It turns out a lot of people worship a being they think is God but actually isn’t. That’s because they’ve failed to understand God’s true nature and, in doing so, leave themselves vulnerable to powerful atheistic counterarguments. That’s why in this episode Trent helps us understand the one attribute that makes God, well, God!
Welcome to The Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Pop quiz, hot shot, there’s a Catholic podcaster who’s going to ask you a philosophical question about the existence of God. What do you do? What do you do? Dennis Hopper, Keanu Reeves. That’s from the movie Speed with Sandra Bullock, it’s the one where the bus can’t slow down. If it goes below 55 miles an hour, the bus will explode. It was a great summer blockbuster, and it’s a decent enough springboard to intro today’s episode. Welcome today’s episode to The Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Today, I want to talk about God’s most important attributes. I mean, what should I talk about as an apologist on defending the Catholic faith? If you’re going to defend the Catholic faith, you should defend the most fundamental aspects of our faith. I would say the most fundamental aspect of our faith would be God, the existence of God, God’s true nature, the fact that God is a Trinity. The catechism says that the Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian faith.
So, if you get God wrong, you’re not going to get anything else right. And that’s not just the case for atheists who would get God wrong by saying that God is fictional, but there are a lot of Christians who misunderstand God. They have an idea of God, but their idea of God is too small. There’s a wonderful book that was written back in, I think it was 1962 by J.I Parker, who’s a Protestant Christian, and it was called Your God is Too Small, and it talked about people’s understanding of God, and that’s just not who God actually is. I think a lot of people treat God as like a policeman in the sky or an estranged father in the sky, or our employer in the sky. Even for believers, we treat God like an employer sometimes.
We just check in, I want to make sure we make the boss happy on a beyond good terms, and that’s that. Not someone to enter into a deep intimate relationship with, which is important, because God is the source of all goodness, and any goodness that we desire in our life will ultimately come from him in one way or another. But however, some of you will try to enter into that understanding of God, they enter into it almost in too literal of a fashion, that they imagine that God is just like you or me, a person exactly like you or me. And they worry about God flying off the handle, or God becoming really upset with them and not forgiving them, that God is just a person like you or me. Now, sometimes that might happen when you read scripture. You read scripture, it talks about how God repented of doing something, or the wrath of God.
But we have to remember that scripture, how it describes God, it often uses anthropomorphic language. It uses language to make God more accessible to us. That just as the Bible is not a scientific textbook that tells us exactly how the world developed over the past 4.5, 4 billion years. That’s just for planet earth. Our observable universe is about 13 billion years old with a B, billion, Genesis is not a science book, it doesn’t tell us that. In the same way, the Bible is not the Summa Theologiae. Summa Theologiae was a theological handbook developed by St. Thomas Aquinas for novice theology students. And so, if you try reading the Summa Theologiae, and then you read the beginning, this is just for beginners, you start to feel really simple minded. At least I do when I start cracking into the Summa, I’m like, “Oh goodness. By the way, if you want a good breakdown of a lot of the stuff that’s in the Summa, you can get a shorter Summa by Peter Craft. It’s a great book on the subject.
And of course, Pints With Aquinas, Matt Fradd is a wonderful podcast, and he does a lot of episodes on the Summa. But my point is just that the way God is described in the Bible is not the same way God is described in something like St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa. Thomas is very particular in describing God in exact philosophical terms. So, the Bible is not a scientific textbook, it is not a theological textbook, it’s not a textbook of any kind. The Bible is the story of salvation history about how God created human beings and revealed himself to them over time. And then in the fullness of time, as Galatians 4:4 says, St. Paul tells us in Galatians 4:4, in the fullness of time, God sent his son born of a woman, born under the law, that God entered into the history he created to ultimately redeem us, to give us a chance to eternal life. That is what the Bible is about.
And it does communicate important truths about God, like God is not a creature, he is creator, God is perfect, we are sinners. We can only leave our sinful state by cooperating with God’s grace. So, we learn a lot from God. And scripture also tells us a lot about God’s attributes, it tells us that God is omniscience. Jesus is omniscient, all-knowing, Jesus tells people that God knows the number of hairs on your head, he knows whenever a sparrow falls to the ground. And today, we would know he knows even more than that. He knows the location, velocity and spin of every particle or subatomic particle in the universe. He knows everything true about the past, everything true about the future, he’s all powerful, and scripture even talks about God being all powerful. Actually, the catechism when it talks about divine attributes, it mentions that only one divine attribute is in the creed that we recite at mass. Do you know what that is? What is the one divine attribute that we recite in the creed? It’s God’s omnipotence, that he’s all powerful.
In Hebrew, God is called El Shaddai. El Shaddai, I want to make sure I’m pronouncing it right. El Shaddai, which means the power. Oh, I just love that. The almighty, or you could just say the power. I have the power. Anyone? Anyone? He-Man, the He-Man cartoon. Hopefully, some you grew up on that. But here’s what I want to focus on today, what is God’s most important attribute? If there is an attribute of God that I would say is God’s most important attribute, in fact, it is the thing about God that makes God, God. It’s important for us to know this, because if we don’t understand this, then we’ll be talking past atheists or we’ll be misunderstanding God when we’re trying to talk with them about the existence of nature of God. The reason I bring this up is that a month ago, I was in California filming for School of Apologetics course on evidence for the existence of God. I actually finished several months ago, arguing against abortion. So if you want to check out that course, go to schoolapologetics.com. I don’t think it’s up yet, but it should be up soon.
I’ll be showing sneak previews of that course and my evidence for God course at trenthornpodcast.com soon. So, if you want to catch that and other bonus content, become a premium subscriber at trenthornpodcast.com. For as little as $5 a month, you get access to bonus content like that, also my catechism study series every week. Probably by the end of summer, we’ll be done with the catechism, you’ll still get access to the past study. And then I’ll debut a new study series after that. If you’re a silver level subscriber or higher, you get a fancy mug, so be sure to check all that out. Now, back to the course, it was a great course, I spent four days, I filmed about 47 lectures on the existence and nature of God, and I went through the different divine attributes, omniscience, omnipotence, eternal, and helping you understand them, because a lot of people misunderstand these attributes.
I’ll give you an example, what does it mean to say that God is eternal? A lot of people think that eternal just means that God has no beginning or end. And that’s true. It’s true that God does not have a beginning to his life and he does not have an end to his life, but we should not think of God as merely having some kind of everlasting life. When the Bible says that we’ll have eternal life in heaven, it doesn’t mean we will be eternal in the sense that God is eternal. We will have everlasting life, so our life had a beginning, but it will just have no end. But God is not a being who merely has no beginning or no end like he just exists on an infinite timeline. That’s because God does not exist in time at all, just as God is not extended over space because he’s not composed of matter, God is not extended over time.
It’s hard for us to wrap our heads around this because we think of God in heaven like we’re praying and God is hearing us, and then God is deciding what he’s going to do, and then he makes a decision and then he doesn’t, and he has to think about things. God doesn’t think about anything, because thinking is a temporal process where beings like you and me that are not all knowing. Since God is all knowing he doesn’t think about anything. As the catechism says in paragraph 600, to God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. So God sees everything in one eternal now. God is timeless, God does not change. Eternal means as the early medieval philosopher, Boethius put it, he said that God’s eternity means that he has the perfect, complete and simultaneous possession of temporal life. So all of God’s temporal life, God perfectly, completely and simultaneously possesses it. God just is. He doesn’t change, he is present to every moment of time that exists, past, present or future, but God himself does not go through time like you or I do.
So, how in the world could we wrap our heads around that? Well, imagine an author writing a story. An author writes a story, and he might imagine the story in one complete flash of insight. I mean, I bet Stephen King does this. He just gets this insight, and he’s got the story in his head. I mean, with human authors, it takes us time to think about, but imagine a really good author, human author who just instantaneously, I’ve got the story. It appears to the author as an instantaneous flash of genius. But for the characters in the story, the story plays out over time. Maybe the story plays out over months or years or decades, but for the author of the story, it comes to him in one single moment.
Now of course, human authors exist in time, so it’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s serviceable. The point I’m getting at is that God has these different attributes, but when we share the existence of God with atheists, sometimes we’ll get into discussions or arguments, and we’ll frame God incorrectly. We’ll think of God merely as one being in the universe. Atheists will talk about, well, how could you worship God? Why would I worship some being that’s all powerful? How do you know God is all powerful? How do you know he’s all knowing? How do you know he’s all good? Why should I trust God? Because let me ask you this son, what is God’s most important attribute? You might think it’s his omnipotence, all powerful, maybe it’s the fact that he’s all knowing. You might think that it’s God’s power. But then your atheist friend may say, okay, God is really great because he’s all powerful, what if he decides to be a cosmic dictator and squishes you like a bug? To which you’d reply, “Oh, we’ll know because God is all good.”
“Okay. Well, how do you know he’s all good? What if he just decided to break all of his promises?” “Well, God would never do that. He’s all good.” “Right. But how do you know that? What is it about God that makes him so good?” Because a lot of times in our world, we think of things as being good or evil, at least in the modern world, it’s just arbitrary to some people. We got some human beings are good, then they turn out to be evil. You thought they were good, but it turns out they had this hidden double life. Our modern world has a hard time understanding good and evil, and how someone like God, a being like God or God who just is being, that’ll be important, and that will come up later, could just be all good, all powerful, or all knowing? And that leads us to God’s most important attribute, which is his simplicity.
What does that mean? You’re saying God’s most important attribute is that he’s simple to understand? No, no, no, no. God is difficult to understand. The catechism paragraph 42 says that God exists beyond what our human language can express about him, so we always have to speak about God in an analogous way. God is infinitely beyond us. And God speaking through Prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 55:8-9, God says for as high as the heavens are above the earth, so are my ways above your ways, so are my thoughts above your thoughts. God is not like us. The biggest reason that God is not like us is because God is not a member of a kind. Think about it. I am a person, what does that mean? As a person, there is a kind that precedes me. Before I was born, there were persons, and when I was born, I came to represent or in fancy philosophical speak, I instantiated this particular that preexisted me, persons.
And now you have this with natural kinds and artificial kinds. So if I build a chair, a chair instantiates the kind of chair. A chair is a type of thing. It’s a type of object. A fish is a type of animal. So, the question is when you have God, we can ask, well, what is God a type of? And the answer is he’s not a type of anything. If God merely instantiated something, if God was a being, a person, then that would mean there was something else being or persons that existed before God or beyond God that God represented. Now, I’m going to try to go over these points a few times, because I want them to sink in. It’s important for you to understand. God is not a being or a person. If he were, then we would have a lot of questions about why should I worship this being as opposed to another being? Just because God’s all powerful, does that mean I have to do what he says because he’s going to … I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.
It’s scary like that. And the catechism recognizes this, that’s why in paragraph 271, the catechism says, in God, power, essence, will, intellect, wisdom and justice are all identical. Nothing therefore, can be in God’s power, which could not be in his just will or his wise intellect. That goes back to the idea of divine simplicity. Divine simplicity does not mean that God is simple to understand, it rather means that God has no parts. This is important, because when I say God is not a being or a person, if we thought of God in this way, that God merely represented something beyond him, he wouldn’t really be God, right? If God is a being, I would say, well, what made being itself? If God represents being, being seen beyond God. It’s like he just popped up in our universe, it was like, “Whoa, what should I do today? Maybe I could put a universe together.” It would make God very small.
No, rather, we say that God isn’t a being, he is being. Go back to Exodus 3:14. This is not a modern concept by the way, that God is not this kind of being or that kind of being, God just is. In Exodus 3:14, Moses meets God in the burning Bush. God appears to Moses in what’s called a theophany. This is an appearance of God. God is invisible by nature. You can’t see God, but God can make him, in his divine nature. Now in becoming man, you can see God in his human nature by beholding the man, Jesus Christ. But in his divine nature, no one can partake of God, no one can partake in beholding who he is truly is because God is immaterial. But God can make himself known to people through things like the burning Bush. And so, Moses asked God, “Okay, you want me to go back and free the Israelites, who, what God sent me, what’s your name even? And we get the name, I am that I am. That is my name. I am, that I am.
What that means, as the catechism lays out is that we understand that God is not this kind of being or that being. We say that what is, a human is a creature that can think rationally, a fish is an animal that can swim, a bird is an animal that can fly, usually, or has feathers or the avian characteristics. The problem is our modern culture would say a God is an all powerful, all knowing, all good being, a being with these attributes. But notice what’s weird here, a God is, that seems to imply there could be more than one being that is all powerful, all knowing and all good. But you couldn’t have that. If there were two beings that were both all powerful and all knowing and all good, could one destroy the other? Does it seem like they’re either could be all powerful because they wouldn’t have control over something else that exists?
In fact, if there were two beings that were equal and attributes and were both infinite … because think about it, if there were two, all powerful, all-knowing, all good beings, they’d be creatures, they would be finite, there would be something they’re lacking. How do we know that? Because if there were these two beings, both are the Omni properties, all powerful, all good, all knowing, and these two beings exist, they would both be finite, they would not be infinite. They’d have to be finite because one of them, each would have to lack something the other had, otherwise, you couldn’t tell them apart. This thing about, how do you tell anything apart? Right now here on my desk, I’m holding two water bottles, and they look identical, they have the same amount of water in them, but they each lack something. They lack the other bottles, spatial location.
I’m holding one in my right hand, one of my left hand. That’s how I can know they’re not the same bottle. They each lack something. Some people will say, well, why do you believe in one God? How do you know it’s not two gods? Well, because if there were two gods, there actually wouldn’t be God, they’d be missing something. They wouldn’t be infinite. There’d be something beyond them, it explains why these two beings exist. So, what we’re looking for, we’re trying to explain reality. This is interesting in the history of physics, that you’ll come up with theories and formulas. What physics tries to do is it tries to seek simpler and simpler formulas, and unify theories to explain the world. So you had, oh gosh, what was it?
My history of science people will get on me about this, over 100 years ago, I’m going to say this, I think it was in the 19th century, it was over 100 years ago, you had Maxwell’s theories of electromagnetism that unified theories about electricity and magnetism to understand this is one force that we’re working with. Now, physicists are trying to combine the theory of relativity with cosmology and the big bang, to have some grand unified field theory. In science, you always try to get simpler formulas and laws and other things to explain the universe. I think scientists one day like to be able to explain the whole universe with a formula that could fit on a three by five card in order to explain things. So, there’s simpler and simpler things to get back to the ultimate foundation of reality. Now, as Christians, we believe that God is the ultimate foundation of reality, but in order for God to be the ultimate foundation of reality, he can not have any parts.
This is controversial. This is the doctrine, divine simplicity, saying that God has no material parts, he doesn’t even have metaphysical parts. Like my mind, our minds, for example, we’re divided. We have our will, we have our intellect, and as thinking beings, we’re divided into parts. The angels do not exist as one infinite act of being. They don’t have bodies, but they are divided into parts, and something keeps their parts together, same for us. So take me as a human being, I am a composite of body and soul, and something keeps my body and soul together, and that means I am alive. So the fact that I have parts, I have a body and a soul that are united together, means there is something else more fundamental than me. So, the reason classical theologians and the church holds that God is simple, or he has no parts is because if God had parts, if he had parts, that would mean there’s something more fundamental than God keeping all of his parts together.
And so, you would say if God had parts, what unites the parts together? If there’s something that unites God’s parts together, that is what would really be God. That’s why the church confesses God’s divine simplicity. In the 11th century, St. Anselm of Canterbury said of God, there are no parts in you, Lord, neither are you many, but you are so much one, and the same with yourself that in nothing, are you dissimilar with yourself. That doesn’t mean that everything is God, by the way. We think, oh God is everything, does that mean that God is my pen? God is my water bottle? No, God creates things that are distinct from him, but God himself has no parts and God sustains everything that exists. So just a century later after St. Anselm’s time, the fourth Lateran council declared, we firmly believe in simply confess that there is only one true God, eternal and immeasurable, almighty, unchangeable, incomprehensible, and ineffable, father, son, and Holy spirit. Three persons, but one absolutely simple essence substance or nature.
That’s what’s important. God is just one infinite act of being without any parts whatsoever. This is crucial. This is what makes God, God. Not merely having the omni properties. Because there are a lot of contemporary theologians and philosophers, Richard Swinburne would be an example of this. He’s a very intelligent man, he’s an Eastern Orthodox philosopher and he has written wonderful works and arguments on the existence of God. His book, The Existence of God is one of the best defenses of the existence of God out there. Though it does start from a very different view about who God is and how we can understand God, and how we can relate to God. But in his book, the coherence of God, Swinburne tries to explain what God is like. And he says, you could imagine what it’s like to be God. Just imagine you know more and more and more, and you look in the mirror and you don’t see anything and you don’t feel a body. And you’re present and understanding things beyond you, but you don’t have a body right next to you.
And he goes through this exercise and he says, pretty sure, anybody could imagine what it would be like to be an infinite spirit. But that’s not God, and I think a lot of atheists have rightful challenges to this, that if God is just this person like you or me that doesn’t have body that has all this power at his disposal and knows a lot, it’s scary. What would this person be like? What if he turned on a dime and just decided to crush all of us because he was having a bad day? Well, that’s where the doctrine of divine simplicity comes in. God is all good because he is infinite being itself. God doesn’t lack anything. So, when you think about what is good and what is evil, a lot of atheists have a hard time describing good and evil. I remember I was discussing with a atheist once online, and they said that evil is an irreducible concept that doesn’t need an explanation or a definition, and I thought that was a pretty weak response.
So, I would say that goodness and evil, evil is not a thing to go with the classic formulation from St. Augustan. Evil is not a thing, it is a parasite upon the good. Evil as an absence of the good. So you have good and bad, non-moral goodness and badness. Like a bad tree is one that lacks fruit when it should be in season, think about Jesus and the parable of the fig tree. A bad dog might be a dog that doesn’t go outside and goes on the carpet, whether they lack proper potty training skills. A good or bad person, we might say in the moral sense, a bad person lacks a virtue they ought to have, whether it’s kindness or justice or temperance or whatever it may be. So if God is infinite being, there’s nothing more fundamental than God. God is one undivided infinite act of being, that means God is not lacking anything. And so God would have to be good by definition.
This is helpful. I find the doctrine divine simplicity, and I’ll talk about some objections to it because it’s not just atheists, there are modern Christian philosophers who don’t agree with the doctrine of divine simplicity. So I’ll talk about their objections. But I find the doctrine divine simplicity really makes sense when we think about God’s goodness, that he has no parts, he’s not divided, he’s just infinite being itself. When we think about God as being the foundation of existence, the contingency argument for God says that everything that exists depends on something else for its existence. So there can’t be an infinite chain of depending things, so there has to be just one cause that depends on nothing for its existence. But if God doesn’t depend on anything, then he can’t have parts. If he had parts, he would depend on something that unites his parts together. And just as an intuitive way for me, if we’re seeking that ultimate explanation of reality, I feel like the ultimate explanation of reality is going to be perfectly simple.
It’ll be complex for us to try to wrap our heads around, but at a metaphysical level, it will just be simple. We say, this will be this kind of explanation, this will be this kind of explanation. When we behold God is the ultimate explanation of reality, we say God will be, period. No semi-colon, no colon, no M dash, is just God will be. Here’s a good quote from David Bentley Hart, who is someone I disagree with quite often. I don’t agree with Hart on universalism, I don’t agree with him on the doctrine of hell, some of his criticisms of owning wealth or defenses of democratic socialism. But David Bentley Hart is pretty good on atheism. For example, his book, The Experience of God is a very good book. This is what he says about divine simplicity, he says there is an ancient metaphysical doctrine that the source of all things, God, that is, must be essentially simple. That is God cannot possess distinct parts or even distinct properties, and in himself does not allow even of a distinction between essence and existence.
What that means is essence is what you do, existence is what you are. A fish exists and has a fishy essence, it swims. There’s a difference between what a fish is and what a fish does. With God, there’s no difference between what God is and what he does, because what he does is just that he is. He’s just infinite being that is ultimate perfection itself. He goes on, if one believes that God stands at the end of reason’s journey toward the truth of all things, it seems obvious to me that a denial of divine simplicity is tantamount to atheism. This is a strong claim, he’s saying that if you don’t believe God is simple, it’s basically atheism. You’re saying that there is a reality and there’s a cause of reality that’s super duper powerful, super duper smart, wasn’t created by anything else, but exists inexplicably. You say it’s not created by anything else, depends on nothing else, but if this thing has parts, how does it actually operate and function? It sounds like a kind of being, rather than just infinite being itself. That would be the problem there.
But people will say, well, Trent, you’ve got problems of your own though. You have problems when it comes to divine simplicity. I’ll talk about a few objections. I mean, there are more, and there are other sophisticated objections to get to, but let me talk about some of the common ones. One objection is that if God is not composed of parts, then that means all his properties are the same thing. We broached this a little with the quote from the catechism. The catechism says in paragraph 271, in God, power, essence, will, intellect, wisdom and justice are all identical. So you have philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, who is a Protestant who say that this is nonsense. Power and intellect are not the same, power is not the same thing as intellect. So if God’s power is the same thing as his intellect, that doesn’t make any sense, because power and intellect are two completely different kinds of things. And so, that’s the objection that God has to at least have different properties. Otherwise, we can’t conceive of what God is like if he doesn’t have distinct properties of omnipotence, omniscience, being all good, being eternal.
But I would say here that this misunderstands God’s properties, God does not have properties in the same way that Batman has pockets on his utility belt. It’s not like God is adorned with properties as these real metaphysical things that are distinct in him, just like how Batman has his grapple and his batter rings, and as all this stuff he carries in a utility belt. God doesn’t wear his properties like you and I were accessories. Rather, when we say God is all powerful and all knowing, this is our limited human way of understanding God as infinite being itself. It’s just another way of saying that God, as infinite being, is not limited in what God can do, God is not limited in what God knows, God is not limited in how he resides or pervades space and time, God is not limited in his existence. These properties are just ways of describing the same thing. God’s infinite, unlimited act of being.
And so, when we use these properties, once again, we’re speaking of God in an analogous way, analogies are not a cop-out. If I say to you, do you see what I’m talking about? I’m not asking you if you’re standing behind me in my house, looking at my laptop, and now the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up and I have to look behind me. And you’re not there, you’re not there, that was silly. Why did I look there? When I ask you, do you see what I’m talking about? What I’m saying is, can you envision in your mind, does it make sense to you in your mind? You know how in our minds we think of ideas and we see them? When we see something in the mind, it’s like looking with our eyes, but it’s also a lot different than looking with our eyes. In fact, it’s almost nothing like using our optic nerves and perceiving some object.
But when we see something in your mind, it is like seeing, but it’s also really not like seeing at all. That’s God’s attributes. That’s God. When we speak of God, we have to use similar analogies, analogous ways of reasoning, to say that God has wisdom or intellect, or God is relatable to us. We can speak of God and we say, okay, God has power, it’s like how I have power, but then it’s nothing like how I have power because God can make something from nothing. God knows things, but he doesn’t think like I do. So Ed Feser, a Catholic [inaudible 00:32:43] philosopher puts it this way, when we say that God has power and knowledge, for example, we don’t mean that he instantiates the properties, having power and having knowledge, just as we do. We mean there is something in him, in God that is analogous to what we call power and knowledge in us. But that whatever this amounts to, it does not amount to his having just the same thing we do. I hope that’s a helpful explanation there.
God has properties, they’re distinct, but only because as human beings, we have to make these distinctions in order to understand God. They don’t represent any divisions in what it means to be God. Although another objection isn’t God divided, God’s a Trinity, so he’s divided into three persons. God is not divided or separated into three persons, God exists as three distinct persons who are only distinct from one another in their relations with one another. So, the father, son and the Holy spirit fully possess the one infinite undivided, divine nature. God, as being as infinite, undivided being, God’s being is not divided. God’s infinite being is fully possessed by the father, son and Holy spirit. Because God is infinite, infinity can be fully possessed by more than one person because that’s just how infinity works. When you have infinity with God or with numbers, you can have that. You can’t have infinity in the actual world, and I would say you can’t have an infinite chain of causes, an infinite causal series into the past, which is a subject I broach in my evidence for God class.
So, the fact that God is a Trinity, that does not negate God’s simplicity. God is the infinite act of being that exists as three persons who only differ from one another in their relationships between father, son and Holy spirit. That’s why I love the icons of the Trinity that show three identical persons. We use the father, the son, and a dove, an image of an old man, a young man and a dove to understand the different relationships. But ontologically, an icon with three identical persons is a better way to reflect the nature of the Trinity. That’s why some people said that when Abraham was visited by three individuals, I think is in Genesis 18, people called that a … it’s like a prototype for the Trinity. Okay. That’s one objection.
The last objection, the more potent one philosophically, and I’ll only be able to cover it briefly, maybe I’ll go into it in a future open mailbag episode, is that if God doesn’t have any parts, that means he’s pure act, pure being, he has no potential. So if God were a combination of actual and potential, then you couldn’t have St. Thomas Aquinas’s first way, that God is the because of all potential becoming actual, is not [inaudible 00:35:38]. God is not a mixture of the actual and the potential. I have the potential to get taller … No, I actually don’t, I only have the potential to get shorter nowadays, and the potential to get wider, and something else has to actualize that. And so, that chain of actualization goes back to God, and the classic formulation is that God is pure actuality itself. God has no divisions, he’s not part act, part potential like you or me, he’s pure act. But then if that’s the case, how could God create the world, for example? How could God make the world?
If he’s pure act, that means he had no potential for creating the world. The potential for creating the world, if it doesn’t exist in God, it can’t be actualized. The idea is that God had a potential to make the world, and he’d have to actualize it if he created anything. But if he had that potential, he wouldn’t be simple. He would be divided into parts, the part of God that actually has power knowledge, and the part that potentially does things like create the world. But God is simple., he can’t have actual and potential mixed together. He’s pure act. The answer to the dilemma is found in what the philosopher, Peter Geach, G-E-A-C-H references, and this is called a Cambridge change. We also believe as Catholics and classical Christians, that God is immutable. God doesn’t change. God changes everything in the world, but God himself has not changed. The letter to James says that God is the father of lights in whom there is no shadow of change or variation. I think it’s in James chapter one.
God doesn’t change, but we change, the world changes. And if that’s the case, where does the potential for creating the world lie if it doesn’t lie in God? It lies in the world that hasn’t been created. That’s the key to understanding it. The change that God undergoes from being without a universe to being with the universe is not a change in God. It is a change in the potential for a universe. It’s a change in us and our world. And so, Peter Geach calls this a Cambridge change. He calls it this because he was arguing with a bunch of guys at Cambridge about this once. Here’s the thing, let’s say my son, Matthew grows up to be big and tall, and Matthew grows up to be taller than me. In that case, my son, Matthew has changed. Something direct about Matthew changed. He went from being a little guy to being a big guy. Matt changed. When I say Matthew is taller than me, Matthew changed.
But at the same time, when he does that, I have changed. I am now shorter than Matthew. If he grows up to be taller than me, I have changed and become smaller than him. But here’s the thing, have I changed? Did anything change about me? No, I’m still the same height through all of this. What changed is my relationship to him. So, it’s an indirect change. There’s no change in me, in my nature, the changes all in Matthew. It’s just indirectly reflected in me. In the same way, when God creates the universe, nothing in God changes when he chooses to create a universe from nothing. He chooses to actualize that potential, nothing in God changes, no potential in God is changed. Rather, God’s status of being without creation and being with creation, that is a change that’s indirect. That merely describes the change of creation, coming into existence. That describes the change undergone by creation. No change by God. God is still simple in the infinite act of being.
Well, I hope your head is not high up in the sky here. I tried to fly down below 30,000 feet, below 10,000 feet, so you don’t have to wear your oxygen mask, but it’s important. God is amazing, God is love. God is infinite and eternal, and it’s completely beyond me. God is more beyond me than I am beyond an amoeba. I could never love an amoeba. By that logic, God could never love me. If God is more different than me than I am from an amoeba, and I can’t love an amoeba, God can’t love me. Philosophical trap here, right? But really, the only way that you can answer it is through theology, Revelation, God becoming man. My reason tells me God can’t love me, but the historical experience of God with his arms outstretched on the cross shows me he does that. That is just the way to over … That visceral display of love helps to defeat this philosophical argument that I have.
And it encourages me to know that God truly does love me, that he can give me the wisdom to understand him. Faith seeking understanding, as the medieval scholastics would say. I hope you will continue to do the same. Look, our faith covers deep subjects, but God gave you a mind to understand them. You just got to take some time to think about it. But he gave you that mind, love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength. So, we need to love the Lord, we do with our hearts all the time. We should love the Lord with our minds as well to intimately know who God is. I hope that when my course comes out, it might help you to be able to do that. I’m going to say it’s called Evidence For The Existence of God. When it comes out, I’ll let you know, I’ll show some sneak peaks at trenthornpodcast.com for our Patreons.
Thank you all so much. I hope you enjoy this, and I’ll leave some resources on the doctrine of divine simplicity at trenthornpodcast.com. But I will leave you with some recommendations on that. I think Ed Feser has written a few posts on divine simplicity on his wonderful blog. Ed Feser blog is a place you can go and check. Here is another guy, Kevin Dolezal wrote a book, God Without Parts. It was funny, there’s a lot of Calvinists who aligned with classical Catholic theists who also agree with God being simple, eternal, timeless, things like that. James Dolezal. Sorry. Why did I say Kevin Dolezal? I don’t know. James Dolezal, D-O-L-E-Z-A-L, God Without Parts, Divine Simplicity and The Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness. I also recommend John DeRosa, his Classical Theism podcast. I think he should have some podcast episodes on divine simplicity. If he doesn’t, I’ll tell him to get on that. I know he has at least one on that, and he’s got other great stuff to help you understand God in a better way.
So be sure to go and check out Classical Theism podcast at Feser’s blog, and God Without Parts by James Dolezal. Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a wonderful day.
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