysically impossible. Although God's power and knowledge are limited, they are as perfect as power and knowledge could possibly be. If a maximally perfect being is the most perfect possible being, then God is maximally perfect.
John Stuart Mill's picture of God, on the other hand, may constitute a genuine counter example to the thesis that conceptions of God are attempts to articulate the concept of a maximally great ultimate reality.
But because nature's contrivances are imperfect, because omnipotence could altogether dispense with contrivances, and because organisms are principally contrived for the mere persistence of the individual or species and not for pleasure or happiness, the evidence not only fails to point to a being of unlimited power, intelligence, and benevolence, it is actually incompatible with it.
Furthermore, there are good pragmatic reasons for imaginatively dwelling on the possibility that such a being exists, and for hoping that it does. For if the demiurge's benevolence is infinite then, given its enormous power and intelligence, there is some reason to think that death will not have the last word and that good will eventually get the upper hand over evil. Does Mill's position provide a counter example to our thesis?
The answer isn't entirely straightforward. But, for Mill what matters for humankind's spiritual growth and development are ideals of moral , not metaphysical perfection. It isn't surprising, then, that in spite of the fact that Mill's divinity isn't maximally perfect tout court , it is maximally morally perfect. In short, while Mill's reflections on God aren't driven by a concept of maximal perfection simpliciter, they are importantly driven by a concept of maximal moral perfection.
Ultimate Concern and Maximal Greatness 2. Impassibility 3. Theistic Vedanta and God's Relation to the World 4. These differences are themselves rooted in fundamental differences in spiritual practice. Theistic Vedanta and God's Relation to the World Our second example of how a dispute over what constitutes maximal greatness can affect one's concept of God is furnished by a disagreement between the great Vishishtadvaitin, Ramanuja, and the founder of the Dvaita school of Vedanta, Madhva — Limited Deities Are limited deities counter examples to this entry's claim that religious consciousness tends to construe ultimate reality as maximally perfect?
Bibliography Alston, William P. Anselm, St. Charlesworth trans. It is interesting to observe, however, that with respect to both parts of the task, the theist may enlist non-theists as allies. One easily understandable version of a theistic moral argument relies on an analogy between human laws promulgated by nation-states and moral laws. Sovereign states enact laws that make certain acts forbidden or required. I am also forbidden, because of the laws that hold in the United States, to discriminate in hiring on the basis of age or race.
Many people believe that there are moral laws that bind individuals in the same way that political laws do. I am obligated by a moral principle not to lie to others, and I am similarly obligated to keep promises that I have made. Both legal and moral laws may be understood as holding prima facie, so that in some situations a person must violate one law in order to obey a more important one.
We know how human laws come into existence. They are enacted by legislatures or absolute monarchs in some countries who have the authority to pass such laws. How then should the existence of moral laws be explained? It seems plausible to many to hold that they must be similarly grounded in some appropriate moral authority, and the only plausible candidate to fulfill this role is God.
The fact that one can understand the argument without much in the way of philosophical skill is not necessarily a defect, however. If one supposes that there is a God, and that God wants humans to know him and relate to him, one would expect God to make his reality known to humans in very obvious ways See Evans After all, critics of theistic belief, such as J.
How can such an awareness be converted into full-fledged belief in God? One way of doing this would be to help the person gain the skills needed to recognize moral laws as what they are, as divine commands or divine laws. If moral laws are experienced, then moral experience could be viewed as a kind of religious experience or at least a proto-religious experience. Perhaps someone who has experience of God in this way does not need a moral argument or any kind of argument to have a reasonable belief in God.
Even if that is the case, however, a moral argument could still play a valuable role. Such an argument might be one way of helping an individual understand that moral obligations are in fact divine commands or laws. Even if it were true that some ordinary people might know that God exists without argument, an argument could be helpful in defending the claim that this is the case.
A person might conceivably need an argument for the second level claim that the person knows God without argument. In any case a divine command metaethical theory provides the material for such an argument. There are of course many types of obligations: legal obligations, financial obligations, obligations of etiquette, and obligations that hold in virtue of belonging to some club or association, to name just a few.
Clearly these obligations are distinct from moral obligations, since in some cases moral obligations can conflict with these other kinds. What is distinctive about obligations in general? They are not reducible simply to normative claims about what a person has a good reason to do. Mill , — argued that we can explain normative principles without making any reference to God. However, even if Mill is correct about normativity in general, it does not follow that his view is correct for obligations, which have a special character.
An obligation has a special kind of force; we should care about complying with it, and violations of obligations appropriately incur blame Adams , If I make a logical mistake, I may feel silly or stupid or embarrassed, but I have no reason to feel guilty, unless the mistake reflects some carelessness on my part that itself constitutes a violation of a moral obligation. All obligations are then constituted by social requirements, according to Adams. However, not all obligations constituted by social requirements are moral obligations.
What social relation could be the basis of moral obligations? Some such demands have no moral force, and some social systems are downright evil. Since a proper relation to God is arguably more important than any other social relation, we can also understand why moral obligations trump other kinds of obligations. That role includes such facts as these: Moral obligations must be motivating and objective.
They also must provide a basis for critical evaluation of other types of obligations, and they must be such that someone who violates a moral obligation is appropriately subject to blame. Adams argues that it is divine commands that best satisfy these desiderata. Obviously, those who do not find a DCT convincing will not think this argument from moral obligation has force.
However, Adams anticipates and gives a forceful answer to one common criticism of a DCT. The dilemma for a DCT can be derived from the following question: Assuming that God commands what is right, does he command what is right because it is right?
These objections can be found in the writings of Wes Morriston , Erik Wielenberg , , especially chapter 2 , and Nicholas Wolterstorff , among others. This is essentially the view that moral truths are basic or fundamental in character, not derived from natural facts or any more fundamental metaphysical facts.
This view certainly provides a significant alternative to divine command metaethics. Specifically, philosophers such as J. Responses to the objections of Wielenberg, Morriston, and others have also been given see Evans , Baggett and Walls, , Although it is worth noting that no single metaethical theory seems to enjoy widespread support among philosophers, so a DCT is not alone in being a minority view. A variety of arguments have been developed that God is necessary to explain human awareness of moral truth or moral knowledge, if one believes that this moral awareness amounts to knowledge.
Swinburne does not think that an argument from moral facts as such is powerful. However, the fact that we humans are aware of moral facts is itself surprising and calls for an explanation. It may be true that creatures who belong to groups that behave altruistically will have some survival advantage over groups that lack such a trait. It is one of several phenomena which seem more probable in a theistic universe than in a godless universe. Street presents the moral realist with a dilemma posed by the question as to how our human evaluative beliefs are related to human evolution.
It is clear, she believes, that evolution has strongly shaped our evaluative attitudes. The question concerns how those attitudes are related to the objective evaluative truths accepted by the realist. However, this view, Street claims, is scientifically implausible. Street argues therefore that an evolutionary story about how we came to make the moral judgments we make undermines confidence in the objective truth of those judgments. However, her argument, and similar arguments, have been acknowledged by some moral realists, such as David Enoch and Erik Wielenberg to pose a significant problem for their view.
Wielenberg, to avoid the criticism that in a non-theistic universe it would be extremely lucky if evolution selected for belief in objectively true moral values, proposes that the natural laws that produce this result may be metaphysically necessary, and thus there is no element of luck. However, many philosophers will see this view of natural laws as paying a heavy price to avoid theism.
It might appear that Street is arguing straightforwardly that evolutionary theory makes it improbable that humans would have objective moral knowledge. However, it is not evolution by itself that predicts the improbability of objective moral knowledge, but the conjunction of evolution and metaphysical naturalism.
Since, it is not evolution by itself that poses a challenge to moral realism but the conjunction of evolution and metaphysical naturalism, then rejecting naturalism provides one way for the moral realist to solve the problem. It does appear that in a naturalistic universe we would expect a process of Darwinian evolution to select for a propensity for moral judgments that track survival and not objective moral truths.
Mark Linville , — has developed a detailed argument for the claim that it is difficult for metaphysical naturalists to develop a plausible evolutionary story as to how our moral judgments could have epistemological warrant. However, if we suppose that the evolutionary process has been guided by God, who has as one of his goals the creation of morally significant human creatures capable of enjoying a relation with God, then it would not seem at all accidental or even unlikely that God would ensure that humans have value beliefs that are largely correct.
Some philosophers believe that the randomness of Darwinian natural selection rules out the possibility of any kind of divine guidance being exercised through such a process. What can be explained scientifically needs no religious explanation.
However, this is far from obviously true; in fact, if theism is true it is clearly false. From a theistic perspective to think that God and science provide competing explanations fails to grasp the relationship between God and the natural world by conceiving of God as one more cause within that natural world.
If God exists at all, God is not an entity within the natural world, but the creator of that natural world, with all of its causal processes. If God exists, God is the reason why there is a natural world and the reason for the existence of the causal processes of the natural world. In principle, therefore, a natural explanation can never preclude a theistic explanation.
But what about the randomness that is a crucial part of the Darwinian story? The atheist might claim that because evolutionary theory posits that the process by which plants and animals have evolved in one that involves random genetic mutations, it cannot be guided, and thus God cannot have used evolutionary means to achieve his ends.
However, this argument fails. When scientists claim that genetic mutations are random, they do not mean that they are uncaused, or even that they are unpredictable from the point of view of biochemistry, but only that the mutations do not happen in response to the adaptational needs of the organism. It is entirely possible for a natural process to include randomness in that sense, even if the whole natural order is itself created and sustained by God.
A God who is responsible for the laws of nature and the initial conditions that shape the evolutionary process could certainly ensure that the process achieved certain ends. Ritchie presses a kind of dilemma on non-theistic accounts of morality.
Subjectivist theories such as expressivism can certainly make sense of the fact that we make the ethical judgments we do, but they empty morality of its objective authority. Objectivist theories that take morality seriously, however, have difficulty explaining our capacity to make true moral judgments, unless the process by which humans came to hold these capacities is one that is controlled by a being such as God.
The moral argument from knowledge will not be convincing to anyone who is committed to any form of expressivism or other non-objective metaethical theory, and clearly many philosophers find such views attractive.
And there will surely be many philosophers who will judge that if moral objectivism implies theism or requires theism to be plausible, this is a reductio of objectivist views.
Furthermore, non-theistic moral philosophers, whether naturalists or non-naturalists, have stories to tell about how moral knowledge might be possible. Nevertheless, there are real questions about the plausibility of these stories, and thus, some of those convinced that moral realism is true may judge that moral knowledge provides some support for theistic belief.
Like subjectivists, constructivists want to see morality as a human creation. However, like moral realists constructivists want to see moral questions as having objective answers.
Constructivism is an attempt to develop an objective morality that is free of the metaphysical commitments of moral realism. It is, however, controversial whether Kant himself was a constructivist in this sense. One reason to question whether this is the right way to read Kant follows from the fact that Kant himself did not see morality as free from metaphysical commitments.
For example, Kant thought that it would be impossible for someone who believed that mechanistic determinism was the literal truth about himself to believe that he was a moral agent, since morality requires an autonomy that is incompatible with determinism.
When we do science we see ourselves as determined, but science tells us only how the world appears, not how it really is. Humans can only have this kind of value if they are a particular kind of creature. Whether Kant himself was a moral realist or not, there are certainly elements in his philosophy that push in a realist direction.
If the claim that human persons have a kind of intrinsic dignity or worth is a true objective principle and if it provides a key foundational principle of morality, it is well worth asking what kinds of metaphysical implications the claim might have. This is the question that Mark Linville , — pursues in the second moral argument he develops. Clearly, some metaphysical positions do include a denial of the existence of human persons, such as forms of Absolute Monism which hold that only one Absolute Reality exists.
Daniel Dennett, for example, holds that persons will not be part of the ultimately true scientific account of things. A naturalist may want to challenge premise 2 by finding some other strategy to explain human dignity.
Michael Martin , for example, has tried to suggest that moral judgments can be analyzed as the feelings of approval or disapproval of a perfectly impartial and informed observer. Linville objects that it is not clear how the feelings of such an observer could constitute the intrinsic worth of a person, since one would think that intrinsic properties would be non-relational and mind-independent.
Another strategy that is pursued by constructivists such as Korsgaard is to link the value ascribed to humans to the capacity for rational reflection. The idea is that insofar as I am committed to rational reflection, I must value myself as having this capacity, and consistently value others who have it as well. It is far from clear that human rationality provides an adequate ground for moral rights, however. Many people believe that young infants and people suffering from dementia still have this intrinsic dignity, but in both cases there is no capacity for rational reflection.
Wolterstorff in this work defends the claim that there are natural human rights, and that violating such rights is one way of acting unjustly towards a person. Why do humans have such rights? Wolterstorff says these rights are grounded in the basic worth or dignity that humans possess.
When I seek to torture or kill an innocent human I am failing to respect this worth. If one asks why we should think humans possess such worth, Wolterstorff argues that the belief that humans have this quality was not only historically produced by Jewish and Christian conceptions of the human person, but even now cannot be defended apart from such a conception. In particular, he argues that attempts to argue that our worth stems from some excellence we possess such as reason will not explain the worth of infants or those with severe brain injuries or dementia.
Does a theistic worldview fare better in explaining the special value of human dignity? The potential in matter is made actual, and over time God brings out its form. Thought is one emanation from God, and through it knowledge arises in humans. The actualized human intellect becomes an immortal substance. Avicenna Ibn Sina; , a Muslim, also distinguished between God as the one necessary being and all other things, which are contingent.
The world is an emanation from God as the outworking of his self-knowledge. As such it is eternal and necessary. God must be eternal and simple, existing without multiplicity. In their essence, things do not contain anything that accounts for their existence. They are hierarchically arranged such that the existence of each thing is accounted for by something ontologically higher. At the top is the one being whose existence is necessary.
From contingent things we come to know universals, whereas God knows universals prior to their existence in things. Al-Ghazali challenged any joining of theology and philosophy, holding that because the mind and senses are subject to error, truth must come by divine grace.
Rather than the world existing necessarily in a Neoplatonic sense, it exists by the will of God alone. It is in no way autonomous, and even causal relationships are non-necessary.
Anselm , archbishop of Canterbury, raised the perfect being concept to a new level by making it the foundation of his celebrated ontological argument. He accepted that God is the highest level of being under which there are, by degrees, lesser and lesser beings. And somewhere there must be a perfection of that being e. That perfection is God. Though a Muslim and an Aristotelian, Averroes Ibn Rushd; added to the growing concept of emanation by claiming that the universal mind is an emanation from God.
Humans participate in this universal mind and only it, not the soul, is immortal. The mind of the common person understands religious symbols in a literal way, whereas the philosopher interprets them allegorically. Consequently, something understood as true philosophically may be untrue theologically, and vice versa. Working from Judaism, Maimonides accepted creation rather than an eternal universe.
He drew from philosophic traditions to formulate three proofs based on the nature of God, and these were developed further by Aquinas. Following Aristotle Maimonides demonstrated the existence of a Prime Mover, and with some inspiration from Avicenna, the existence of a necessary being. He also showed God to be a primary cause. Bonaventura John of Fidanza, c. As such God could not be its creator.
Furthermore, because some change in the universe is cyclic and therefore unexplainable by chance, change would have to be deterministic. So a proper concept of God must include Platonic ideas. Reason can prove God as creator since an eternal universe entails both that the amount of time of its existence is infinite and that it is increasing. Yet there cannot be both an infinite and a larger infinite a view not held in modern times.
Thomas Aquinas accepted both Aristotle and Christian revelation. He accepted both reason and revelation as sources of knowledge of God. Over the neo-Platonic notion of a hierarchy of reality in which lower existences are less real and a mere shadow of the divine, Aquinas accepted gradations of form and matter. Atop the hierarchy is God as pure form and no matter.
As pure actuality and no potentiality, he is perfect and therefore changeless. He is also pure intelligence and pure activity. To these Aristotelian concepts Aquinas added Christian convictions that God is loving, providential, and ruler of the universe. Reason and revelation are in harmony because they have the same divine source, and revelation is not unreasonable. This being the case, God as cause can be known through the world as effect. The God that can be known in part from the universe is fundamentally different from it.
Only God is identical to his essence, being neither more nor less than it. By contrast, a being such as Socrates is transcended by humanity because there are other people. So unlike God, Socrates is both greater than and less than his essence. There is nothing that transcends God so nothing is greater than his essence.
And there are no accidents in God because accidents are caused by something else just as part of the cause of Socrates sitting is a chair. God is not completely knowable because he is not material, whereas our knowledge is normally dependent on our senses.
Furthermore, we normally know things by knowing their genus and species, yet God is unique and so cannot be known in that way.
We can know something of God the negative way via negativa by removing limits, concluding for example, that God is un moved, and un limited by space. What we can know of God positively is neither exactly like our knowledge of temporal things univocal nor entirely different equivocal. Rather, it is analogical, being in some ways the same and in other ways different. God knows x in a way that is both like and unlike the way in which Socrates knows x. God knows, but in a way that is, among other things, complete, immediate, and timeless.
That God created is evident though not provable because a material universe cannot emanate from an immaterial being. The universe exists to manifest God, who created the fullest possible range of beings because in them he can be revealed to the fullest extent. Beings range from angels, who are immaterial; to humans, who are material and immaterial; to animals, who are purely material and both eat and move ; to plants, to inanimate objects.
God as primary cause works through such created things as secondary causes. Nevertheless, creatures with a will remain free and responsible. God can also work apart from secondary causes in what we call miracles. Being good, God created the best possible world in the sense that it has the best kinds of things. Evil is a privation or lack of good and as such God did not cause it the way he causes other things.
So we cannot ask why God brought about evil, but we can ask why he did not bring about more good. He did not bring about more good in order that he could be revealed through the greatest range of things, and as well, to allow for certain types of good such as compassion, which can exist only where there is some suffering. Aquinas and others grounded the scholastic synthesis of knowledge in the view that truth, morality, and God himself could be known by reason because the divine will itself is guided by reason.
What is reasonable is therefore what is true and right. But John Duns Scotus claimed that in humans and in God it is the will—not the intellect—that is primary. Evidence of this is that a being must will what to think about, thus something must act on the intellect; whereas nothing need act on the will.
The view entails that there is no reason why God acts or wills as he does. This makes truth and morality essentially arbitrary and thereby unknowable through reason. God could have willed different moral standards. William of Ockham held that omnipotence means God can do literally anything. Accordingly, a person could perceive something by sheer act of divine will, without the object being there at all.
On his view, faith and reason can be contradictory. This was later used to cut out of world views such things as divine purposes, which had been central to explanations since the Greeks. Eventually, even concepts of a divine being would be optional—or even unnecessary—to explanations and world views. God knows all things in their unity, timelessly; but on our temporal level it makes sense to differentiate time as well as events.
God moved out of the intellectual center of knowledge as faith was no longer grounded in reason and reason was no longer supervised by faith. The power of the church waned and society found inspiration in the classical world.
Interest in this life and the world drove interest in science, which soon uncovered mathematically describable physical regularities. This development shaped the concept of God in a way that further undermined the Aristotelian world view, with its emphasis on such things as divine purpose. Early in these developments, Giordano Bruno emphasized God as immanent in the universe as an active principle, a trend in the conception of God that would increase along with the ever more detailed understanding of natural processes to be achieved in the scientific revolution.
If humans cannot come to God unaided, then it is God who must choose some to be right with him. Since the Reformers affirmed that divine choice cannot be based on merit, love must be the central divine attribute operating in salvation. This view of divine predestination brought new questions, both theological and philosophical, about the relationship between the human and divine wills.
The latter consists of human choices which God allows for a higher divine purpose to run counter to his perfect will. Thus God is entirely sovereign and humans are responsible for their deeds. James Arminius objected that Calvinism made God responsible for sin, and he proposed instead that God predestined those whom he foresaw would repent.
An unfallen mind would see God everywhere through His creation, but our fallen minds cannot find God. Being therefore hidden, as Martin Luther emphasized , God must reveal Himself in revelation and deed. Humanity must resist the temptation to go beyond what is revealed, especially since God reveals only what we need to know, not all that we wish to know.
That reason has a limited role in the spiritual realm was later emphasized by Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth Philosophy began splitting from religion as the two moved in opposite directions with regard to reason. Religion was retreating from reason both by emphasizing the divine will over the divine intellect, and in the human realm, by emphasizing faith over reason. Meanwhile, broad elements in the culture turned away from the authority of the church and Aristotle to regard reason as the main source of knowledge.
The wisdom of this seemed confirmed in the discoveries of scientists like Newton and Kepler, who had great success using observations to find mathematical regularities in nature. Discoveries were revealing a highly ordered universe, implying a highly reasonable God. Deism rose as a philosophical form of theism that used reason as its source of knowledge of God. Without revelation to give detail to natural theology, knowledge of God was minimal.
Lord Herbert of Cherbury claimed simply that there is one supreme God, who should be worshiped; virtuous living constitutes worship, people should repent, and God rewards good and punishes evil. The emerging Newtonian universe was one of mechanical precision and predictability, with no room for outside causes. Accordingly, there seemed to be little or no room for divine intervention.
Deism, then, held that God caused the universe but did not intervene thereafter. The emphasis on God as a perfect designer entailed that waste and suffering were only apparently pointless. The plan and wisdom of God were seen in the grand scheme of the universe, hence God is known best in generality and abstraction. In a time of upheaval, Rene Descartes famously sought to ground all knowledge on a foundation he could not doubt: that he was a thinking being. Descartes also regarded God as not merely uncaused, but somehow the cause of himself.
John Locke held a view reminiscent of scholasticism, that revelation reveals about God what cannot be known by reason alone—yet neither does revelation violate reason. He went beyond the scholastics to affirm that what violates reason cannot be accepted as revelation. Reason must judge whether a supposed revelation is true. His view further welded the concept of God to reason. Baruch Spinoza agreed with Descartes that clear and distinct ideas indeed reflect reality, but he thought that philosophy must start with God, not the self.
This is because God is first in the order of things. He abandoned his judaistic roots by affirming that God is the whole of reality, and neither transcendent nor personal. Aquinas had concluded that God exists on grounds that the universe needs something outside itself as a cause.
There is nothing outside the whole on which the whole can depend. That whole is a network of truths connected by implication. That being the case, everything is either necessary or impossible. Since to be free is to be undetermined by anything outside oneself, God is free because nothing can be outside him; and God alone is free because everything within the whole is the way it is by necessity. There is no need to prove the existence of God beyond the need to prove the existence of the one substance.
For Spinoza, God is not an external initiating cause of the world and so is not demonstrable as such. He is nonetheless an immanent and continuing cause of the world.
That is because wanting to bring something about implies lack, and God can lack nothing. Lacking purposes, God can have no moral goals for humanity. God is the network of all truths, not a personal being who gives revelation. Still, to know God-which is necessarily a matter of reason-is an essential good. Where Spinoza explained reality in terms of a singular substance that is divine, Gottfried Leibniz proposed innumerable instances of the same types of substance. These monads as he called them, are centers of psychic energy.
They do not act causally on each other but are coordinated in a grand harmony preestablished by God. Because God operates on a principle of sufficient reason, there must be a reason why he chose to create just this world: it must be the best one possible.
While many things are possible individually, even God is limited in what can be brought about together just as a man can be a father or childless, but not both. Since God alone is perfect, created things have limitations, which is a source of evil. Nevertheless, we find that evil is often a prerequisite for some types of good.
He made this world because it has the greatest variety and can, as an act of love, reveal his nature in the greatest possible way. Leibniz made God the source of causality, George Berkeley made God the source of perception. He denied the existence of physical substances because he regarded belief in the physical world as a root of atheism and claimed that God directly gives us our ideas of the world. The orderliness of our ideas is testimony to the power of God. He held that our observations about the world do not warrant belief in the God of theism.
Design, for example, is manifestly imperfect; furthermore, a good God would not allow evil. If our observations point beyond the world at all it might be to a finite god, or even a number of gods. So the concept of God must be rooted not in reason but in emotion and the will.
Immanuel Kant also rejected empirical knowledge as a way of knowing God. In fact, he maintained that God cannot be demonstrated at all, yet neither can his existence be disproved. As humans we typically go beyond what we can rightly infer, and our idea that God can be objectively known is an example. Nevertheless, as an idea, God has regulative value for our thinking in that it acts heuristically and gives a sense of unity to our experience.
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