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In this episode Trent sits down with Catholic apologist Pat Flynn to discuss how medieval philosophers gave us the best tools to defeat atheism and how some modern Christian views of God undermine our Faith.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone, welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Just want to let you know, I have a new course on the existence of God at the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics. If you haven’t been there yet, you really need to go check it out, schoolofapologetics.com. They’ve got probably my favorite course there. It’s not one of my courses, because that would be narcissistic. It is Jimmy Akin’s Beginner’s Guide to Apologetics. It’s just awesome, because Jimmy is the best, because Jimmy is probably a robot the church sent from the future to help us, because he knows everything. But go to schoolofapologetics.com, check out my new course, Evidence for God, because today, also, this ties into that a little bit, I want to talk about how Christians sometimes get God wrong. There’s different views among philosophers of religion. How do we understand God?
Trent Horn:
And so the title of today’s episode is, How the medieval God can beat up the modern God. What does that mean? We often think of medieval philosophers, they live in the dark ages. And I hate that phrase by the way, I think it was Petrarch, a Renaissance writer, who came up with it, which is silly. It was the time when the light of Christ shined in the world, it was Christendom. And then during the medieval period, they were all kind of advances in technology, arts and literature. Any case, that’s a topic for another show, but medieval philosophers gave us a lot of great insights into understanding who God is and it’s very technical and sophisticated. And, ironically, many modern views of God are much less sophisticated and dumbed down compared to medieval philosophers.
Trent Horn:
And when you have these modern views of God, that are dumbed down or not as sophisticated or not as fully thought out, you can get into trouble when you argue about atheism. And atheists can put forward serious objections to theism, to belief in God, based on these understandings of God that are really incomplete. So, to help us dive into that today, I’ve invited Pat Flynn onto the show. Pat is at chroniclesofstrength.com. He’s got a lot of podcasting, philosophy, theology, and how to get your kettlebell workouts in. Pat, welcome to the podcast.
Pat Flynn:
Trent Horn, it is a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me on.
Trent Horn:
All right. Well, before we get started though, can you tell our listeners just a little bit more about yourself?
Pat Flynn:
Yeah, sure. What’s the condensed version here? Well, I’m an online face and mouth, I guess. My backgrounds, academically, are in economics and philosophy, but a lot of people know me for sharing online kettlebell workouts. So it’s weird. I have a foot in a lot of different worlds. I’m now an affiliate apologist with Catholic Answers, which is a great honor. I am a former atheist and naturalist who was convinced by the great classical theistic tradition. And in fact it was this particular model and view of God that moved me away from naturalism to theism and then eventually Catholicism. So it was really philosophy of God that served as a significant bridge to religion, for me. So I think maybe that’s the most relevant aspect of my background probably for the conversation we’re going to have.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, well let’s jump into that classical theism. A lot of people may not understand that, but I think that that’s the big difference. We talk about the medieval God, we’re talking about a classical tradition, not just a Christian one, by the way. We have obviously Catholic philosophers, Aquinas, Bonaventure, but also there are Jewish philosophers as well, Maimonides would be one of them. Muslim philosophers like Avicenna. But while they differed in important ways from each other, they all held to a very classical view of God. So I want to talk about classical theism versus what the Catholic philosopher Brian Davies calls theistic personalism.
Pat Flynn:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
And I think the biggest difference here that for a lot of people, what is so hard about sharing the existence of God or debating with atheists today is that, many modern people erroneously think God is a being among others. Then, if we want to prove God exists, we have to assemble evidence in the same way we would prove any other individual being exists. You want to prove Bigfoot, go out with your cameras. You want to prove Higgs Boson, turn on the machine that does the scientific experiments. That God is just one being among all these other beings and we got to do our telescopes and microscopes and find him. But that’s a very modern view of God, that he’s a being among others, which allows atheists to judge God in a different way than he should be judged. Whereas the classical view would be that God just is being, but that’s not pantheism. Break this down for us.
Pat Flynn:
Yeah. God is being, I’ll say, everything else is being through participation. So we’re not saying that everything that exists is God when we say that God is subsistent existence itself, because we’re committed to modes of being. So our mode of being is distinct from God’s mode of being. So that’s important to get clarity of that upfront to avoid a pantheism or pantheism. But no classical theism, as you know, Trent is both very deep and very wide in its tradition. I would argue, it goes all the way back to Plato where he identifies the ultimate deity, if you will, with the form of the good, put his demurrage aside. And then it developed right on down through the line, certainly into Christianity, [Augustinoethius 00:05:24] Aquinas is often seen as the great champion of these developments, but you have classical Theus in Hinduism, in Islam, in Judaism. So it’s certainly not restricted to Christianity, and in fact, many Protestants are classical theists. So I want to make sure that this is not a Catholic versus Protestant debate. I mean-
Trent Horn:
This is very popular even among the Protestant reformers and going forward for several centuries, it’s much more recent. And I guess if we had to make a comparison, what do we mean the difference here to put it in concrete terms? What we are comparing would be like St. Thomas Aquinas, but even Calvin and other Protestant reformers had this view that God, and will break down these attributes here shortly, God is infinite. He is not a being among others. He is not a person among other persons. He just is being, He is intellect. He has intellect and will, but He is being itself. He is the ground of being, anything that exists, exists because it participates in the fact that God is being, then God gives it being. So God is being, he is simple. He’s not composed to parts. He is timeless. He is necessary. He is immutable. God does not change.
Trent Horn:
So, when you have all of these points together, you have a very robust view of God whereas a more modern conception, to give a few examples, our listeners are familiar with, be like how William Lang Craig views God. Now I think William Lang Craig has put out a lot of great arguments in natural theology. I appreciate them. I am a staunch defender of the Colony when other Catholics are not, I think actually you have actually put some good arguments out there for it as well or Richard Swinburne who is also-
Pat Flynn:
Sweet Richard.
Trent Horn:
Richard Swinburne, he’s an Orthodox philosopher. He is a great philosopher of religion. Swinburne would be another good example, a really good example to compare here. I love listening to him talk. “Well, God,” you asked Richard Swinburne, what?
Pat Flynn:
I’m absolutely convinced of substance daoism.
Trent Horn:
Well, then when you ask him what does [crosstalk 00:07:34] Yeah. What it means to be God though? The problem is you ask Swinburne, what does it mean to be God? He says, “Well it’s not that hard to imagine being God, just imagine you and you don’t have a body, you don’t get tired and you’re not ignorant and you’re aware of everything. And very soon you arrive at what it means to be God.” And so here, he’s just saying by God is a big cosmic person like me with infinite powers, but that leads to a bunch of problems. I’ll give you one that we can start out with. And that would be the philosopher Stephen Law has said, “Well, how do we know God isn’t evil? How do we know?” We look at the world around us people will say, “Look at all the good things. That means there’s a good God and he tolerates evil.”
Trent Horn:
And law says, “Well, how do you know that he Isn’t an evil God and he just tolerates the good things so he can have more evil. How do you know? It could go either way.” and so I’ve seen others like William Lang Craig and others try to rebut this but I feel classical theists have a great retort. And that is because God is being itself. He also has to be perfectly good because of the nature of being, why don’t you walk us through?
Pat Flynn:
Yeah, boy, you put a lot of stuff on the table. So let me wade through it bit by bit here. Really good stuff. So yes, when we’re contrasting classical theism with the modern God, well, there’s a lot of different models of the modern God. So it’s difficult to just dismiss all of them right away. I think the best thing to do is make the case for classical theism and that will automatically exclude its competitors. Because when I read Swinburne, yes, I think he falls under the broad tent of theistic personalism, but he seems to have different views about God, even than Bill Craig. And, I was looking around for his book, the Existence of God. It’s a great book. It’s really good but-
Trent Horn:
I’ll give you an example of a difference. I don’t know if he holds this anymore, but among modern philosophers or religion, God’s necessity. The idea that he has to exist. You could say that’s factual necessity or just that God is indestructible, that it’s possible He could not have existed, but since he does exist, hey ain’t going anywhere. or logical necessity, which is, God must exist just like two plus two equals four.
Pat Flynn:
Yeah, to deny it would entail a contradiction.
Trent Horn:
And so, I know Craig, at one point only believed God was factually necessary then he changed his mind on that. I don’t know if Swinburne… I think he might believe God is only factually necessary. I think that might be a difference there.
Pat Flynn:
I can’t say because a lot of Swinburne’s work that I’ve spent time with was many years ago, so maybe has changed his mind on this, but Swinburne famously posits Burtness at the ultimate explanatory end. And I think that going to be a critical issue that we’re going to want to explore here later on. So real quick, I want to circle back to some of the other things you said. Classical theme is marked by crucial characteristics. God is absolutely the first cause of all causable things. There’s nothing back of God. It’s like the buck stops here. God is a temporal, strictly timeless. God is absolutely simple, He’s not composed of parts, physical parts or metaphysical parts. He’s purely actual. He lacks any intrinsic passive potency. And, I think the core critical development from Aquinas that really cements all this is that, God has no distinct nature and no distinct act of existence. That to be God is just to be, to be. God isn’t even a substance, technically speaking, God is a subsistent. That is something that people need to get clear on because-
Trent Horn:
To help people understand that it’s like if I say, a fish is an aquatic animal. Trent is a rational creature. A building is a structure created for people to dwell in, but for God we would just say, God is, and there’d be nothing after that.
Pat Flynn:
Right. [crosstalk 00:11:23]. It would be incorrect to say God exists, because I think we want to say anything of that type of grammatical structure is actually pointing towards a cause like rather to articulate it, this is what Barry Miller says. God’s existence. We should just have exist! Which I think that’s right. But it shows the radical transcendence of God. So you brought up Stephen Law and The evil-god challenge. So part of this comes down to method and procedure. What is motivating somebody toward a particular model of God? And in the classical tradition, what motivates classical theism is that, we start with rut in front of us. We start by sort of carving reality at its joints. We start in philosophy and of nature and then move to metaphysics.
Pat Flynn:
And this is where you try to make sense of common experience. Things like change, things like composites, and you start to realize, Okay, how do we make change intelligible? Well, we have to carve being into. There has to be actual being and potential being to give us the conditions to render change intelligible. And then we start to get causal principles from this, that push us towards an unactualized actualizer, an unchanged changer to make sense of why there’s any changing things at all. So, just follow me broadly. Say that there are certain features or aspects or categories, reality that are not intrinsically completely intelligible but they’re always pointing beyond themselves for a source of intelligibility or explanation or cause or something like that. What might some of these features or categories be? Well, again, traditional philosophers have said, it seems like changing things. It seems like composite things. It seems like qualitatively finite things, things with a real distinct between their essence and active existence, which would be a type of composition. These things are not explanation enders. If the reality we’re-
Trent Horn:
So you’re saying we could always ask, why do they exist?
Pat Flynn:
Right. Yes. They don’t terminate explanations and they don’t provide a sufficient condition for being, that’s the key. So if reality, we’re only these types of things, the traditional cosmological argument just says, if that’s all reality were there would not be a sufficient condition for being, and none of those things would actually exist. But given that they do exist, we actually have to escape those categories. We have to make a category shift. We can’t explain these changing things by more changing stuff. We can’t explain contingent things with more contingency. We can’t explain composite things with more compositeness. We can’t explain more arbitrarily limited or bounded things with something that is itself arbitrarily limited and bounded. That is not an explanation ender.
Pat Flynn:
So whatever we need to render reality, philosophically and scientifically intelligible, says the traditional metaphysician. We need something that could actually be as radical as it sounds, a self explanatory fact. Something that could be intrinsically completely intelligible. And what could that type of thing possibly be? It seems like we need that type of thing, but what on earth? It’s literally nothing on earth that could be that, it would have to be none of those things. It would have to be-
Trent Horn:
And I think what happens here is, with modern philosophers of religion, people will say, Oh, well God is that ultimate explanation. And many atheists will say, “Well, why is it God? What caused God? Maybe there was a super God. And if God is just a big cosmic person who is all powerful and all-knowing, you would still ask, but why does it stop there?” But classical theism gives us a principled reason to say, “This is why God is the ultimate foundation, and there can’t be anything beyond God.” Specifically his simplicity. And then how that tied into him being all good. I definitely want to explore that more.
Pat Flynn:
Yeah. And what I’m saying here is, put the term God aside and just ask what could possibly be an explanation ender? That’s what I’m asking people to consider. And then you realize, well, would have to be something that escaped all those categories that could not be explanation enders.
Trent Horn:
Well, I love this because it’s saying, instead of starting with, Here’s why God exists. We’re just doing an investigation. Because this is a question I ask atheist a lot, could there be an ultimate explanation of reality that is not God? I just start there like, “Hey, can we just find some common ground here? Could there be an ultimate explanation of reality that’s not God? And I would ask, “Well, what properties does it have?” And ideally, if we’re reasoning correctly, it turns out this ultimate explanation does have divine attributes. Because what you’re saying is, it’s a way to remove the prejudice. It’s like, look, let’s just talk about ultimate explanations. Don’t worry about God for a second. But what explains there are changing things, there’s things made of parts, there’s things that don’t have to exist. And so it sounds like we got to get to something that’s ultimate, that doesn’t change, that doesn’t have parts and has to exist. Now we’re getting to divine-
Pat Flynn:
Whose nature to exist is unless you want to pose it with facts. And it’s not enough to just call something necessary. Atheists and naturalist call physical is necessary, many of them anyways. Like take Graham Oppy when I read him, it seems like he just wants to call some initial physical state necessary, and then through a model of the deterministic causation, we get everything else, right?
Trent Horn:
Right.
Pat Flynn:
Okay. I think that’s horribly inadequate because I don’t think that’s an adequate explanation. We want a deeper explanation of how something could be necessary in the first place. But the point is, if atheist leaves God composite or with a distinction between essence and existence, the naturalist can come right along and say, “Look, you haven’t really given me a principled stopping point in God. Maybe reduced the number of components but in principle, you haven’t escaped these categories altogether. So I’m just going to shave off the God thing and come back to naturalism.”
Trent Horn:
Right. Because if we could ask Oppy, well, why is it this particular initial state of the universe that’s the necessary foundation? It seems it could have been something different than that. But if you have an idea of God, that could have been different in many ways that isn’t this infinite act of being itself, then you have problems. What it seems like to me then, that with divine simplicity, well this explains it because the ultimate explanation of reality, it couldn’t have any parts. If something has parts, there’s something more basic than it that keeps the parts together. That is the ultimate explanation, that would be God.
Trent Horn:
So that explains why God is the ultimate foundation of reality. He’s just the most simple thing but He’s not that he’s simple to understand, he’s not composed to parts or he doesn’t change. He is the source of all change, but does not undergo change himself. And that helps us to not think of God like we would as like kids, like God is up in heaven, wondering what I’m doing. And he’s surprised at what I do. It’s a very anthropomorphic view of God, but also it helps, I think the convertibility of being and goodness, because in the classical view… Let’s talk about that.
Pat Flynn:
Yeah. Well, can I say one more quick thing?
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Pat Flynn:
So I ultimately think that the fundamental difference between God and creature is compositeness. I think compositeness actually helps to explain why things are contingent and it goes right down to the metaphysical level. And once you have God who’s essence just is its active existence, there’s so many the advantages to this. Yes, you have little puzzles and difficulties you have to work through to make sense of simplicity and challenges, stuff like that. I’ve talked about those infinitely on my podcast before, and they can be worked through, but there’s so many advantages. It secures a robust monotheism and ultimate explanatory, stopping point and draws a really clear a distinction between what is created and the creator. Now, as you also said, this will tie into the point about the evil God challenge.
Pat Flynn:
Traditional metaphysicians are trying to make sense of what’s in front of us. And it seems like in front of us, there are good things. And they ask, well, what is goodness? And what they discovered. And I think this is that goodness is really a do being. It’s just being under the aspect of desirability or success. It’s something having the features that are relevant to it, and there always has to be a certain degree of success, like goodness, before we can ever consider something bad. It has to have enough relevant features to even be considered a certain type of a thing that have to be there before we can consider something bad.
Trent Horn:
Because we can talk about goodness in a moral and a non-moral sense. Like you could have a good… That’s a good tree. That it’s blossoming. It has its branches. It’s not decaying. A good squirrel runs and scammers and gather its nuts, but a bad or defective, you could even say, would be missing a leg, can’t find an acorn to save its life, a tree that’s not budding. But then in the moral world you feel something similar, like a bad person lacks the virtues they ought to have. So it seems like goodness is when you have the being you ought to have, and badness occurs with a lack of being.
Pat Flynn:
It’s nothing over and above the being of the relevant features to something, so that’s why it’s convertible. It’s also an attributive rather than predicative adjective, which is just a fancy way of saying the semantic content of goodness shifts and slides, depending on what we’re talking about. So to know what a good squirrel is, tells you nothing about what a good tree is, right?
Trent Horn:
Right. You have to understand squirrels, trees or humans. You have to understand the nature of the thing right before you can say that it’s good or bad. And so here-
Pat Flynn:
So what’s the upshot of this. Well, if you have this traditional metaphysical perspective of convertibility between being, and goodness, and then you get to God just as pure perfect being, as purely actual being, and goodness really is just the actualization of potential relevant to a particular thing, God is purely actual. It’s just going to follow metaphysical necessity that God is purely imperfectly good, has no wrinkles, lacks privations, defects whatsoever. So The evil-god challenge is just not even relevant to classical theism. So the classical theism can be completely unbothered by this type of issue.
Trent Horn:
So it’s like asking, how do you know God is good? That would be like asking back a decade ago or so, how the meter was calculated. Meter was calculated, there’s a bar of Iridium in France. That was the standard bar. And this bar was a meter long. And the length of this bar simply determined what a meter was. So it’s asking like, how do you know something’s a meter? Well you take out your tape measure. And well, how do you know the meter bar is a meter long? Well, because it just is the standard. That’s what it is. Now we use, I think it’s decaying sesame atoms or something like that. So it’s more precise than the meter bar which wasn’t exactly a meter. But the point is like, so asking why something is good, that makes sense. But it doesn’t make sense to ask why God is good because God is goodness. So it doesn’t to ask why he is good. Well, he is it. That’s what goodness is. He’s the fullness of being, he doesn’t lack anything. He’s infinite in itself.
Pat Flynn:
Why are all mothers parents? Well, that statement indicates confusion right?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Because that’s what is.
Pat Flynn:
And also, this is why I think it’s so important to talk about method. We don’t think about classical theism just independently as another competitive model of God and worldview comparison and modern philosophy of religion debates. We think of it as the entailment of a very traditional way of looking at the world. A very traditional way of doing philosophy of nature and metaphysics. That’s what convinced me. Now, I think you can put classical theism into these world-viewed debates and say, look, it’s a theory with great simplicity. In fact, it seems like the simplest possible fundamental theory you could get. I mean, what’s going to beat divine simplicity, enormous predictive success, all that good stuff but that isn’t how people thought about it, traditionally. That’s a very new way of comparing worldview paradigms. And that’s fine, that’s interesting, but it’s far less interesting to me than actually just doing the metaphysics. And another upshot trend, I know you wanted to maybe talk about, You’re the first dilemma, a little bit as well, right?
Trent Horn:
Oh, yeah. So that’s the idea with God and morality. Why is murder wrong? If it’s wrong because God says so, well, could he have said murder is right? If he can, he’s like this big cosmic tyrant, but if it’s wrong because it just is wrong and well, don’t worry, God will always do the right thing. It sounds like there’s something over and above God, a rule book that he checks to see what’s right and wrong. But if that’s the case, if something’s over and above God, that would be God. So it seems we’re in a bit of a dilemma here, it’s called The Youth of a dilemma.
Pat Flynn:
Yeah, this is… And it goes back to one of Plato’s famous dialogues. Does God or God’s it is originally-
Trent Horn:
Yeah, his was God.
Pat Flynn:
Does God will something because it’s good or is something good because God wills it. And for of the theist, as you pointed out, none of those are particularly attractive because in one sense, it seems like there’s something over and above God, which most theists don’t want to accept. And in another sense, it seems to make morality arbitrary, which most people don’t want to accept. Seems like some things just are inherently bad. So classical theism, again, has resources here. I think this is one of those modern objections, it’s almost completely irrelevant and just bounces off classical theism, like The evil-god challenge. Because if we have this convertibility principle, and we have God as subsistence being, it’s just going to follow that God is just goodness. And so that God will’s good things, is neither arbitrary nor dictated by something over and above God, it’s just God acting in accord with His nature.
Trent Horn:
So the way we split the dilemma, using Plato’s language, we don’t have only two choices to say, does God… is something good because God wills it? Is it good because he says so or does God will it because it’s good? Like goodness is outside of him. The way you with a dilemma is, God wills it because He is good or He is goodness itself. And so, naturally, what he wills automatically will be good in that respect. So-
Pat Flynn:
Because if God just is perfect goodness, and just is the divine will and just is immutable and necessary being, then there could be no question of God willing in accordance with some standard of goodness, independent of him or being arbitrary because God just is the subsistence good itself. And everything acts according to its nature.
Trent Horn:
The catechism has a great paragraph to summarize this. It is paragraph 271 in the catechism talking about God’s omnipotence and how… No, he’s not going to become an omnipotent cosmic bully. And it quotes Aquinas. And it says here in paragraph 271, Gods almighty power is in no way arbitrary. And then it quotes. I think it’s quotes Aquinas, “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.” To wrap everything up Pat, maybe you could just share with us where are some areas, resources you would recommend for people to learn more about this classical theistic tradition and you can shamelessly plug any of your own materials.
Pat Flynn:
Well, thank you very much. I mean, there’s so much more to explore here. Even with divine simplicity, we just have to be very careful to say that we’re using stretch concepts in a logical predication. So when we say, God’s power is his goodness, is his will, is his justice.” We mean God has something like power that in God is identical to something like justice to something like goodness, as we understand it, as we experience it. God is the limit case instance of existence. He’s not, and is instance of existence. He’s the limit case instance of power, the limit case instance of justice, zero-bounding. And all this language actually comes from Barry Miller. So he would be one resource I would recommend. If you can get your hand on Barry Miller’s work, which is actually really hard to do Unfortunately, he’s brilliant, especially fullness of being, if you want to make sense of traditional commitments of divine simplicity in conversation with modern analytic philosophy, I would point people strongly there.
Pat Flynn:
Another contemporary philosopher who blends the new and the old traditional metaphysical ideas with contemporary analog fossil would be William Valachella. His work is really good. If you’re interested in the more technical weeds, some good more popular level introductions would be the work of Fr. Brian Davis, which you recommended, the work of Eleanor Stump. She’s got a great book called, The God of the philosopher and the God of the Bible, which not only unpacks the motivations for a classical theism, but shows you how it is compatible with a scripture and I think that’s a concern of many of this modern models of God.
Pat Flynn:
What’s motivating them is they think there’s a tension or incompatibility there. If that’s a concern of yours, get Eleanor Stump. It’s a short little book, The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosopher. And then I’ve had many conversations on my podcast about some of the technical aspects of this. I would search for my conversations with Dr. W. Matthews Grant, where we discuss divine simplicity and how it holds up on their stress testing different objections to try and break the model in relation to contingent creation or contingent knowledge and stuff like that. And show how robust and durable this model actually is under stress testing, which I think is really important. And he’s got a great book as well on how divine simplicity actually helps to make sense in securing libertarian and freedom, which is another, I think, major upshot. So that’s a lot of stuff-
Trent Horn:
Oh, that’s a fun one. We could go very deep on these topics and it’s important to do that. And I recommend for our listeners check out John De Rosa’s Classical Theism Podcast, He has a lot of great interviews there on this subject. We mentioned Brian Davies. I teach a class at Holy Apostles College and Seminary and online apologetics class and the textbook I assigned for that is Davies’ Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. That’s a very nice starter on a lot of these questions, so I recommend our listeners to check that out. Pat, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Pat Flynn:
Thank you, Trent. Oh, and real quick if people… Because you mentioned my other website before Chronicles of Strength, but I also have a new YouTube channel now called Philosophy for the People, which I co-host with Dr. Jim Madden. So if you like this type of stuff, that would be the more relevant place to go at this point.
Trent Horn:
All right. Thank you so much again, sir. And thank you guys for checking us out, I hope this was edifying for you all and I hope that you have a very blessed day.
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