God, Abstract Objects, Platonism, and Logic

Transcript God, Abstract Objects, Platonism and Logic

Kevin Harris: So glad to have you here. This is the Reasonable Faith podcast with Dr. William Lane Craig. Kevin Harris in the studio with Dr. Craig. Bill, we have some general questions about God that we'd like to address, and one in particular here that came in from Dr. Jamie Watson, who's Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Young Harris College. She says:

Is that true, so far, Bill?

Dr. Craig: Yes, that's a nice summary.

Kevin Harris:

Dr. Craig: Her argument here is that in order to make certain affirmations the metaphysician is committed to the reality of certain abstract objects called propositions, which would roughly be the information content of sentences. And I think that this is incorrect, this inference. What I think we as Christians want to affirm will be things like the following: we believe that necessarily either God exists or God does not exist; we think necessarily God is good; necessarily God is eternal. But that doesn't require that you then make what is called a semantic assent to a sort of second-level or higher level and say therefore it is true that necessarily God exists or God does not exist, or it is true that necessarily God is good. To make that semantic assent you have now moved from affirming that necessarily God exists or does not to no longer affirming that but to affirming that there is a truth, that there is a proposition which has the value true, and this is to make a semantic assent that is simply unnecessary in order to make these first level, first order, affirmations about the way God is.

So to give a non-theological example, Kevin, I could say “Hitler was a really bad man.” Or I could ascend semantically and say “It is true that Hitler was a really bad man.” Do you see the difference between the first order and the second level claim? And that second level claim doesn't need to be made—I can just say “Hitler was a really bad man,” and I can make that affirmation sincerely and so forth without ascending semantically to saying, therefore there is a proposition which has the value true.

So I certainly do want to affirm what she says, namely that God necessarily either exists or does not, or God is good, or necessarily God is eternal or omnipotent, but I don't think that commits us to the reality of propositions.

Now, if you do want to make these second order statements – you want to semantically ascend to talking now no longer about God but rather talking about truths – it could be open to the nominalist to identify propositions with, say, God's belief states or something of that sort, and have a kind of conceptualist view. This would be an alternative to Platonism that would ground these truths in the mind of God. But I'm not willing to even go that far yet. I don't see why we even need to be pushed that far. Why not just not make the semantic ascent and just content ourselves with affirming that necessarily either God exists or does not, or necessarily God exists, and so forth?

Kevin Harris: Is this sometimes called a modified Platonism or a theistic Platonism?

Dr. Craig: No, no I don't think it is a modified Platonism. Usually that would be a view that there do exist these abstract objects external to God, these are real beings that are not in any way in God's mind or dependent on his intellect. [1] These are things that are external to God, but they are created by God.

Kevin Harris: When you say 'being' we often think of a personal being when you do that. But you're not talking about a personal being.

Dr. Craig: No, obviously not. I mean, a tree is a being; a computer is a being; a table is a being—at least unless you are a mereological nihilist who don't think there are composite objects, but we don't need to get into that. [laughter] So the point is that the modified Platonist would affirm that there are these entities – if you like that word better than 'being,' or objects – which exist exterior, outside of God but are caused or created by God. That's what I would call a kind of modified Platonism.

Kevin Harris: Okay.

Dr. Craig: I don't think modified Platonism works because it seems to me that some of these objects are uncreatable. For example, take the property of being powerful. If God has to create properties in order for them to exist how could he create the property of being powerful without already having the property of being powerful? In order to create the property 'being powerful' God would already need to be powerful. He's got to have some power in order to do that. But then you're in a vicious circle, you see—in order to create the property he already has to have the property. So it seems to me that modified Platonism is attended by this vicious circle or bootstrapping problem that I don't know how to escape, and therefore I am not enamored with this modified Platonism or absolute creationism, as it's sometimes called. I would rather go to a divine conceptualism which would identify these things as merely ideas in the mind or God, or something of that sort – or even more so, I'm even more attracted to just a plain old nominalist view that these things just don't exist. That although we can talk about them and they're sort of useful facon de parle, they're means of speaking, they don't really exist. They're kind of like Wednesdays. It's useful to talk about Wednesday, and we can say “Wednesday is the day of the faculty meeting,” or we can say, “Wednesday is between Tuesday and Thursday,” and we assert true things. But nobody thinks that Wednesdays actually exist, that there are these objects that exist in a mind-independent way called Wednesdays. Wednesdays seem to be just social constructs, not objective realities. And I suspect that it's similar with these other sorts of abstract objects—that they don't really exist in a robust sort of way.

Kevin Harris: Now, are we to understand that Plato somehow thought so, that he thought they did?

Dr. Craig: Yes. Yes, he thought that this world of sensory objects – tables and chairs and horses and people – is in a sense a less real reality than the abstract realm on which the sensible realm is modeled. He thought that this world of sense perceptible objects has a kind of shadowy existence and that the things that are truly real and existent are these abstract entities which serve as the pattern or the model for these objects of sense that we deal with in this world.

Kevin Harris: Can we trace the evolution of thinking on that perhaps to the early church fathers who started to question that?

Dr. Craig: Most certainly. Early church fathers, like Origen and Augustine in particular, clearly understood that classical Platonism is incompatible with theism because it posits infinite realms of being which are independent of God, exist just as necessarily and uncreatedly as he does, and that these things are not created by God. And therefore it results in a sort of metaphysical pluralism where you have no ultimate reality that is unique; God is not the summit of being, so to speak. There is just a plurality of uncreated ultimate beings of which God is merely one. And so Augustine moved the Platonic realm of the ideas into the mind of God, and said these things are merely ideas in the divine intellect. Thomas Aquinas then went even further and said although we talk as though these are distinct ideas in the mind of God, that's just our way of conceiving them. In fact God is simple and there really isn't even a diversity of divine ideas in the way God knows things. That's just the way we represent it to ourselves. [2] 

Kevin Harris: Dr. Watson goes on to say,

Dr. Craig: Now this is a question, Kevin, that I have addressed to a great extent in question of the week number 210 [3], which is a kind of preview of a paper I'm going to be giving on this at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting in November in San Francisco. It's very interesting that the majority view of the editors of the Greek text of the New Testament is that verse 3 does not include that qualifying phrase “that came into being.” Rather the second half of the verse says “apart from him not one thing came into being,” and they punctuate the verse so that it ends there. Now, I think that you can make out a case for including the words “not one thing came into being that has come into being” as part of verse 3 primarily on the basis of the fact that in middle Platonism – that is to say Platonism as it had evolved to the time of the first century – had developed a view according to which there are two realms of reality—the sort of intelligible realm of the ideas or the Platonist abstract entities and then the sensible world of things that become, things that are subject to temporal becoming. So you have the realm of being, and then you have the realm of becoming. And it's possible that what John is talking about is God's creating the realm of things that are in the realm of becoming. But when you look at what middle Platonists thought about the realm of being, this intelligible realm, they believed that the Platonic ideas all existed in the mind of the divine Logos, the mind of God. So that there isn't any independently existing realm of abstracta. These are ideas in the Logos. And that is exactly the background that you have for the prologue to the Gospel of John—“In the beginning was the Logos, and was God, and the Logos was God,” and then everything else was created through the Logos. This is middle Platonism; this is exactly what middle Platonism believed. And so if Jamie is right that what John 1:3 is talking about is simply God's creation through the Logos of the realm of becoming, that is only because there were no objects existing independently of God in the realm of being, rather God and his Logos is the seat of any abstract entities that you might care to posit—these were ideas in the mind of God. So I think even given the inclusion of that phrase “that has come into being” on the tale end of John 1:3 it would follow that John is thinking of God here as the sole uncreated being who exists ase, through himself, and that all other things belong to the realm of becoming, which was brought into existence through the agency of the Logos. The Johannine prologue reflects the background of middle Platonism; it breathes the same atmosphere that these middle Platonists breathed – people like Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish philosopher and exegete – but John does not, unlike Philo, explicitly teach that abstract objects are ideas in the Logos. John's interest is in salvation. His interest is in the incarnation. And so he quickly moves to the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have beheld his glory, and so forth. He doesn't tarry or linger on the pre-creatorial state of the Logos and whether or not the divine ideas are there. [4] So I don't think we can say that John or the Bible teach that abstract objects are ideas in the mind of God—that would be to be reading between the lines.

Kevin Harris: Ok.

Dr. Craig: But I think what we can say is that such a view is consonant or consistent with what the Bible is teaching, and I think we could also say that in the minds of the author of the Johannine prologue that God is the only uncreated being, that he does think of God as the sole uncreated being that exists ase and that everything else came into existence through the Logos. I think we can say that he teaches that.

Kevin Harris: This next question is on the ontological argument, so everybody fasten your seat belts.

Dr. Craig: This is a wild question! I've never seen God compared to Freddy Kruger! [laughter]

Kevin Harris: Well, no, me neither. I've got to tell you, though, Bill, that movie scared a lot of people because the director, the writer, attempted to convince you that somehow Freddy could get out of the movie and get you.

Dr. Craig: Well, the suggestion of the ontological argument is not in any way that God operates out of some other possible world to have effects in the actual world. The reader here is just misunderstanding the argument.

Kevin Harris: Or watching too many horror movies.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, maybe so. All it is saying is that by definition a being who is maximally great exists in all possible worlds if he exists in any of them. That's all. It's not saying that he somehow reaches out from one of these other possible worlds to do something in another world—it's just saying that such a being is either in all worlds or he's in no world. Such a being is either impossible or necessary. What is not possible is that such a being could be merely contingent, that he might exist in some possible worlds but not in all of them. That is excluded by definition.

Kevin Harris: Let's go to another question on the ontological argument.

Dr. Craig: Oh, this is just so sad, to see this kind of drivel propounded on the internet. The idea of a being which creates something while he doesn't exist is logically impossible. There is no possible world in which a being does not exist and yet creates something. In order to create something you have to exist. So in fact there is no possible world at all in which a certain being exists and doesn't exist—this is just nonsense. [5] So it doesn't undermine the ontological argument to posit something that's metaphysically incoherent. The idea is that God is the greatest conceivable or metaphysically possible being. And that isn't in any way called into question by postulating nonsense and metaphysical impossibilities.

Kevin Harris: What do you think about premise number three, which seems to be kind of the crucial premise.

Dr. Craig: Well, that's not the crucial premise, though. The crucial premise is five, that if we suppose the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive of a greater being—namely one who created everything while not existing. That is not a greater concept; that's nonsense. That's metaphysically incoherent to talk about a being who created everything while not existing.

Kevin Harris: Okay, so number five is crucial. What do you think about number three: the greater the disability or handicap of the creator the more impressive the achievement? A person who has no arms that paints by holding the brush in their toes we laud as a great achievement. It seems like this argument is trying to establish something there.

Dr. Craig: That doesn't seem to make sense because he says the merit of an achievement is a combination or product of its intrinsic quality and the ability of its creator, and if you decrease the ability of its creator maybe you could say that that increases its intrinsic quality or something. But he doesn’t define what he means by more impressive. But I think this is all not germane anyway because, as I say, the argument is worthless—it's based on a logical incoherence.

Kevin Harris: Here's another one, Dr, Craig, on the ontological argument: “Dear Dr. Craig, can the atheist claim 'If it is even possible for there to be no God then there is no God'? Is my concern legitimate? Is there a negative ontological argument? If not where have I gone wrong?”

Dr. Craig: There certainly is a negative ontological argument. Either God's existence is necessary or it's impossible. So what is not possible is that God would just contingently exist given the definition of a maximally great being. So there certainly is a negative ontological argument, and you need to decide which premise is true. Is it possible that a maximally great being exists or is it possible that a maximally great being not exist? Which of those premises do you think is more plausibly true?

Kevin Harris: This letter is from the UK:

Dr. Craig: Yeah, this is based on evident misunderstandings of the claim. I've never said that matter emerging from non-matter is absurd. What I've said is, as he more correctly puts it, is that something cannot come from nothing. Now, what that means is that if anything comes into being there has to be a cause of that. And this cause could either be an efficient cause or a material cause or it could be both. It's saying there needs to be some sort of a cause for why something comes into being out of nothing.

Now, what he seems to misunderstand this as is saying that if a material object comes into being there has to be a material cause of it—but I've never asserted such a thing. And I don't think in fact that's true. There could be an efficient cause that brings the matter and energy into being in the first place. And in that case you don't get something coming from nothing. You have a cause; you have an efficient cause.

So the problem is he's thinking of nothing here in terms of a kind of absence of matter or something, material causation, where I'm talking about any kind of causation, including efficient causality, [6] which produces the being of its effect. So when we say that God is the efficient cause of the matter and energy in the universe, and that there is no material cause of the universe, we're not asserting that something came from nothing. Quite the contrary, we're saying that there was an efficient cause which brought the matter and energy into being.

The cosmological argument that I present leaves it open as to what sort of cause the universe has. But it is when you realize that all space, time, matter, and energy had a beginning before which they did not exist that you see that the universe cannot have a material cause of its origin, and therefore it must have an efficient cause which created the matter and energy, and the space and time in being. And whether we can understand how that happens is not germane to whether or not this is metaphysically possible. What is metaphysically impossible is that something should come from nothing. That is to say, that the universe should spring into being without any sort of cause at all—material or efficient. But I don't see any metaphysical absurdity in saying that the universe has an efficient cause, and that that efficient cause created the matter and energy, space and time, when it created the universe.

Kevin Harris: Alright, thank you Dr. Craig. We have some more questions on God, and we'll look at those next time on Reasonable Faith. [7]