van Inwagen, “The Idea of God”

From Lecture Two of The Problem of Evil The Gifford Lectures in the University of St. Andrews Delivered in 2003 (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Introduction

I said that in this lecture I would “discuss this God whose non-existence the argument from evil is supposed to prove”. My purpose in this lecture is to say what a being would have to be like to be God, to count as God, to have the attributes, qualities, properties, characteristics, or features that are the components of the concept of God. But can this be done in any principled way? Do people who say they believe in God not disagree about his attributes? Who’s to say what features God is supposed to have? I will respond to these questions with a proposal, a proposal I do not think is arbitrary. It is this: the list of properties that should be included in the concept of God are just those properties ascribed to God in common by Jews, Christians, and Muslims—the properties that adherents of these religions would all agree belong to God.

Having said this, I now qualify it. If we obtain a list of properties by the method I have proposed, the list will contain some properties that are thought to belong to God only contingently or accidentally : the property of having spoken to Abraham, for example. Let us therefore restrict our list to properties that Jews, Christians, and Muslims will agree would have been properties of God no matter what–that belong to God independently of the contingencies of history, independently, indeed, of whether there is such a thing as history, independently of the existence of a created world, independently of any contingent matter of fact. Thus our list of properties, the defining properties of the concept of God, will be a list of his essential properties—although, of course, it is not meant to be a complete list of his essential properties. 

Now a further qualification. By “Jews, Christians, and Muslims”, I mean those Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have attained to a high level of philosophical and theological reflection; for some of the properties in the list I shall propose will be ones that most ordinary believers will not have so much as heard of…

And I think I must add one more qualification: by ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims’, I mean “Jews, Christians, and Muslims who lived before the twentieth century’. If you are puzzled by this qualification, I invite you to examine two quotations from the writings of a theologian of considerable reputation, the sometime occupant of a chair of theology in the Divinity School of a great university. As a matter of deliberate policy, I will not identify him. I assure you, however, that he is real and that the quotations are exact: 

To regard God as some kind of describable or knowable object over against us would be at once a degradation of God and a serious category error.

It is a mistake, therefore, to regard qualities attributed to God (e.g., aseity, holiness, omnipotence, omniscience, providence, love, self-revelation) as though they were features of … a particular being.

These words mean almost nothing. Insofar as they mean anything, they mean “There is no God’. It is precisely because a significant proportion of the theologians of the last 100 years would not have agreed with this judgment that I exclude any reference to them from my criterion. I therefore propose that we find the properties to be included in our definition of God by asking what properties Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers and theologians in the year 1900 or earlier would have agreed were essential properties of God. (This, at any rate, was my first inclination. But Richard Swinburne has pointed out to me that theologians said some pretty odd things about God in the nineteenth century, too, and on reflection I had to agree with him. Maybe we should push the date back to 1800, just to be on the safe side. And I suppose I should apologize to the Muslims for including them, quite unnecessarily really, in my historical adjustment. There are serious charges that can justly be brought against some twentieth-century Muslim theology, but the charge of proposing a meaning for the word ‘God’ that enables atheists who occupy chairs of theology to talk as if they were theists is not one of them.)

The list that can be obtained by the method I propose is a rich one. In my view, it contains the following properties. God is, first, 

—a person. 

God as a Person

By a person, I mean a being who may be, in the most straightforward and literal sense, addressed—a being whom one may call ‘thou’. (Of course a non-person like a flower in the crannied wall or an urn or a city may be addressed in a non-straightforward and non-literal sense. When we do that, we call it personification.) In saying this, I do not mean to be offering an analysis of the concept of a person—whatever exactly ‘analysis’ may mean. I mean only to fix the concept of a person, to make it plain which of our available concepts I am using the word to express… If I were to venture a guess as to how the concept of a person should be analyzed, I should say something very lengthy that would start like this: a person is a conscious being having beliefs and desires and values, capable of abstract thought … and so on. But I should regard any such analysis of ‘person’ as provisional, as liable to require revision… Nothing in this lecture or the remaining lectures in this series is going to turn on any particular analysis of personhood. I include this attribute in my list (and it is really redundant, for most of the attributes in the list could belong only to a person) simply to make it plain that I regard it as part of the concept of God–as do all Jews, Christians, and Muslims—that he cannot possibly be thought of as impersonal, like Brahman or the Tao or the Absolute Idea or the Dialectic of History or, to descend to a rather more popular level, the Force.

Before leaving the topic of the personhood of God, I should say a word about sex—not sex as the vulgar use the word, not sexual intercourse, but sexual dimorphism—what people are increasingly of late, and to my extreme annoyance, coming to call ‘gender’. We haven’t yet officially said this, but, as everyone knows, God does not occupy space, so he can’t have a physical structure; but to have a sex, to be male or female, is, among other things, to have a physical structure. God, therefore, does not have a sex. It is literally false that he is male, and literally false that he is female. My point in raising the issue is simply to address this question: What about this pronoun ‘he’ that I’ve been using? This problem is raised not by any feature of God’s nature, but by the English language, in which the only third-person-singular pronouns are ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘it. We cannot call God ‘it, for that pronoun is reserved for non-persons like the Dialectic of History or the Force. It would be nice if English had a sex-neutral third-person-singular pronoun that applied to persons, but it doesn’t. (Many languages do.) English does have sex-neutral pronouns that apply to persons—they’, for example—and in fact has a good many sex-neutral pronouns that apply only to persons, such as ‘one’ and ‘someone’ and ‘who’, but it lacks third-person-singular pronouns having these desirable features. (Some of our more enlightened contemporaries have proposed a system of “divine pronouns”, but I can’t quite bring myself to say things like, God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Godself”.) The only real possibilities are to call God ‘he’ or ‘she’, and both pronouns raise serious problems. Calling God ‘he’, when all is said and done, really does carry the implication that God is male. This is both false and reinforces historical prejudices. Calling God ‘she’, of course, carries the implication that God is female. This implication does not reinforce historical prejudices, but (besides being false) it raises this difficulty: the masculine gender is a kind of default setting in the machinery of English grammar—I believe that you express this idea in linguistics—speak by saying ‘In English, “masculine” is a marked gender’, but I may have got ‘marked backwards. However you say it, the reality is this: when you’re speaking English, use of the feminine gender in cases in which there’s no basis for it in the nature of the thing you’re talking about always calls attention to itself, and use of the masculine gender sometimes does not, not if the thing is a person. English is thus an inherently sexist language, but, unfortunately, that fact can’t be changed by fiat or good intentions or an act of will. Well, not all problems have solutions. I’m going to call God ‘he’, but if someone else wants to call him ‘she’, I don’t mind.

I now turn to some more familiar items in the list of the defining properties of God. The first is familiar indeed. God is 
— omnipotent (or all-powerful or almighty).

God as Omnipotent

This notion is often explained by saying that an omnipotent being can do anything that is logically possible. People also say “all-powerful” or “almighty” to describe this feature of God. I have two unrelated difficulties with this definition. The first is controversial; perhaps I alone find it a difficulty, but I can’t ignore it on that ground. It is this. I don’t understand the idea of logical possibility. I understand (and believe in) ground-floor or absolute or metaphysical possibility, but, as far as I can see, to say that a thing is logically possible is to say something with no meaning… I must not spend any more time on this hobby horse of mine. Suppose it is granted that my scruples in the matter of logical possibility are well-founded. Might we not accommodate them simply by saying that omnipotence is the power to do anything that is metaphysically possible? We might indeed. But if we did, we should still face the second of the two difficulties I mentioned, and that difficulty is not at all controversial. It is this: most theists contend that there are metaphysically possible acts that God is unable to perform. Two well-known examples are lying and promise breaking… (L)ying and promise breaking are certainly metaphysically possible things. (I don’t know about you, but I’ve actually seen them done.) But, it’s commonly said, God is unable to do either of these things because, although someone’s doing them is metaphysically possible, his doing them is metaphysically impossible. Let’s suppose that the philosophers and theologians who say that it is metaphysically impossible for God to lie and to break his promises are right. Does it follow from their thesis that God is not omnipotent? According to the proposed definition, yes. But the way the case has been described immediately suggests another definition, a definition one frequently sees in works of philosophical theology, a definition designed to meet exactly the difficulty we have been considering: to say that God is omnipotent means that he can do anything such that his doing that thing is metaphysically possible.

This definition meets the two difficulties I have mentioned, but it has problems of its own. The most important of them is this: it doesn’t tell us what God can do. Another way to put essentially the same point would be to say that, at least as far as any human being is able to judge, there might be two beings each of which was able to do everything it was metaphysically possible for it to do and which were yet such that one of them was vastly more powerful than the other. Suppose, for example, that God exists, that he is able to do everything that it is metaphysically possible for him to do, and that among the things that it is metaphysically possible for him to do is to create things ex nihilo  .

Now that seems an odd result when you compare Demiourgos with God, who is able to do so much more than he. And it demonstrates—you’ll see this if you think about the question for a moment—that the proposed definition of omnipotence doesn’t tell us what an omnipotent being is able to do. […] It would be a very interesting project to try to provide a satisfactory definition of omnipotence… It is a difficult problem, and a useful discussion of it would lead us deep into the forbidding territory of technical metaphysics. I will suppose in these lectures that we have some pre-analytic grasp of the notion of omnipotence…

Aquinas, in the famous discussion of omnipotence that I quoted in note 5, says that “whatever implies a contradiction does not fall within the scope of divine omnipotence”, and I have been more or less following his lead. (More or less, but closer to less than to more: the notion of metaphysical impossibility is richer than the notion “implies a contradiction”.) There is, of course, another, stronger conception of omnipotence, whose most famous advocate is Descartes. According to this conception, God is able to do anything, including (Descartes tells us) creating two mountains that touch at their bases and have no valley between them. I shall not discuss this “strong” conception of omnipotence, which seems to me to be pretty obviously incoherent—incoherent because ability (the concept that is expressed by sentences of the form ‘x is able to do y’) is no more and no less than the power to choose among possible states of affairs, to determine which of various incompatible possible states of affairs are to be actual.

I turn now to the next “divine attribute” in our list: God is 

— omniscient (all-knowing).

God as Omniscient

Here is the standard definition of omniscience: A being is omniscient if and only if that being knows the truth-value of every proposition. And here is a second definition, one I like rather better for a number of reasons. A being is omniscient if, for every proposition, that being believes either that proposition or its denial, and it is metaphysically impossible for that being to have false beliefs. The second definition makes a stronger claim on behalf of an omniscient being than the first, but it is a claim that theists would be willing to accept on God’s behalf.

The existence of an omniscient being raises a famous philosophical problem: if there is an omniscient being, that being either knows that when I am put to the test tomorrow I shall lie or knows that when I am put to the test tomorrow I shall tell the truth. How, then, can I have  a free choice between lying and telling the truth? (Or, in terms of the second definition: If there is an omniscient being, that being either believes that when I am put to the test tomorrow I shall lie or believes that when I am put to the test tomorrow I shall tell the truth; and it is metaphysically impossible for this being to have false beliefs. How, then, can I have a free choice between lying and telling the truth?) I defer discussion of this problem to the fifth lecture, where it will arise naturally. (It will arise in connection with the famous reply to the argument from evil called the free-will defense—for whatever virtues or defects the free-will defense may have, it obviously isn’t going to work if human beings do not have free will.)

In addition to being omnipotent and omniscient, God is said to be

— Morally perfect (perfectly good).

God as Morally Perfect

That is to say, God has no moral defect whatever. It follows that he is no way a subject of possible moral criticism. If someone says something of the form, ‘God did x and it was wrong of God to do x’, that person must be mistaken: either God did not in fact do x, or it was not wrong of God to do x. (Of course, because God is very different from human beings and stands in very different relations to created things from those human beings stand in, what would be a moral defect in, or a wrong act if performed by, a human being is not automatically a defect in, or a wrong act if performed by God. Suppose, for example, that a human being inflicts pain on others – without consulting them – to produce what, in his judgment, is a greater good. Many of us would regard this as morally wrong, even if the person happens to be factually right about the long term consequences of the pain he inflicts. My point is that it does not follow from the correctness of this judgment that it would be wrong of God to inflict pain on human beings – or angels or beasts – without their consent to produce some greater good. That’s as it may be; such judgments need to be examined individually and with care, taking into account both the ways in which God is similar to human beings and the ways in which God is different from human beings.)

God as Eternal, Immutable, and Omnipresent

Next, God is

— Eternal.

This attribute is frequently mentioned in songs of praise and in liturgy; that God has this attribute seems to be emotionally very important to human beings – probably because of our sorrow over the impermanence of human things…It is well known that theists have understood God’s eternity in two ways: He has always existed and always will exist; he is outside time altogether. I shall briefly discuss these rival conceptions of eternity when we discuss free will and divine foreknowledge in connection with the free will defense.

A closely related attribute is this: God is immutable.

That is, his attributes and other important properties do not and cannot change…Of course, if God is in time, and if he’s aware of the changing world, as he must be, some of his properties, in the broadest sense of ‘property’…are going to have to change with the passage of time: in 45 BC, he knew that Julius Caesar was alive, and in 43 BC he no longer had this property. But, to speak the language of metaphysics, his intrinsic or non-relational properties do not and cannot change with time: we get old and grey and become more (or less) wise; in middle age, our youthful idealism is replaced by cynicism, or our youthful improvidence gives way to prudence; we turn from belief to unbelief, or the other way round; nothing in God’s nature corresponds to the mutability that characterizes human existence and the existence of all things present to the senses.

One of the divine attributes is the spatial analogue of eternity: God is omnipresent.

To say that God is omnipresent is, obviously, to say that God is everywhere…The attribute omnipresence will figure in our discussion of the question (at least this is how some have framed it), “Why does God hide himself from us?”…It will suit my expository purposes better if we put off discussing omnipresence till we address this question in the final lecture. Here I will remark only that whatever omnipresence may come to, it is obviously incompatible with God’s having any sort of spatial or physical structure (and hence with his being either male or female).

God as Creator

And what is our relation to this omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, immutable, omnipresent being? He is, of course, our creator and we, like the heavens and everything else besides himself, are the work of his fingers…

To say that God is the creator of all things besides himself is not to say that he formed them out of some pre-existent stuff…If there is a God, then there never was a chaos of prime matter that existed independently of his power and his will, waiting through an eternity of years for him to impress form on it. This could not be, for if there is a God, nothing does or could exist independently of his creative power. God creates things from the ground up, ontologically speaking. His creation is, as they say, ex nihilo.

And even [God], in his omnipotence, is not capable of bringing a thing into existence and then leaving it entirely to its own devices, for a thing that exists, even for an instant, independently of God’s creative power is as impossible as a gaseous vertebrate or an invisible object that casts a shadow. This fact – I mean this conceptual fact – is sometimes emphasized by saying that God is not only the creator of everything but the sustainer of everything as well; but this is only for emphasis, for sustainer is included in the meaning creator – at least in theological contexts.

Having said this, we must face a minor logical problem created by our criterion for membership in the list of divine attributes,; for we said, among other things, that an attribute was to be included in this list only if it was an essential attribute of God. And being a creator is, according to the Abrahamic religions, one of God’s accidents: it is a property he lacks in certain perfectly good – but fortunately for us, non-actual – possible worlds: those in which he never creates anything. Jews, Christians, and Muslims insist that whether God creates a world – that is, whether he creates anything – is a matter of his free choice. Nothing in his nature compels him to create. He is not, for example, compelled to create by his moral perfection; for it not better that there should be created things than that there should be no created things. It could not be better, for all goods are already contained – full and perfect and complete – in God. (In the matter of his free will, he does not have a free choice between good and evil, as we imperfect beings do, but he does have a free choice between various alternative goods, and there being created things and there being no created things is one of the pairs of alternative goods between which he has a choice.) But if being a creator is an accidental property of God, then, by our criterion it cannot occur on the list of divine attributes.

The solution to this problem is simply to say that the following is the relevant attribute: God is

• the creator of such things other than God as there may be.

God has this property vacuously, as philosophers say, in those possible worlds in which he exists and creates nothing, and non-vacuously in all other worlds in which he exists; but he has it in every world in which he exists, and it is therefore one of his essential properties.

God as Necessarily Existent and Necessarily Unique

I have just used the phrase ‘in those possible worlds in which he exists’; but are there any possible worlds in which he does not exist? His possession of the next attribute in our list implies that there are none: God is

• necessary.

That is, he exists in all possible worlds; he would exist no matter what. Thirty or forty years ago, many philosophers denied that the concept of a necessary being made any sense. It is easy to refute them. Consider me. I might not have existed; I am, therefore, in the language of metaphysics, a contingent being. And surely, if the concept of a contingent being is intelligible, then the concept of a being that doesn not fall under that concept is at least prima facie intelligible…(…The thesis ‘If the concept of a contingent being is intelligible, the concept of a non-contingent being is intelligible’ seems no more implausible than the thesis ‘If the concept of a thinking being is intelligible, then the concept of a non-thinking being is intelligible.) Of course, from the fact that a concept makes sense, it does not follow that it is the concept of a possible thing, that it is metaphysically possible for anything to fall under it. The concept of a method for trisecting any angle using only a stylus, straightedge, and pair of compasses makes sense, but it is an impossible concept. It may well be that the concept of a necessary being is an impossible concept. The question whether this is so falls outside the scope of these lectures. We should note that if God is, of conceptual necessity, a necessary being, then the old taunt, “But then who created God?”, is conceptually defective; one might as well ask who created the natural numbers.

Unifying the Attributes

The Greatest Possible Being

I now turn to two questions I promised an answer to at the beginning of this lecture. The first is this: Is there some principle or general idea that binds together the attributes in the list I have given? (Note, by the way, that it is, as I promised it would be, a very rich list.) Is the list—I asked rhetorically—just a “laundry list”? Is it anything more than a jumble of historical accidents? The answer is that it is not a mere jumble. It represents an attempt by many thinkers—not, I would suppose, for the most part a conscious attempt—to provide some specific content to the Anselmian notion of a greatest possible being, a something a greater than which cannot be conceived, aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit.

If an argument for this thesis is wanted, I ask you simply to see whether you can think of some attribute that could be added to the list that would make a being who possessed the attributes in the expanded list greater than a being who possessed only the attributes in the original list. And I ask you to consider whether there is some attribute in the list that could be removed without diminishing the degree of greatness represented by the list. It seems obvious that a greatest possible being must be omnipotent—at least supposing omnipotence to be a possible property. A being who is capable of, say, creation ex nihilo is—all other things being equal—greater than a being whose powers do not extend to creation ex nihilo. A necessarily existent being, a being who would exist in every possible circumstance, is greater—all other things being equal—than a contingent being, a being who could fail to exist. And so on, it seems to me, for each of the attributes in the list. And what could be added to the list that would make for “greater greatness”? Nothing that I can see. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that our list contains all the properties of God that are relevant to the degree of greatness he enjoys. No doubt there are “great-making” properties of God that no human being-perhaps no angel, perhaps no possible created being—could form the dimmest conception of. I do claim that the list can plausibly be said to contain all the great-making properties that human beings can form a conception of.

The Flexibility of These Attributes

The second question is this: To what extent is the list at all “flexible”? To what extent can someone who calls himself a theist modify the list (or modify the definitions and explanations I have given of the items in the list) and still rightly call himself a theist? I think there is some flexibility in what I have said, but not much, and that the line between “having a different conception of God from the one expressed by the list” and “using the name ‘God’ for a being who is not properly so-called” can be drawn in a principled way. Let me give examples of proposed alterations to the list of divine attributes—ones that have been actually proposed, although I name no names so as not to have to take responsibility for getting a particular author right when my only interest is in finding cases that illustrate a point—that fall on both sides of the line. 

(1) The property of existing necessarily is an impossible property. Therefore, we should, in Whitehead’s words, be paying God an ill judged metaphysical compliment if we ascribed it to him. Let us replace ‘exists necessarily’ with 'exists a se.' A being exists necessarily just in the case that it exists in all possible worlds—and a necessary being is therefore impossible, for, as Hume pointed out, we can easily conceive of there being nothing. The reality of a being whose existence is a se, however, is consistent with the possibility of there being nothing at all. 

(2) If God is omnipotent, the problem of evil is intractable. Let us therefore understand God’s powers as being severely limited. 

In my view, the theist who proposes the first of these alterations does succeed in saying that God does not, as others have supposed, exist necessarily. I think he’s wrong—for I don’t think that necessary existence is impossible—but I don’t think that what he’s saying is conceptually defective. It is otherwise with the second case. In the words of J. L. Austin's inarticulate judge, the man isn’t on the thing at all. I say that someone who says that God is a being of “severely limited powers” refers to nothing at all—even on the assumption that there is a God. No being of severely limited powers could be God, could fall under the concept properly expressed by the word ‘God’; not even if that being was the greatest being who in fact existed and had created the heavens and the earth and all things besides himself. 

Now why do I draw the line in such a way that the person in my first example is using the concept ‘God’ properly and the second isn’t? The reason is simply that the person in my first example is, so to speak, loyal to the idea of God as the greatest possible being, and the person in my second example isn’t.

This person, I believe, does succeed in referring to God when he says, “God is not omnipotent but rather demi-omnipotent”—because he, too, is loyal to the idea of God as the greatest possible being. I believe, of course, that his contention that omnipotence is an impossible property is a metaphysical error, and that his contention that this conclusion can be proved by an argument based on the Paradox of the Stone is a logical error. And I believe that the theist who thinks that necessary existence is impossible is metaphysically wrong in thinking this, and logically wrong in thinking that it can be proved by a Humean “conceivability implies possibility” argument. But this is the extent of my disagreement with these people. I don’t accuse them of having got the concept of God wrong; they have the concept right—the concept of a unique occupier of the office “is not exceeded in greatness by any possible being”. Theists who decide that God is not omnipotent simply because, in their view, the fact of evil is inconsistent with the existence of a good and omnipotent being, and who do not say that an omnipotent being is intrinsically impossible, are paying no attention to the conception of a greatest possible being. Their position, I would say, should be put this way: The fact of evil shows that there is no God; nevertheless the world was created by a benevolent being of vast but limited powers, a being who is immensely greater than all created beings. We who were theists should “transfer” to this being the attitudes and loyalties we formerly and mistakenly directed at the God we thought existed. Let me sum up my position this way. The concept of God is not, in the strictest sense, the concept formed by conjoining the attributes I have listed. In the strictest sense, the concept of God is the concept of a greatest possible being. The list of attributes I have provided—guided by the question, What features of God do Jews, Christians, and Muslims agree on?—is an attempt to say what a greatest possible being would be like… Alternative lists of the attributes that would belong to a greatest conceivable being (or different understandings of various of the attributes in the list from those I have provided) are possible and do not signal an attempt to attach a different sense to the word ‘God’ from its traditional (that is to say, its proper) sense—provided that is what they really are: attempts to provide as much content as possible to the abstract and general idea of a greatest possible being. If two theologians or philosophers present significantly different lists of divine attributes, this should be because, and only because, they have different ideas about what is metaphysically possible, and thus different ideas about what the properties of the greatest metaphysically possible being would be…

Or you could put my position this way: if a list of attributes is to provide an absolutely incontrovertible list of the properties that belong to the concept of God, it should contain the single item “is the greatest possible being”; long, traditional lists like the one I have provided represent attempts, defeasible attempts, to provide a more or less complete specification of those properties accessible to human reason that are entailed by “is the greatest possible being”. 

[…]

I claim now to have spelled out, in just the relevant sense, the content of the concept ‘God’—or at least to have made a pretty good start on spelling out this content. (It may be that some will want to add attributes to my list. What about beneficence or benevolence, for example? This property obviously has some sort of connection with moral perfection, but it is not obviously entailed by it. What about freedom?—for, although I have affirmed God’s freedom in my discussion of the attribute “creator”, ‘freedom’ is not one of the items in my list of attributes. What about love? Does St John not tell us that God is love? And is love not a plausible candidate for an attribute of an aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit ? I have no objection in principle if someone wants to add properties to my list, provided they are consistent with the ones already there. I shall, of course, want to look carefully at each candidate for admission.)

For further reading…

Ontological Arguments (for the existence of a greatest possible being)