In correspondence with budding philosophers who message me on social media, I find myself frequently offering the advice (if not admonition) of not spending time engaging serious matters on unserious platforms. If you’re interested in the best discussion and debate, privilege the philosophical literature to Youtube comments, Reddit threads, Facebook groups, or blogs, I tell them. Of course, none of which is to say there is nothing of interest or value on those platforms, only that peer-review can be extremely helpful in weeding out painfully inept objections, strawman characterizations, and other irksome timewasters.
All said, I would now like to be a hypocrite and address a few objections raised to my recent conversation with Matt Fradd, wherein I presented a brief sketch of the argument more fully detailed in How to Think About God. The point of my doing so is principally one of inspiration to people of faith who feel often overwhelmed by the online skeptical noise. Remember: Just because an objection sounds good, doesn’t make it so, and just because you may not see a solution to the problem, doesn’t mean you see that there is no solution.
Here are the specimens (which I’ve copied these from the comment section):
Objection. I find his contingency argument to be not convincing. Contingency isn’t a linear relationship (i.e. A is contingent on B which is then contingent on C and so forth). For one thing, there is a certain amount of back and forth. Let’s take A is contingent on B. Well in some cases, B is also contingent on A as well. A good example is fire and fuel. Fire is dependent on fuel however, fuel is also dependent on fire. In order for it to be called “fuel” it has to be flammable so wood would be fuel but stone bricks and water would not be. Another example is that Pat Flynn is dependent on his parents existing for him to exist. However, being his parents is dependent on Pat Flynn existing (if Pat didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be his parents). Also as Pat himself pointed out, there are any number of things A can be contingent on. Pat’s existence is dependent on a number of things (as Pat pointed out). So, one could conclude from this that: A) The universe is contingent on God, but God is also contingent on the universe. B) The universe is contingent on any number of Gods instead of one God. Pat Flynn should study the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna for a more detailed analysis of this sort of thing.
Response. My argument can accommodate these considerations and, in fact, explicitly acknowledges them. The objector seems to have only watched my interview with Matt Fradd, where I presented a brief sketch of Step 1, without reading the fuller treatment. But even in my conversation with Matt I never held that causal/contingency relations had to be linear or could not be manifold/multifarious – in fact, this is admitted by the objector when acknowledging my examples. I provide additional examples in the eBook, showing how dependency relations are required not just in explaining how any qualitatively finite being came into existence (if there was a temporal beginning; I grant there may not be), but is sustained in existence, and often in a cobwebbed fashion. Aside, the linear example was merely to illustrate a general point regarding an infinite series of dependent/conditioned things, but it doesn’t matter how one arranges that series – linearly, in a circle, layered matrices, etc – the results is always the same: without at least one unconditioned reality, nothing would exist. So, the objection misses the point.
But to the other points. My parents being categorized as parents may be contingent upon my creation, but surely Daniel Flynn (my father) is not. Eradicating the effect in that sense (me) does not eradicate the cause. Another example: a certain nest is contingent upon a bird creating it, but the nest could never be and the bird remains. The confusion here is one of not distinguishing between different kinds of properties – what is essential, accidental, relational, etc.
Finally, and relevantly, God is not contingent upon the universe. Only God being “the creator of this universe” would be, but that is merely a Cambridge change of God, not a real change, which is something I address when discussing divine simplicity in the eBook, drawing the distinction between real relations and relations of reason. The objection is once again mistaken by failing to mark off the appropriate distinctions between types of properties.
Objection. God is the ultimate square circle, he is said to contain mutually incompatible attributes. God’s very own omniscience conflicts with his own omnipotence, in that if God knows everything that will take place in the past, now and into the future then he is not powerful enough to change his plan, his plan is set in stone, and by his own omission he cannot change anything according to what he already knows past, present and future as it is his own plan.
Response. This objection is very confused but unfortunately common. The first problem is the skeptic starts without delivering clear conceptions of omniscience and omnipotence, and then constructs a conflict between them. Notice, however, that when it comes to metaphysics, we reach conceptions of omnipotence and omniscience from the primary-cause arguments, and, in doing so, develop a rather specific meaning therein, as related to act-potency, unrestricted Being, and so on. It is a mistake frequently made (even among professional philosophers) to draw up definitions of omnipotence or omniscience irrespective of the greater metaphysical project, and then raise paradoxes of the sort seen above. But this is getting everything backwards.
Either way, this objection does nothing to threaten the argument developed in HTTAG. For one thing, as those familiar with the argument will already know, there is no real distinction between God’s knowledge and power when discussing classical theism, so there cannot, in principle, be any conflict between them, because there are not two really distinct things to be in conflict. At most, the stated objection would have force only against those who deny divine simplicity, and maintain composite-ness in God, which I spend time arguing cannot be the case.
But given divine simplicity, God knows things in virtue of being their cause, since apart from God’s causal operation, there is nothing else in existence for God to know. Additionally, God is eternal, so to say God “knows the past or future” is incorrect and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of God’s relation to the world. God only knows the present from his Eternal Instant in which everything created is present to him. Now, you may have issues with God’s eternity (or with divine simplicity, etc), but that would be a different objection. That this person fails to acknowledge the classical theistic conception of God, however, is a critical flaw in his argument and suggests a lack of engagement with the relevant literature.
We can, however, further resist the objection as follows. The fact that God does not change his mind regarding creation is not a limit to God’s power, but proper to Him being Perfect Being itself (as being not only omnipotent and omniscient, but perfectly rational). To change one’s mind is (frequently) to come across new information, some facts a person has not previously considered. But, of course, there is no way for an omniscience and omnipotent being, in light of divine universal causality, to come across anything which is “new information” to that which is the ultimate source of everything else which exists. For God, then, to “be surprised” or “taken aback” or to “have not considered this or that scenario”, is just to make God less than omniscient, less than omnipotent, and to signal a defect in God, not a Perfection. Therefore, God’s not “changing his mind” upon creating the world is not a problem for either omnipotence or omniscience, properly understood, nor, as argued in the eBook, did God have to create the world in the first place.
In conclusion, allow me to reiterate — especially when considering paradoxes concerning the coherence of God – that many responses throughout the centuries have been offered, and that a substantial number of paradoxes raised with respect to the divine attributes fail to consider divine simplicity, the principle of analogy (stretch-concepts, as Fr. Norris Clarke called them), and the deeper metaphysical system from which these conclusions come. But once those considers are brought to bear, the paradoxes (many of them, anyway; others we must deal with separately) dissolve.
– Pat