More thoughts on the properties of God for my philosophy of religion class. As I have been responding, this week, surrounding God’s omniscience, eternality freedom, goodness, and necessity. These are my last three responses.
- What is freedom? Does it make sense to talk about maximal or perfect freedom? If yes, how should this be defined? If not, why not?
- Do you agree that the ability to do what is morally wrong is a power for human beings but a liability for God? Answer the question by laying out the argument for this as you understand it, or asking any questions about parts that you don’t understand. Then give your reasons for why you think that this is either a good argument or not a good argument.
- Could it just be an accident that there is, or that there is not, a God? If not, why not?
Freedom is that aspect to be able to do or not to do. It makes sense to talk about perfect freedom vis-à-vis God. God is maximally or perfectly free in the sense that he literally and absolutely and personally has the capacity within himself (his in se life) to bring this or that to pass, at will. On classical theism, God’s total properties, working one within the other, grounds the fact of divine freedom. That is to say, that God, on this accounting, has libertarian agency, so to speak, to do this or that without contingence or constraint. Or it might be said, that God’s freedom has no constraint other than the consistency of his own inner-life in simple relation.
On the other hand, as Mawson develops, human freedom, finite as it is, given its lack of divine properties, by definition, are not able to be perfectly free. This is the case since human agency is conditioned by its own “finity.” Meaning, human agents are not “omni” relative to the powers of God (on classical theism). This entails, that human freedom cannot be perfectly free insofar that it is necessarily limited by its contingency. For example, human beings have the capacity to supererogate or not; to go beyond the perceived limits of this or that good. This implies that human agents have a lack in their freedom.
[From a Christian theistic perspective, as a theological aside, here is how one of my favorite theologians, Karl Barth, refers to Divine Freedom:
According to the biblical testimony, God has the prerogative to be free without being limited by His freedom from external conditioning, free also with regard to His freedom, free not to surrender Himself to it, but to use it to give Himself to this communion and to practise this faithfulness in it, in this way being really free, free in Himself. God must not only be unconditioned but, in the absoluteness in which He sets up this fellowship, He can and will also be conditioned. He who can and does do this is the God of Holy Scripture, the triune God known to us in His revelation. This ability, proved and manifested to us in His action, constitutes His freedom. (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §28 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 47]
Goodness “is a matter of behaving as one ought in one’s relations with other people—and creatures more generally—and perfect goodness is a matter of doing the best thing that one can for them whenever there is a best and doing one of the best things that one can whenever two or more things are ‘joint best’ for them, i.e. are equally good and none is better” (Mawson, 57–8). Good is the objectively understood rightness (or we might say, righteousness) on the classical theistic account. Perfect goodness, on God, is that standard of what counts for right versus wrong. Indeed, wrong is only the privation of right. In other words, there could be no perception or conception of wrong without right being prior to it. That is to say, we understand wrongness only as it is measured against rightness (or goodness). I agree that in ethics there are grades of wrong vis-à-vis the good. At points, in given situations and circumstances, it can be a power for humans to choose a wrong, in order to amplify the good. We might think of Corrie Ten Boom, and her family in the Netherlands during WW2. They hid Jews from the Nazis in their home, and “illegally” found safe passage for some of them out of the country. In a relative sense this could represent a human power, in the sense that the sanctity of life was amplified, in the face a certain dark evil. I.e., on a grade, the sanctity of life is a greater good than is the lesser wrong of lying in order to ensure the good in this case. Such is the human dilemma, at times. Since we aren’t all powerful, all knowing, everywhere present at the same time in the same way, as God is, we must attempt to see what is the greater than rather than the lesser than in any given ethical dilemma, and choose the greater than of life, even if it might require the lesser than wrong in order to ensure the continuance of life rather than death. God is not faced with such dilemmas; again, because, on classical theism, he is “omni,” and much more.
Necessity. God is necessary. Not in a god-of-the-gaps type of way (i.e., as an explanation to fill in the gaps in our logically-deductive schemes to explain reality, per se), but in a necessary way; in the sense that the world itself, contingent as it is, requires an explanation greater than itself to explain its existence in the first place. Or the universe/cosmos as a finite (ever expanding) entity does not have the resources within itself to explain its origin (where it came from, why it continues, and where it is going, if anywhere). Contingency implies a prior non-contingent ground upon which the contingent is contingent. Without the non-contingent prius there can be no contingent after and remainder.