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John DeRosa, author of One Less God Than You, explains what classical theism is, why the Catholic Church embraces it, and how to defend it against less noble visions of the divine.
Cy Kellett:
Does classical theism still work? John DeRosa next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host.
Cy Kellett:
One of the things we have to defend is the existence of God, but it’s not just that we believe that God exists and we have to defend that. There are things that we can say about God. If you take the collection of these things, you could call that classical theism. Is classical theism still defensible in the late modern world, given all that has happened, all the advances that have been made, all that we know that wasn’t known in the Middle Ages or in the ancient times? Very much so.
Cy Kellett:
We invited our friend John DeRosa to come here and explain what is classical theism, and can classical theism still be defended? Then there’s a little bonus at the end that he recorded with us. I didn’t understand any of the bonus, but you can hang around for it if you’re interested in what John has to say.
Cy Kellett:
He is the guy behind the podcast ClassicalTheism.com. He has a book out for us here at Catholic Answers, a very well-received book, and for good reason. He puts into terms that I can understand, let’s just put it that way, some of the explanations for the existence of God and some of the ways that we can address those slogans that we hear about “one less god than you,” for example, where people say, “Well, you Christians only have one God. Other people have lots of gods. I have just one less god than you Christians.” One Less God Than You, as a matter of fact, is the name of the book. Here’s John DeRosa.
Cy Kellett:
John DeRosa, thanks for being with us.
John DeRosa:
It’s great to be back, Cy Kellett. Thanks for having me.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so your podcast is called Classical Theism. I need you to tell me what that is and why I should accept it. Can we do that over the course of the next 25 minutes or half hour or so?
John DeRosa:
Absolutely. No, there’s a lot of rabbit trails we could chase, but I think we start with the fundamentals and then go from there.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. First of all, what is classical theism? What are we talking about?
John DeRosa:
Excellent question. Great place to start, by the way. What is something? What do you mean by that? We teach ourselves in apologetics to ask that question. Also, too, I’m just going to flag for the listeners, the Classical Theism Podcast, although it’s called that, we do more than just classical theism. We delve into other topics, defending God, Jesus, and the Church, which you do on Catholic Answers as well.
Cy Kellett:
Do you ever talk about modal collapse?
John DeRosa:
We do. We could definitely go into that later in this episode.
Cy Kellett:
No, I know, because I’ve seen it, but I don’t know what it is. I’m sorry, John. That-
John DeRosa:
Well, hey, by the end of this short episode, I will explain to you, Cy Kellett, what modal collapse is-
Cy Kellett:
That’s a bonus. All right-
John DeRosa:
Anyway, sorry, I’m diverting. Let me just say what it is first.
Cy Kellett:
Yes, thank you.
John DeRosa:
Classical theism refers to the traditional conception of God that He is the ultimate metaphysical foundation for all reality, He’s the ultimate explanation for why anything exists at all, He’s the Creator, capital-C Creator, in a very robust sense. The buck stops with God. Sometimes He’s referred to in various arguments as the necessary being, the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover, the first cause, and so on. There’s that ultimacy tied up with Him.
John DeRosa:
That’s the main idea first, but let me say a little bit more. I’ll also say that that main idea is affirmed by not just Catholic Christians, but also Jewish thinkers like Moses Maimonides, Islamic thinkers like Avicenna and Averroes. There’s even aspects of it that can be found in pagan writers like Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, not that we’re saying that they were full-blown monotheists in the sense that we Christians are, but they definitely have aspects of holding this idea of a fundamental reality. Plato had the idea of the good. Aristotle had the unmoved mover. Plotinus has the one simple reality.
John DeRosa:
We Catholics go on to affirm that, yeah, what they’re talking about there, what everybody is talking about, that’s God. Beyond just being all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing, which are attributes that are commonly brought up in philosophy and religion, classical theists go a little bit further. We say, you know what, we’re going to hold to the full batch of divine attributes defended by the patristics, the Church Fathers, and the medieval theologians. The four more controversial ones nowadays are divine simplicity, divine immutability, divine eternity, and divine impassibility. We say we’re going to hold to all of those things.
John DeRosa:
One other thing about that, and then I’ll get to why we believe it. I’m going to quote the Catechism here in a second. I even pulled out my old Catechism from college. I found this one because I like this one to quote it.
Cy Kellett:
They’ve updated it, you know.
John DeRosa:
You’re right. I’ve got to get that. I’ve got to get that.
Cy Kellett:
Get the update, John.
John DeRosa:
This is still a good one.
John DeRosa:
The idea is that whenever we talk about God and speak about Him and think about Him, as classical theists, we’re very much attuned to His transcendence, and that God is radically unlike any other creature in creation. We can say true things about Him. Thomas Aquinas is big that we can say what He’s not. He’s not this. He’s not that. We can make true statements about Him. He’s somewhat like this, somewhat like that. But we’re always proceeding cautiously and through a glass darkly and bowing before the mystery of God. So I like it because it leads into worship.
John DeRosa:
Can I just quote the Catechism real quickly-
Cy Kellett:
Please do, John. Yes.
John DeRosa:
This is Catechism Paragraph 43. It says, “Admittedly, in speaking about God like this, our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless, it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express Him in His infinite simplicity. Likewise, we must recall that ‘between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude’; and that ‘concerning God, we cannot grasp what He is, but only what He is not, and how other beings stand in relation to Him.'”
John DeRosa:
Classical theists are more willing to put the emphasis on God’s transcendence when we talk about Him. I can get into some reasons, but that’s just what classical theism is.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. I want you to do a quiz with me before we go on then, because you used four big terms. You said they’re controversial. We’ll get into why they’re controversial, but I need to make sure that everybody knows what they mean. Do them one at a time. I’m going to tell you what I think they mean. You can tell me if I’m right or wrong.
John DeRosa:
That sounds great. The first one is divine simplicity.
Cy Kellett:
God doesn’t have any parts.
John DeRosa:
You got it. That is the core right there. The big discussion is, what counts as a part? How simple is He going to be? Most people are willing to affirm that He’s somewhat simple, but in our Catholic councils we say that God is absolutely simple. But even there, there’s some latitude in how you understand it. But you got it. That’s the main thing. He doesn’t have parts.
John DeRosa:
Here’s the second one, divine immutability.
Cy Kellett:
God does not change.
John DeRosa:
You got it. That’s it.
Cy Kellett:
I don’t know if I want to do the last two. That’s okay, I’ll get at least a 50 on this quiz, 50%.
John DeRosa:
Divine eternity.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, well, that seems kind of self-explanatory. He exists outside, beyond time, without beginning and without end.
John DeRosa:
You said it well. You nailed it. I’ll tell you what, some people have the concept of God as everlasting or just being around forever and going on forever, but His existence is outside of time, or He exists in a timeless way. That’s altogether different from just enduring through time. That was a great point there.
John DeRosa:
You are three for three, Cy Kellett, but here’s a tricky one, divine impassiblity.
Cy Kellett:
The only way I can think to say what I think that that means is God doesn’t have emotions. Is that in the ballpark? That’s probably not the best way to say that.
John DeRosa:
It definitely is in the ballpark. There’s a lot of debate over what an emotion is and what counts as an emotion. Some people will say, “No, actually, God does have a perfect blessedness and beatific emotion of that happiness in Himself.” But the way that I have more commonly seen people who defend classical theism define it nowadays is that God is not causally affected by anything outside of Himself. It’s not that creatures can come along, or the devil or somebody else, and knock God off His pedestal. He is completely impassable in that way.
John DeRosa:
That’s it, simplicity, immutability, eternity, and impassability. I give you a four out of four.
Cy Kellett:
Really, you give me a four? I don’t know. Three and a half. I feel like you’re being… No grade inflation, John. This is not Harvard, okay?
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so God conceived this way is a classically theist way of conceiving of God. You’re a classical theist. I’m a classical theist. Most Muslims, most Jews, most Christians. If you say classical theism, though, there must be some kind of theism that’s not classical. What other modifier is there for theism?
John DeRosa:
That’s a great question. There’s been several proposed. I’ll say it’s more of a recent phenomenon, in the past few centuries, though I’m sure you can find germs of it earlier on, but the bulk of the Christian tradition really does think and talk about God in the realm of classical theism.
John DeRosa:
Recently, different thinkers have questioned particular attributes and want to tone them down. They’ll say, “Okay, maybe God is somewhat simple, but He’s not completely simple. Maybe He doesn’t change most of the time, or He doesn’t change in the fact of His good character, but He still can change in other ways and change His mind about things, decide not to do things.” People point to the Bible with that one. Or they’ll tone down His eternity and say, “Maybe He’s not completely timeless in a way that allows Him to see all of reality and know the future. Maybe He doesn’t know the future.” Or maybe they’ll tone down His impassability and say that, “No, we need a God who’s not that distant that He can’t be affected, but a God who actually suffers in His divinity, a God who suffers in His divinity,” and so they’ll deny impassability.
John DeRosa:
Thinkers of these various sorts that seek to modify one of those attributes, you could call them modified classical theists. In the 20th century of theology, some people were called process theists that said God can undergo various processes and change. Nowadays, a common term is neoclassical theism. Thinkers who question a lot of these attributes we’re talking about will call themselves neoclassical theists.
John DeRosa:
I’ll also make a distinction, though. I have three levels. I’ve got classical theism. That’s the most robust that we’re going for. There’s neoclassical, modified classical that changes some of these attributes. Then there is this type of conception of God that really I think a lot of the new atheists had, or people who critiqued theism, that’s more of a finite theism that thought of God as a man up in the sky with a long beard flying around, a lot of superpowers.
John DeRosa:
I have those three levels. I would say neoclassical theism is a step up from that, and then classical theism is a step up from that in the sense that we’re handling God in the most transcendent and robust sense. I can talk about some of the reasons why, but that’s how I would lay out the territory.
Cy Kellett:
We’ll do that then. Yeah, if you would, talk about some of the reasons why. Would you consider, for example, things like… I’m just going to name some of the things, and tell me, do they fall into these categories, or are these categories “we’ll just leave that for another day; they’re separate”? For example, things like pantheism, things like polytheism, things like naturalism, for example, that might believe in a God, but the God would be within nature, are these related to this conversation? For example, a pantheist… No, let me just say a polytheist seems like someone who does share a lot of beliefs that I have, and might even believe in a demiurge or something beyond, so help me with those words before we move on with classical theism.
John DeRosa:
Yeah. No, those are great questions and great words. I would say there’s sometimes debate over what the different terms mean. But I would say a polytheist would definitely have to fall into either the finite theism category or the neoclassical or modified classical theism category because they’re conceiving of God, even if He’s one among all the best ones, even if He’s Zeus-
Cy Kellett:
Zeus. Yeah, right.
John DeRosa:
… highest among the pantheon. Because He is in the same… These are some Aquinas thinking here. Because He’s in the same genus of the category God, that there can be multiple things of, well, in one way of thinking, God then would not be the most fundamental thing. There’s also this category of being God that multiple things can fall into. We have to ask, “Well, why are there more than one of these? Is any one of them the top notch in the sense of being the creator of the others, or are there just a bunch of them and this guy is the lead in charge?” We’d have to do some more investigation and metaphysical analysis.
John DeRosa:
What classical theists are going to say is, “No, that’s actually impossible, for the polytheistic god is not going to be the same thing as the classical theist God.” David Bentley Hart has a provocative phrase that I don’t like to use because some people take it as a pejorative-
Cy Kellett:
Wait, first of all-
John DeRosa:
He calls [crosstalk 00:14:23].
Cy Kellett:
David Bentley Hart-
John DeRosa:
Go ahead.
Cy Kellett:
David Bentley Hart has a provocative phrase? That shocks me. David Bentley Hart is usually so mild. I’m only teasing you, because he’s probably the most provocative writer out there right now. But, okay, give me the David Bentley Hart provocative phrase.
John DeRosa:
This is when he was going against the New Atheists a lot, and he has a lot of really good writing back then that I really think is beneficial to read. But he would call this modified classical theism or neoclassical theism or process theism, he would call them monopolytheists, because the way that they were thinking of God is still as, and here’s a phrase from Bishop Barron too, they were thinking of Him still as one being among other beings, one other entity in all of reality, whereas God, in classical theism, He’s not just one more thing. Father Herbert McCabe had another famous phrase. I can give you a lot of quips and slogans.
Cy Kellett:
I love them.
John DeRosa:
I wrote a book on slogans, so I can give you slogans all day. But Father Herbert McCabe used to say, “God and the universe don’t add up to make two,” because when you do that calculation you’re counting God as one thing, the universe as another thing. Now, okay, maybe there’s another sense of where you could say it’s two, but as classical theists, we hold that God is completely and utterly distinct from all creation, and insofar as being distinct from creation, He’s not like every other created thing, and so He would not be a polytheistic god. That would be more of a finite or a neoclassical conception.
Cy Kellett:
Pantheism wouldn’t work either because that would mean the universe itself, just add all this up and you get God. The classical theist is saying, no, you must think of God as outside of and beyond all of this.
John DeRosa:
Right. Exactly. What you just said, the pantheism concept, it blends what classical theists, Augustine and others are very good on this in the tradition, it blends what we call the Creator and creature distinction. God is the Creator. Everything else is a creature in some sense.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so we were going to get to why then. Why does the Church hold this very exalted… I guess anybody who’s talking about God, in a certain sense, that’s exalted. The name God is an exalted word. But this very high-level view of God, why do we insist on that?
John DeRosa:
Great question. I’ll give you three sources of warrant for why I think we as Catholics should hold to classical theism. One is that it falls out of the traditional metaphysical arguments for God’s existence. You think about a classic contingency argument or an argument from composition. We say something like this. By the way, contingent means, it can be different in different contexts, but let’s just say it’s something that exists, but didn’t have to exist.
John DeRosa:
The way a contingency argument goes… Jimmy Akin actually does a nice job of laying one of these out in the course at the School of Apologetics for Catholic Answers. He defends a contingency argument in the course on Beginning Apologetics. It says that every contingent thing has a cause, because something that exists but didn’t have to exist points outside of itself to a cause or an explanation for its existence.
John DeRosa:
Long story short, traditional proofs will trace back that line of causality and say, “Well, we can’t only have contingent beings.” If we trace that backwards, we can maybe try to run a finite regress. That’s not going to work. If it just stops arbitrarily, then we have one thing that’s unexplained. Maybe we try to run an infinite regress, but infinity is just a radical way of adding more things, and if you have one thing that is not explained well enough by the previous thing, which is not explained well enough by the previous thing, and then people draw analogies here where they talk about a chandelier which is being hung up on a chain, and say you had one chain link versus two chain links. Even if you trace the chain links up and you say, “Oh, I’ve got an infinite amount of chain links on this chandelier,” if it’s not latched into a ceiling, if it’s not latched into a firm foundation, there’s still not a complete explanation for why the chandelier is there.
John DeRosa:
I’m giving a broad sketch of a contingency argument, but you trace back to a necessary being that has to exist. We say that that metaphysically necessary being, because He’s that firm foundation, He’s not going to be changed in Himself, He’s not going to come into being Himself, so we get a doctrine of immutability there.
John DeRosa:
Go a little bit further. Plato argued, and others following him, and Aquinas, that everything that’s composed, that’s put together in some way, requires a composer to put it together. If you walk into a room and you see a nice, beautiful beach chair, a beautiful beach chair… I just got a new beach chair last year. It’s got a spot for your drink, a spot for your phone, a spot for your book. It’s got all these-
Cy Kellett:
That is beautiful.
John DeRosa:
… bunch of parts put together. I don’t know if beautiful is the best word to describe that.
John DeRosa:
Anyway, people would ask, “Well, hey, why was this thing put together as it is?” The more complexity we get there, it seems to point outside of it to a reason why these things were put together. Again, I’m giving a brief sketch here. If you want to see all the gory details, check out Ed Feser’s Five Proofs for the Existence of God. He argues for the neo-Platonic proof, such that when you trace this line of causality backwards, of composers which are caused, and then those causes, if they’re also composed, they need a cause, and then if they’re also composed, they need a cause, you get back to something that must be most fundamental and uncomposed or uncaused. That’s where we can get the doctrine of divine simplicity.
John DeRosa:
For the last two, I’m just going to be very brief here. For eternity, this can come through a bunch of different arguments. Say, Aquinas’s first way, that traces motion or things that are changed from potential to actual requires something already actual to move them from potentiality to actuality. I realize now that I’m getting into a lot of terminology. When I introduce it, I want to define it, but again I’m going to be brief.
John DeRosa:
Aquinas traces that back to a fundamental being which is pure actuality, that’s not a composition of act impotency or a mixture of those things. In that sense, since God is already pure being, purely actual, purely real, He doesn’t need anything else to turn Him on, so to speak. He’s already perfect in Himself, and so we recognize there that God must exist in a timeless way, because if He were in time, well, then He would be flowing through time or He would have the potential to be at an earlier moment and a later moment. That sort of change and potentiality is not going to fly with eternity.
John DeRosa:
We would make similar arguments for impassability. The first warrant is the metaphysical arguments for God’s existence. I’ll be briefer with the other two. The second one is, personally, some people don’t like to get mixed up in these debates. They’re just like, “I affirm God exists. He’s one. I don’t know about all this simplicity, eternity stuff, but I trust Christ and His Church.” Christ and His Church gave us the magisterium, which you actually mentioned, particularly at the Fourth Lateran Council and then again at the First Vatican Council. The Church herself teaches that God is absolutely simple, that He is immutable, that He is transcendent, and also that He’s Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that those are consistent. If you trust Christ and you trust His Church, then you can have warrant there for affirming these attributes, even if you don’t go through all the other arguments themselves.
John DeRosa:
Then the third layer of warrant I would throw on this is hints in Scripture of how unlike God is compared to us. Some people go further with this. They go to Exodus 3… I realize I’m being very long-winded. But they go to Exodus 3:14, and they say, “God is I AM WHO I AM,” and they talk about the divine name there and His subsisting existence. Aquinas has a lot of discussion on that. That’s unlike any other creature. No other creature is I AM WHO I AM. It’s just a weird phrase to say.
John DeRosa:
You could also look at other verses like Isaiah 55, where He talks about how His thoughts are so much higher than our thoughts, as the heavens are above the earth. It doesn’t sound like He’s just enough rational creature like us. Then you go to the New Testament. There’s a lot of doxologies and things. St. Paul in Romans 11, at the end there of that chapter, says something like, “God is from whom and to whom and through whom are all things,” referring to God as that fundamental ground of being. Also, Acts Chapter 17, God is “He in which we live and move and have our being.”
John DeRosa:
I would argue that there’s a lot of hints in Scripture when you point to God’s transcendence and His perfect necessary existence that we could support the doctrine of classical theism that way, but then you’ve got to enter into scriptural debates because people are going to say other things.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, but I always do like, and I appreciate that you did that, John, that trusting in Christ is a very reasonable thing to do. If you trust in Christ and in His Church, you’re going to be okay on these things. We don’t all have to be Aquinas, which is great because none of us are, except Aquinas.
Cy Kellett:
If I could just, before we end… I don’t think you’re long-winded at all, actually. I feel like we should give you more air sometimes. But I want to get into three challenges to this God that you’re proposing, this classical theist God. Then we can go in any direction you want after that, but will you take my challenges?
John DeRosa:
Sounds good.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. It doesn’t seem like God is simple because He’s… If I say God is powerful, then He’s powerful. That’s an attribute. That’s a quality. If I say God is good, that seems like an attribute and a quality. He’s got all these features that no one… I’m playing devil’s advocate right now. You Christians give him all these features. How can you say that’s simple?
John DeRosa:
No, it’s a good objection. It’s actually one that even the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga raised in a little bit more of a sophisticated way as a very similar objection, that if God is all these multiple properties, then how can He be this simple God? How can He be absolutely simple?
Cy Kellett:
I’m offended that you said Alvin Plantinga is more subtle than I am or more sophisticated, but I’m going to leave that behind. Go ahead and answer the question. I thought I was perfectly sophisticated right there.
John DeRosa:
In my defense, I didn’t say that Alvin Plantinga is more sophisticated than you, Cy.
Cy Kellett:
But he is.
John DeRosa:
I said he raised this objection in a little bit more of a sophisticated way. Hey, I’ve heard your taste in music. You’ve got a lot of sophistication.
Cy Kellett:
There you go. That’s right.
John DeRosa:
That’s good.
John DeRosa:
Okay, how do we answer this? As classical theists, we are still allowed to say that God is powerful, that He’s wise, that He is just and He is merciful, but we don’t say that that entails that He’s composed of these qualities. Rather, we say we’re going to describe a way of these are true ways of speaking about God, that it’s true to say of God that He’s powerful because there’s something in the one simple God that’s like power. It’s true to say of God that He is wise because there’s something in the one simple God that is like wisdom. It’s true to say of Him that He is just because there’s something in God that is like justice. However, on the God side, it just so happens in that perfect, incredible reality that we can’t grasp with our finite intellects, they’re all one.
John DeRosa:
I’ll give you a quick geometry analogy that I’ve been using lately. There’s other analogies you can give. Eleonore Stump has a great one with, she calls it quantum theology. She says how people learn about light in physics class in high school or college, and sometimes light is talked about like a particle and sometimes light is talked about like a wave. But we know from physics that waves are not the same kind of things as particles, and particles are not the same kind of things as waves, but what we find out is that whatever light turns out to be, it’s true to say of it that sometimes it behaves like a wave and sometimes it behaves like a particle. She calls this quantum theology, that whatever God in His radical simplicity and nature is, it’ll be true to say of that thing it’s powerful, wise, just, and merciful.
John DeRosa:
My geometry analogy is I say look at a cone. Picture a 3D cone sitting there on the table in front of you. If you have a 2D straight-on view only, subtract away from the surroundings and say you’re just looking at it straight-on, two-dimensionally, and it’s standing upright, point up, what two-dimensional shape would you see if… I’m kind of idealizing here.
Cy Kellett:
I see. You’ll see a triangle. Right.
John DeRosa:
Exactly. You’ll see a triangle. That’s my point. You’ll see a triangle if you look at the cone straight-on, but then go to the bird’s eye view. You’ve got the same cone on the table, and you go above it and you look straight down.
Cy Kellett:
You would see a circle.
John DeRosa:
You’d see a circle. So it’s true to say of this cone… All analogies are going to limp in some way because we’re not talking about God exactly. But it’s true to say of this cone that in this cone there’s foundation for us predicating that the cone is triangular, because when you look at it a certain way it looks triangular, but it’s also true to say of it that it’s circular, because when you look at it in this way it looks circular.
John DeRosa:
So when we see God’s justice, punishing people in the Bible for various things, or ensuring that Joseph, He raises him up to be the king in Egypt above his brothers, we experience that as God’s justice acting. We might even experience His justice in our own convictions when we think we’ve committed a sin, and we experience, wow, we feel guilty for this sin. And we can experience God’s one simple nature. We experience divine justice because we feel that we’ve turned against God, but then when we go to Confession and we confess our sins and He forgives us, we still experience God. Now, it’s not God that’s changing, but we experience His one beautiful nature. Now we experience it as mercy as we are being forgiven.
John DeRosa:
That doesn’t mean that justice is mercy. It’s just it’s sometimes true to say of God that He is just, and it’s also true to say of that one thing that He is merciful. This doesn’t commit us to the idea that He is a complexity of multiple properties. He can have all of that in His one simple nature.
Cy Kellett:
All right, but there’s a further problem for you as a Christian, John DeRosa. God is, as you Christians love to say, three persons. That seems very complex.
John DeRosa:
Yes, it does. It can get very complex. There’s a lot you can go into here, but I’m going to try to be brief, because it’s often alleged quickly nowadays that divine simplicity is just flatly inconsistent with the Trinity. I’m actually going to start by going back to the definition that you gave, Cy Kellett, earlier. I’ll also throw in a special qualification that some people might have in the back of their minds. But you said earlier when I asked you, “What is divine simplicity?” you said… Do you remember what you said?
Cy Kellett:
No parts. God has no parts.
John DeRosa:
God is not composed of any parts. What we’re going to say is that divine simplicity entails that we can’t make any sorts of distinctions in God that would mean that He is composed of parts. Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae, first book, question three goes through all the different ways that realities that we encounter are composed. He says in God there’s not composition of two bodies; there’s no composition of matter and form, of essence and existence. He gets into all this fancy stuff that you can go into. The key idea is that if there is another special distinction that doesn’t entail that God is complex or composed, well, then He is allowed to have that sort of distinction. I think history can back us up on this.
John DeRosa:
I want to make a distinction because the way we arrive at divine simplicity, typically through that philosophical-metaphysical analysis, is different than the way we arrive at the trinitarian distinctions. We arrive at the distinctions of Father, Son, Holy Spirit because God told us about it, because it’s in divine revelation, preserved through Scripture, tradition, and the magisterium. It’s not something that we could’ve just figured out on our own like, “God is a trinity.” The Jews had revelation in the Old Testament, and they affirmed that God is one, there is one God, and that’s true. But they couldn’t have just figured out on their own that God was a trinity. He had to reveal that to us.
John DeRosa:
What happens is that we have the one simple reality that is God, but we also have this public revelation, divine revelation, preserved in Scripture, tradition, and magisterium, that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that these are trinitarian distinctions. What we end up saying is that the sorts of distinctions that these are are not material parts. They’re not matter and form. They’re not essence and existence. They’re not multiple substances. We don’t have a super clear grasp on what they are. There’s different analogies that have been proposed in the tradition. But we know it’s true to speak of the three persons.
John DeRosa:
The best person who brings this out is Father Thomas Joseph White, the Dominican. He wrote a couple of papers on this where he argues the doctrine of divine simplicity always tracked with, historically, the doctrine of the Trinity. When Athanasius is defending the Trinity, he’s also defending divine simplicity, up through Augustine, up through Aquinas and so on. Because they always track together, we can have confidence that when the fathers and the medievals, when they predicated that God is triune, they’re talking about a special, albeit mysterious to us, personal trinitarian distinction that doesn’t entail composition.
John DeRosa:
Another way we know that they didn’t just think it was flatly contradictory is because the Fourth Lateran Council opens with a statement, literally in the first two sentences, it says that God is absolutely simple and that He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I don’t think these guys were being stupid and just affirming contradiction.
John DeRosa:
I’m going to say the way we affirm this does force us to say it’s a bit of mystery, but the kinds of distinctions that we talk about in created and philosophical reality that we can analyze with our intellects, the Trinity just can’t be any of those. It’s the sort of distinction that doesn’t introduce composition into the godhead.
Cy Kellett:
Classical Theism is John DeRosa‘s podcast. He’s the author of One Less God Than You.
Cy Kellett:
I had another objection, but I’m going to have to do it another time because there’s something else we have to get to. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to say goodbye to you and then I’m going to do my closing remarks, and then there’s going to be a little bonus at the end of this episode. I’ll tell you what it is in a second. First, we’ll act like we’re ending here, but we’re not.
Cy Kellett:
John DeRosa, thanks so much for explaining and defending classical theism.
John DeRosa:
Cy Kellett, thanks for having me on. It’s been a pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
If you want to hang around, there’s a little bonus at the end of this. I don’t understand a thing that John says in the bonus part, but maybe you’ll understand it. Maybe it’ll be helpful to you. John DeRosa, One Less God Than You: How to Answer the Slogans, Cliches, and Fallacies that Atheists Use to Challenge Your Faith. That’s John’s book for us here at Catholic Answers. You can get that over at shop.catholic.com.
Cy Kellett:
Hey, we love to hear from you, focus@catholic.com. You can always send us an email, an idea for a future show, or maybe a complaint or an insight about a show you’ve heard, focus@catholic.com.
Cy Kellett:
Don’t forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher. You know what really helps us? Give us that five-star review and maybe write a comment. That really does help to grow the podcast.
Cy Kellett:
You know what else helps to grow the podcast? If you’re watching on YouTube, right down here or here or somewhere around here, you can like and subscribe. If you like and subscribe, that also helps us to grow this podcast. If you’d like to support us financially, givecatholic.com is the place to do it, givecatholic.com.
Cy Kellett:
Well, that wraps it up. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, it doesn’t wrap it up. I think there’s a little bonus material coming. See you next time, after the bonus material, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, here’s the bonus part. You ready? What is modal collapse?
John DeRosa:
Great question. Now, this one, if I put this one on that quiz where you got four out of four, I wonder how you would’ve done. What is modal collapse?
Cy Kellett:
Zero. I don’t have any clue what it is.
John DeRosa:
Don’t feel bad because, honestly, when I started the Classical Theism Podcast a few years ago, I didn’t even know what it was. I’m like, “What is this thing?” Bishop Robert Barron is presenting a paper on divine simplicity, and William Lane Craig is critiquing it with modal collapse. I’m like, “I don’t even know what these words mean. What’s even going on here?”
John DeRosa:
I’m going to give you a brief… The first thing, I would say you’ve got to do two steps. Step one is understand what the objection is saying. Step two, give some sort of an answer to it from a classical theist perspective. I’d love to help you do those two things. Just give me a sense of how long you have for this or what kind of time we’re looking at for the bonus.
Cy Kellett:
30 seconds. No, I’m just kidding. Is it something you can do in five, six, seven minutes?
John DeRosa:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, go ahead. Do it.
John DeRosa:
That’s good. I just want to calibrate, because if it’s 10, 15, I’ll go into a lot more detail, but we got this.
John DeRosa:
Okay, modal collapse. Modal is an adjective affixed to a proposition that is anything other than a simple fact. If I say, “It is snowing out here in New Jersey,” which has been true a lot lately, if I just say, “It is snowing,” say that’s a simple fact. But if I say that, “Necessarily, it is snowing outside in New Jersey,” or if I say, “Possibly, it’s snowing outside in New Jersey,” these kind of operators affixed to the proposition, necessarily and possibly, those are called modal operators. There’s different ways to qualify terms and talk about them in that way.
John DeRosa:
Okay, so what’s the objection? The objection is people say that affirming divine simplicity and divine immutability brings about a modal collapse, because if we say God is absolutely necessary in Himself and perfect, and He’s also simple, so He doesn’t have a bunch of different parts, and He creates, but remember, we can’t conceive of God as thinking about different things that He’s going to do, sitting around for a long time and maybe saying, “Okay, maybe I’ll create that. Maybe I’ll create that over there,” and so the arguer is going to say, because you’re not thinking of God like that, because you’re saying He’s this radical, transcendent, simple God, you have a problem with modal collapse, where God’s necessity, because He has to exist in the way that He does and He’s unchanging, is going to transfer over into created reality such that no longer can you Christians say that it was God’s choice to create, but rather because He is necessary and unchanging, He must have inevitably created everything that exists, and because it’s inevitable, not only…
John DeRosa:
They say this infects everything. That’s why it’s a collapse. Everything collapses, from not just being God is necessary and creation is possible, but everything collapses down into one category. God is necessary. Creation necessarily flows from Him. All the acts of creation, like us talking together right now, even though they seem like they are contingent in various ways, turns out they’re all necessary. A crude fatalism does seem to follow from this sort of thinking. That’s the modal collapse objection in a very broad sense, that if you affirm simplicity and immutability, you get all these possible categories and contingent categories collapsing down into one necessary category. How does that sound for an understanding of the objection?
Cy Kellett:
I love it. So you call that a modal, the modifier that comes at the beginning? That’s what it is?
John DeRosa:
Yeah, a modal is an adjective, right, that comes in front of things. It could be different things, but possibility and necessity are two kinds of modal operators and terms. There’s a whole system of modal logic which I haven’t studied in detail, but it gets very complex. But yeah, that’s the basic idea.
Cy Kellett:
You are a really good sport, John DeRosa. I really do appreciate it. Thank you for putting up with… I have a different kind of simplicity than divine simplicity. I need you to make things simple for me to grasp.
John DeRosa:
Well, I haven’t answered the objection yet.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah. Okay. Oh, I see. I thought you were just going to explain what the objection was. I didn’t know you were going to give us the answer to it.
John DeRosa:
Well, I don’t want to make people hurt like that-
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I thought you were going to leave… Oh, go ahead, John. I didn’t know. I thought you were just going to, okay, express it, and so there you know what we’re talking about in this debate. But okay, resolve it for me.
John DeRosa:
Well, I’ll give you a brief resolution, and I’ll say we’ve done a lot of episodes on this on the Classical Theism Podcast. I’ve had different Catholic and non-Catholic Christian thinkers on.
John DeRosa:
Briefly, what we would do as classical theists is we’re just going to deny either one or two of the steps, depending on how it’s laid out, that lead us to this modal collapse conclusion. What are we going to deny? Well, what seems to get us there is that God, in Himself, who’s unchanging in His perfect nature, they seem to argue, the people pushing modal collapse, that it’s not possible that He brings about one state of affairs or a different state of affairs or a different state of affairs; they want to say that because… They have this principle that one philosopher on my show has called the difference principle. They want to say that if there’s a difference in the cause… Sorry, I mixed it up-
Cy Kellett:
And the effect. I see where you’re going.
John DeRosa:
If there’s a difference in the effect, that entails there had to have been a difference in the cause. But because God is unchanging, they’re going to say there can’t be any other effects. What we’re going to say is we’re going to actually question and deny that that principle has to apply to God.
John DeRosa:
We actually have some good reasons for doing this. We have some analogical reasons, considering a human free action. People who defend a libertarian version of human freedom will typically say that the agent, in the run-up to their decision, could’ve really chosen to have tea or coffee, let’s say, but still they could’ve been held the same up until that moment of choice. In that case, in a small way, it seems maybe it’s not true that just because there was a difference in the effect, there had to be a difference in the cause. It seems like you can have the same unchanging effect and then it goes one way or the other with an act that terminates outside of itself.
John DeRosa:
Analogously, we’re going to say something similar with God. God can be unchanging in His perfect nature, but we’re going to deny that just because He produces one effect or could’ve done a different effect, that He had to be different in Himself. We’re going to say that He, as the agent causing the world, could’ve brought about one world or could’ve brought about a different world, similar to how a human acting freely could’ve brought about one thing or another thing.
John DeRosa:
Now, there’s all kinds of debates with different kinds of human freedom and things of that sort, but the main idea is that we’re going to deny the difference principle applies to God. This is something we do a lot as classical theists because what we end up with when we do our metaphysical analysis, we have these causal principles, everything that goes from potency to act needs something in act to actualize it, or every contingent thing has a cause, or everything that’s composed requires a composer. We have these principles, and then we trace them back and we get to a fundamental reality that transcends those categories.
John DeRosa:
When we say everything that’s contingent has a cause, we get to God, who’s necessary, but then it’s not true that God has a cause. Or if we say everything that’s moved from potency to act has to be done by something already in act, when we trace back to God as pure actuality, well, He doesn’t have any potency, so that principle no longer applies to Him. Similarly, even if it were true that this difference principle, that every difference in an effect entails a difference in the cause, even if that were true of created reality, well, it’s not a valid inference to say, well, therefore, God has to be like that, because in these arguments, we trace back and say, “God is allowed to be different. In fact, He is different. He’s the Creator and we’re the creature.”
John DeRosa:
That’s a basic sketch. There’s a lot more detail, but hopefully that helped.
Cy Kellett:
It did. If I had your brain, I’d have a headache all the time. John DeRosa, thanks. I really appreciate it.
John DeRosa:
Thanks, Cy Kellett. It was a lot of fun.