Dr. Craig criticises Thomism as unintelligible and makes God impersonal

[fisherman_carl]

Dr. Craig’s recent podcast criticizes Thomism’s view of God as unknowable and too abstract to reconcile with the personal God of the Bible. He says under this view there is nothing that we can say about God that is univocal, only analogical. And, thus it becomes hard to relate to God and as such the view of God becomes agnostic.

Here is his podcast
reasonablefaith.org/is-it-possible-god-is-not-personal

What do you think of this?

For me I have not come to the same conclusions that he has, but then I am still studying the issues. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are still persons in the Godhead that one can have a relationship with. Even if God’s essence is a bit abstract he still interacts with us and loves us.

 

[fisherman_carl]

Dr. Feser addresses the charge that classical theism paints God as impersonal:

Lydia’s first objection, I’m sorry to say, rests on a pretty basic (albeit annoyingly common) misunderstanding. Contrary to the impression she gives in her post, I have never denied that God is personal, nor do classical theists in general deny it. On the contrary, like classical theists in general, I have argued that there is in God intellect and will, and these are the defining attributes of personhood; and as a Catholic I also affirm that there are in God three divine Persons. So, I hardly regard God as impersonal.

Because this misunderstanding arises so often, it is important to emphasize that this is not some hidden theme or new development in my position. This is something I have made explicit many, many times over the years. For example, in a post from May of 2010 I wrote:

[A]mong the things we know about God via natural theology, at least from an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view… are that His attributes include intellect and will. But since possession of intellect and will is definitive of persons, it follows that God cannot correctly be referred to as an “it” or in any other impersonal terms.

In a post from October of 2010 I wrote:

[F]or the classical theist, theistic personalism is bad philosophy and bad theology… [T]hat does not mean that God is impersonal, since according to classical theism there is in God something analogous to what we call intellect and will in us, and other attributes too which presuppose intellect and will (such as justice, mercy, and love – where “love” is understood, not as a passion, but as the willing of another’s good).

In a post from September of 2012 I argued:

[W]hile one might be tempted to conclude… that God’s intellect and knowledge must be decidedly sub-personal compared to ours, that is precisely the reverse of the truth…

His intellect is not inferior to our conscious thought processes (as a stone, gravity, or even the unconscious informational states of a computer are to that extent inferior to our conscious states) but on the contrary beyond and higher than them, just as divine power is beyond and higher than the relatively trivial capacities in created things that we characterize as ‘powers.’ “My thoughts are not your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8).

In a post from October 2013 I wrote:

[C]lassical theists, in general, by no means regard God as impersonal. They typically argue that when the notion of the ultimate cause of all things is fully developed, it can be seen that there is a sense in which we must attribute to this cause intellect and will.

I could go on – you’ll find similar quotes in various books, articles, and other blog posts I have written – but that suffices to make the point. I not only have never said that God is impersonal but have repeatedly denied it, and repeatedly affirmed that God has personal attributes…

To continue reading edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2014/05/miracles-id-and-classical-theism.html?m=1

 

[catholic1seeks]

I’m a fan of Craig – and of Aquinas.

I haven’t listened to the podcast, but I wonder what Craig means by his criticism. Natural theology can only tell us so much about God. Is Craig’s criticism that Aquinas thinks we can only know less than what Craig things we can know about God from natural theology? Surely Aquinas accepts the belief in a personal God. But the issue seems to be in what sense we can know about God through natural law.

 

[fisherman_carl]

Also, see here
edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2014/04/gods-wounds.html?m=1

A quote from above. I just love this mind boggling image of the Incarnation.

Thus do we see yet again how crucial classical theism is to a sound Christian apologetics. But its significance is no less crucial for Christian spirituality. The “God” of theistic personalism was already “one of us” – an instance of our genus if not of our species – before he took on flesh. The God of classical theism most definitely was not. Indeed, unlike the “God” of theistic personalism, the God of classical theism, the only God worthy of the name, is immeasurably different from any creature – “Wholly Other,” in the apt phrase popularized by Rudolf Otto. And yet he became one of us anyway. It is because of this – because Christ is so radically unlike us in his divine nature, so “Wholly Other” – that his having become so much like us in his human nature is so incomparably profound and moving. We will not understand the Incarnation, and we will not understand the divine love for human beings that it evinces, if we conceive of that divine nature in anthropomorphic terms. Is God’s love for us like the self-sacrificing love of a father for his children or the love between brethren or friends? Indeed it is – except insofar as it is incomparably greater, incomparably more self-sacrificial, than those merely human sorts of love.

Nor does even the thought of God’s having become man – mind-boggling enough as that thought is when properly understood – entirely capture the depths of that love. For the second Person of the Trinity did not take on the body of an Adonis, or of an emperor. He was a carpenter in a backwater province of the empire, having “no form nor comeliness… no beauty that we should desire him,” who suffered and died as other human beings suffer and die. He not only lived as a man, but lived as most men have to live, with all their weaknesses and defects, albeit without sin. As Aquinas writes, he did so in part precisely to make it evident that he really was God become man:

 

[Tomdstone]

Dr. Craig’s recent podcast criticizes Thomism’s view of God as unknowable and too abstract to reconcile with the personal God of the Bible…

This is true to some extent. From the natural law alone, I don’t see how you could prove that God would have a Son and a Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father.

 

[fisherman_carl]

I’m a fan of Craig – and of Aquinas.

I haven’t listened to the podcast, but I wonder what Craig means by his criticism. Natural theology can only tell us so much about God. Is Craig’s criticism that Aquinas thinks we can only know less than what Craig things we can know about God from natural theology? Surely Aquinas accepts the belief in a personal God. But the issue seems to be in what sense we can know about God through natural law.

I like listening to his podcasts and his teaching as he is a very good teacher of philosophy. And his site reasonablefaith.org is outstanding and I sometimes wish we Catholics had some place like that where we could go to learn more about this stuff (for free) from a Catholic perspective.

Craig here reveals he studied philosophy under a Thomist, however he never accepted it because he thought the picture of God it paints is too “wholly other” or to not like us that we can not relate. He can not see how you can get a personal God that you can more relate to that is portrayed in the Bible.

However, it seems to me after reading Feser that Craig’s criticism is a bit like saying under personalistic theism God is great, but under classical theism God is even greater. He is so great we can’t even imagine how great He is. So lets try to make him into something we can better imagine. Of course this thinking has no bearing on what God actually is. You can’t say the God of classical theism can not be true because He is beyond our understanding. The Greek gods were well within our understanding, but that doesn’t make them any more true.

 

[Vic_Taltrees_UK]

To me a pitfall in Aquinas is piggybacking on the Aristotelian “substance” which to me looks more like essence or identity.

Is the noun from Duns, “Dunsary”?

(Admittedly I’ve not read all that much of either, but mainly digests.)

If a fair bit in Aquinas is fairly good, at the same time as preserving “Thomism” can we please additionally create a new genre in which other streams in philosophy mutually benefit with it, or is it imperative to keep it solely in a ghetto?

 

[Vic_Taltrees_UK]

What’s presumably happened is that there are undeclared “personalistic” and “impersonalistic” sub-schools within Thomism, additionally complicated by various individuals periodically posing as “classical” and/or “non-classical”.

That way, we can all claim to be targetting the whole lot when we are targetting part (or do I mean the other way round!)

 

[Wesrock]

I have not had the opportunity to review either Craig’s particular comments or Feser’s response, but my first impression of Thomism was an impersonal and distant God. The deeper I’ve gone into Thomism, particularly with the help of W. Norris Clarke who synthesizes the basics rather well, the more convinced I am that the God as described by Thomas Aquinas is very near and very personal. I think there’s just a steep learning curve as you get aquainted with the language and the concepts. There’s a systematic framework you have to get aquainted with, and I think that’s a turn off for some people. And Thomas never claimed that natural theology could tell us everything about God. Some things, such as the Trinity, can only be known by revelation.

Feser’s explanations, while exceedingly helpful, do tend more towards an analytical and rational approach, so I can understand first impressions after reading Feser may only catch that, too.

 

[fisherman_carl]

To me a pitfall in Aquinas is piggybacking on the Aristotelian “substance” which to me looks more like essence or identity.

Is the noun from Duns, “Dunsary”?

(Admittedly I’ve not read all that much of either, but mainly digests.)

If a fair bit in Aquinas is fairly good, at the same time as preserving “Thomism” can we please additionally create a new genre in which other streams in philosophy mutually benefit with it, or is it imperative to keep it solely in a ghetto?

According to New Advent the Christian philosphers were platonists before Aquinas. And Aquinas (and others) were criticized at the time for bringing in too much Aristotle. This criticism is still alive today. However, not too many people today are platonists.

 

[Vic_Taltrees_UK]

According to New Advent the Christian philosphers were platonists before Aquinas. And Aquinas (and others) were criticized at the time for bringing in too much Aristotle. This criticism is still alive today. However, not too many people today are platonists.

Platonism - more than Plato, whom I think the Platonists may have misunderstood up to a point - can be airy fairy.

But I’m not talking about that contrast. The Aquinian “substance” which is reputed to be Aristotelian seems superficial, hence the completely unnecessary twist over “transsubstantiation”.

One can be sharper about substances, essences and identities and it may bring one closer to or further from Plato and a hundred and one other philosophers newer.

What I am saying, has post-Aristotelian and post-Aquinist physics (material science) helped “macro-Thomism” (and its half-sisters) advance to make better sense while remaining true to what was best about it all along?

Mainstream bread says and continues to say, “I hurt celiacs’ stomachs” and “I taste so-and-so” which are substance, and it says before consecration “I am bread” and after consecration “I am the Body of Christ” which is identity.

The latter statement is heresy in Aquinas but it is plain observation in 2016. If the personal account of Christ in Aquinas is good in 2016, can we bring together these things?

 

[Wesrock]

Mainstream bread says and continues to say, “I hurt celiacs’ stomachs” and “I taste so-and-so” which are substance, and it says before consecration “I am bread” and after consecration “I am the Body of Christ” which is identity.

The latter statement is heresy in Aquinas but it is plain observation in 2016. If the personal account of Christ in Aquinas is good in 2016, can we bring together these things?

Coukd you clarify? Anyway, affecting celiac’s and tasting “so-so” are accidents, not the bread’s substance.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I’m a fan of Craig – and of Aquinas.

I haven’t listened to the podcast, but I wonder what Craig means by his criticism. Natural theology can only tell us so much about God. Is Craig’s criticism that Aquinas thinks we can only know less than what Craig things we can know about God from natural theology? Surely Aquinas accepts the belief in a personal God. But the issue seems to be in what sense we can know about God through natural law.

This post nails it.

Craig is respectable as a thinker when he is debating non-Christians. But when he comments on Catholic theologians he leaves much to be desired. Aquinas rightly finds severe limits to understanding the nature of God by pure reason and without revelation. Even Einstein, like Aristotle and Spinoza, applying pure reason could find Intellect in God, but could not get beyond Intellect to find Persons.

Outside the Judeo-Christian tradition no religion finds persons in God excepting the ancient polytheistic religions which really were poor excuses for approaching God since they equated all the gods with forces of nature. This is why Aristotle and Plato repudiated them and so did most respectable philosophers of the ancient world.

 

[Vic_Taltrees_UK]

Could you clarify? Anyway, affecting celiac’s and tasting “so-so” are accidents, not the bread’s substance.

In materials science which meshes in with plain as day experience they are a form of chemistry or physics.

I don’t think God really wants us to have two parallel and different sets of science using identical terminology. In 1200 they couldn’t think of anything better but I think it shouldn’t stop us drawing what is good from Aquinas and the Aquinists if they are good on the personal God. Topics must have formed part of a coherent whole in Aquinas and the Aquinists. After all, the host as Body of Christ is actually about the personal God (especially to the more intense contemplators) as well as about materials science and experience.

If you picture the host as talking to you, when it says what it is, it is telling you its identity!

Alternatively:

Essence = fact, property, entity, nature (not too dissimilar from identity)

Whereas:

Substance = thing, matter, material, mass, solid qualities

(Both selectively quoted from Onions 1932 edition to support my case from moderately old-fashioned, middle-of-the-road current usages.)

Another way of saying what I am saying is, is Thomas and Thomism tough enough to cope with paraphrasing or are we irrevocably tied to a form of words by some sort of unwritten canon law? Is it actually worth explaining straight?

What language(s) are Thomas and Thomism written in? If not English, as an ex-translator from one of my former careers, there are issues in translation to an adequate standard. (I’m not interested in an Irish translation, only an English one. Pretending people and things are different from what they are, appeals to Irish whimsy. But I say the Christian faith and true philosophy and all branches of God’s good knowledge are tough enough to talk about them straight. It is far more important to be able to give others faith than to flaunt a quaint badge of insider identity in their faces.)

This might be behind the portmanteau concept of “consubstantialism” i.e chemically substance in my sense and spiritually substance in your sense, all at the same time, which is the same as what “transsubstantialism” is reputed to be about. The mental twist has not only led to Real Presence Protestants recoiling from Thomas and Thomism to their and the world’s loss, but damaged the reputation of the Real Presence itself in the eyes of others. I merely wondered whether, since substance means accidents, what is the understandable word for substance? I suspect this problem didn’t only crop up in 1932, but was giving people trouble as long ago as the 1400s.

Catholics get irrational because they are told a substance isn’t a substance, but something else is instead. God wants us to be rational scientists (in the normal and best meanings of rational and scientist) AND talk straight and plain AND have a straightforward mental life AND have a personal relationship with Him AND believe AND (for all I know, though I’m not into it) contemplate intensely, as if it were normal for normal human beings to do all these things at the same time (instead of putting different hats on and off). So you see it is about your thread topic.

Is Thomas and Thomism a completely separate dimension from philosophy where the terminology isn’t allowed to mesh in? English has nearly a million words, we can definitely say what we mean in the here and now. If communion wasn’t a queer thing that was invented in the middle ages, we don’t have to make it sound like it was. When I’m personal, e.g with God, I talk about all branches of knowledge, straight, in a roughly 1932 vocabulary. We don’t need queer usages, we can use real words for things!

I’ve got wider questions around Aeterni Patris which I’ll start another thread for, another time.

 

[Vic_Taltrees_UK]

“Accidents” sounds haphazard, which fits “nicely” (for them) into the whimsical quaint image, the diametric opposite of my faith, my science and my life.

Are they really doing all that much justice to Aquinas, was he really all that whimsical, quaint and haphazard?

Or was it only on the single subject of sacraments that his terminology got shaky?

Let’s not forget that almost as soon as Aquinas stopped writing the educated portion of the public was almost wiped out in the Black Death and they didn’t have the training to comprehend and pass on what is contained in his writings. Universities were severely stunted in this period.

 

[Wesrock]

Phew, done with work. I can finally listen to this. I also noted at Feser’s blog, in one of his comment boxes, that Feser will be responding shortly, so that should be interesting.

Substance comes from the Latin sub-stare, to stand under. Accident comes from the Latin accidere, to happen to.

A substance is that which stands under all its changing phases as their principle of continuity.

Accidents “happen to” a substance but do not change its self identity.

The modern definition of substance has not been around forever, but really came into use after the scholastics around the time of John Locke.

Okay, more technical dedinitions:

Substance = that which is apt to exist in itself and not in another (i.e., not as a part of another being).

Accident = that which is apt to exist not in itself but only in another. The latter, properly speaking, do not have their own being, but share the being of a substance. Their being is a being-in-substance, the substance is a being in itself.

Or to be clearer, “red” is not a substance. Red does not exist on its own. Red can only be found existing in another substance as one of its properties. Color is an accident. So is taste. A taste does not exist on its own, free-standing in its own right, but only exists in the substance of something else.

A dog exists as a being in its own right. It’s not a property of another being. A dog is a substance. It’s not boiped down to what it is made out of but what it is at its core as a single, unified being.

I’m not sure what’s so confusing about transubstantiation of the Eucharist. All it means is that the host becomes the whole person of Jesus under the appearance of bread and wine. That which it is has changed, even if the properties abscribed to it haven’t. Does this happen in nature? No. But we’re talking about a divine miracle here. The host is Jesus, not bread. It didn’t get Jesus added to it, but truly became him, something different, regardless of its color and taste or chemical properties.

Substance in scholastic usage does not refer to the material.

 

[catholic1seeks]

This post nails it.

Craig is respectable as a thinker when he is debating non-Christians. But when he comments on Catholic theologians he leaves much to be desired.

I have been listening to Craig a lot lately because I like hearing talk about the cosmological arguments, etc. But I stumbled upon a series of his recent videos on Youtube (ReasonabeFaith’s channel), and one of the talks featured Justification/salvation, where he expresses the errors of the Catholic view. Of course he speaks much more fairly than other non-Catholics would, but I wish he would not comment in such a way when his expertise is more on the natural theology and philosophy level.

I have to say I thought it was funny. One person in the audience brought up James 2 (I think he was just playing devil’s advocate - there didn’t seem to be any Catholics in the small room). And Craig read the entire passage, but kept insisting that is only seems contradictory to (his interpretation of) Paul “on the surface”. And he said how the good work, such as Abraham’s sacrifice of his son, was a way of completing his faith. Now that caught me off guard. How is a good work just a fruit of faith and at the same time something that completes faith? He kept insisting on the way good works are the fruit of a true faith – even though the passages bluntly ends by saying we are justified by “works and not by faith alone.”

Anyway…

 

[Wesrock]

Call me petty, but I had to quit with about 30 seconds to go. The idea that Thomism is completely impersonal, that a necessary being would be less than what Thomas Aquinas described, that the idea of a being who is existence itself is unintelligible, that being a Thomist is contradictory to the Incarnation or even having ethics or entails denying miracles . . . It’s just hogwash and statements without any support. Granted, it’s just an interview for a podcast and not a book, but I feel like Thomism just doesn’t click in his head.

He seemed to completely disregard the idea of praying for acceptance of a hardship, as opposed to only praying for a cure, as ludicrous and sad. Perhaps I never realized how distinctively Catholic (and I feel both Biblical and evident in early Christianity) that idea is.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I have been listening to Craig a lot lately because I like hearing talk about the cosmological arguments, etc. But I stumbled upon a series of his recent videos on Youtube (ReasonabeFaith’s channel), and one of the talks featured Justification/salvation, where he expresses the errors of the Catholic view. Of course he speaks much more fairly than other non-Catholics would, but I wish he would not comment in such a way when his expertise is more on the natural theology and philosophy level.

I have to say I thought it was funny. One person in the audience brought up James 2 (I think he was just playing devil’s advocate - there didn’t seem to be any Catholics in the small room). And Craig read the entire passage, but kept insisting that is only seems contradictory to (his interpretation of) Paul “on the surface”. And he said how the good work, such as Abraham’s sacrifice of his son, was a way of completing his faith. Now that caught me off guard. How is a good work just a fruit of faith and at the same time something that completes faith? He kept insisting on the way good works are the fruit of a true faith – even though the passages bluntly ends by saying we are justified by “works and not by faith alone.”

Anyway…

It has occurred to me that Craig is a reputable philosopher, but not so much a theologian. And it strikes me as unfortunate that man of such estimable intellectual ability can be so deliberately narrow as not to fully research the teachings of the Catholic Church before he judges them to be inadequate. Craig has clearly not reached the point John Henry Newman finally reached when he began to read early Church history and finally concluded, despite his Anglican convictions, that to be truly Christian is to be Catholic.

“We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.” John Henry Newman

 

[fisherman_carl]

Platonism - more than Plato, whom I think the Platonists may have misunderstood up to a point - can be airy fairy.

But I’m not talking about that contrast. The Aquinian “substance” which is reputed to be Aristotelian seems superficial, hence the completely unnecessary twist over “transsubstantiation”.

One can be sharper about substances, essences and identities and it may bring one closer to or further from Plato and a hundred and one other philosophers newer.

What I am saying, has post-Aristotelian and post-Aquinist physics (material science) helped “macro-Thomism” (and its half-sisters) advance to make better sense while remaining true to what was best about it all along?

Mainstream bread says and continues to say, “I hurt celiacs’ stomachs” and “I taste so-and-so” which are substance, and it says before consecration “I am bread” and after consecration “I am the Body of Christ” which is identity.

The latter statement is heresy in Aquinas but it is plain observation in 2016. If the personal account of Christ in Aquinas is good in 2016, can we bring together these things?

I would think that even in Aquinas’ day they would have had to deal with consecrated hosts going ‘bad’ or moldy if not consumed soon enough. So the idea that the host still has physical effects like bread would not be foreign to Aquinas. And so his idea of “accident” includes not only that appearance but also the physical effects. The miracle is that the substance changes while these physical effects do not. So while it might not make sense to modern science Miracles are not supposed to make sense to science. In fact Miracles tend to defy what we would naturally expect to happen. That is why we call them Miracles.