Platonism and the Scriptures

KEVIN HARRIS: It’s Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m Kevin Harris. Bill, this is right up your alley. The name of the article is “No Plato? No Scripture.”^[1] It is from Andrew Wilson from the Think blog. We are going to go over some terminology that people may be unfamiliar with. But we will unpack it as we go. Bill, you've written a book about this – this whole topic – called God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism. Before we look at this article, talk about your work on Platonism.

DR. CRAIG: I spent thirteen years studying this topic full time. It seems to me that Platonism is the most powerful challenge to theism and the existence of God that I've ever encountered, far more powerful than the problem of evil or the other typical atheist objections. According to Platonism there exists not only concrete objects, like physical objects, but also abstract objects – things like numbers and sets and other mathematical entities, propositions, properties, possible worlds, even fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes and Donald Duck. The thing about these abstract objects is that they tend to be self-existent and therefore uncreated. They are eternal, necessary beings that exist independently of God. What that means is that God is not the sole ultimate reality. He is not in fact the creator of everything that exists apart from himself. Rather, God is sort of like a BB in a can of other BBs rolling around. He's just one of an incomprehensibly multitudinous, infinite panoply of metaphysically necessary, self-existent beings. And that cuts at the very heart of theism, I think. So what I wanted to do was to find out the best way to meet the challenge posed by Platonism to traditional theistic belief.

KEVIN HARRIS: The article begins:

"Without a good dose of Plato, it becomes difficult to retain the teaching of Scripture," declares Hans Boersma in his deeply thought-provoking new book, Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew. "The Bible cannot be interpreted without prior metaphysical commitments, and we need Christian Platonism as an interpretive lens in order to uphold Scripture's teaching." It's a bold claim.

What is Christian Platonism?

DR. CRAIG: Good question!

KEVIN HARRIS:

Boersma follows Lloyd Gerson in summarising it with five ideas, which tend to stand or fall together:

Here are the five ideas. Let’s get your comment on each.

1. Anti-materialism: bodies and their properties are not the only things that exist.

DR. CRAIG: Now, it's clear already that he's using Platonism in a different sense than I used it just a moment ago. Plato's philosophy was wide-ranging and had therefore many elements, and some of them certainly we would want to affirm. Anti-materialism would be one that Christians and Jews would affirm. God is not a material object. Souls are not material objects. So we do want to hold to a view of reality that does not restrict reality to material objects. That's quite right.

KEVIN HARRIS:

2. Anti-mechanism: the natural order cannot be fully explained by physical or mechanical causes.

DR. CRAIG: I would agree that the natural order cannot be fully explained by physical or mechanical causes. One reason would be that you need God in order to explain why there is a physical order at all. God is the one who created and fine-tuned the universe and built it to have its mathematical structure. So ultimately the natural order depends upon a supernatural cause. But in addition to that, I think we should affirm the free will of human beings – that we are not just mechanistic devices, moist robots as has been said, but rather we have significant libertarian freedom and are therefore morally responsible agents. Everything is not simply mechanically or physically determined. So this second point is also one we would agree with.

KEVIN HARRIS:

3. Anti-nominalism: reality is made up not just of individuals, each uniquely situated in time and space, but two individual objects can be the same in essence (e.g. both canines) while still being unique individuals (distinct dogs).

DR. CRAIG: Now this is where it does connect with my work. What I would say is that two dogs can be essentially the same kind of animal. They both share the essential properties of a dog and are unique individuals without saying that there are in addition to the dogs this sort of weird abstract object “dog-ness” or “canine-ness” that is something that is identical in each of the two dogs. That seems to me to be a metaphysical extravagance that we do not need to say that Fido is essentially a dog and that Rover is essentially a dog. That is true. I affirm that. But we don't need to say that there is some abstract universal called “dog-ness” that somehow exists in Fido and also exists in Rover.

KEVIN HARRIS:

4. Anti-relativism: human beings are not the measure of all things; goodness is rather a property of being.

DR. CRAIG: I don't think that human beings are the measure of all things. I think that's right. My moral theory would say that moral values are grounded in God. So goodness is not just a property of being. I would say that God is the Good and that things have goodness insofar as they resemble God.

KEVIN HARRIS:

5. Anti-scepticism: the real can in some manner become present to us, so that knowledge is within reach.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think we also want to affirm that as well. Genuine knowledge is available and that we are not left with skepticism. So with respect to all five of these points, I think that we can affirm in each case essentially what Boersma is asking us to affirm. But we can do so without positing the existence of these uncreated, metaphysically necessary abstract objects.

KEVIN HARRIS: The article continues,

Most of us probably have no problem with #1, #2, #4 and #5, and wouldn’t see anything particularly Platonic about them (though Boersma would say we are probably wrong about that). The one we find unfamiliar, even incomprehensible, is #3. Modern people (including modern Christians) are generally nominalists, who deny the existence of universals, as opposed to realists, who affirm them.

What about number three – anti-nominalism?

DR. CRAIG: I think that that probably is crediting normal people with far too much philosophical astuteness. I don't think that most people have any idea of what a universal is, and so it would be unfair to say they're nominalists because they probably never thought about the subject. What I would say is that the average person is not a Platonist in the sense that he doesn't believe that there are these sorts of abstract objects. But that would be probably because he's never thought about it, not because he's reached these nominalistic or anti-realist conclusions. I think he's quite right in saying that number three is an unfamiliar and even almost incomprehensible debate. It is very difficult to understand.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next the article says,

Boersma insists that we need anti-nominalism as much as the others, and that this is true for our doctrine of salvation as well as our doctrine of God. In theology proper, it is easier to see that the existence of universals matter, and Boersma quotes Gregory of Nyssa to explain why: the distinction between one ousia and three hypostases depends on it, and without it we would be dangerously close to having three gods.

Uh-oh, Bill, we wouldn't want that!

DR. CRAIG: No, we wouldn't. I think that what Boersma is saying here is that we want to affirm that there are three persons or hypostases in the Trinity but they all share the same substance or essence. Namely, they are all divine. They're all God. I don't think that you need to posit the existence of these abstract objects in order to affirm such a truth. There's one “thing” that is God, and that thing is tri-personal: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Moreover, that thing has certain properties in every possible world that belong to it alone – things like necessary existence, perfect righteousness, eternality, omnipotence, omniscience, and so forth. Each of the three persons has those properties. We can affirm what one is driving at by saying there are three persons in one essence without affirming that there are in addition to God these abstract objects. When we think of the Trinity existing alone without the world – God existing alone without creation – in addition to God, is there also an infinite number of these abstract objects like omnipotence, omniscience, holiness, righteousness, goodness, not to mention the natural numbers and the various sets of numbers? I don't think that we want to affirm that. I think we want to say there's just God, and you don't need to have all of these abstract objects in order to make the kind of trinitarian affirmation that Boersma is so anxious to preserve.

KEVIN HARRIS: This is the end of the article. Boersma says we need universals for our understanding of the Gospel, as well. Wilson citing Boersma says,

Without universals, it would be very difficult to make sense of our participation in Christ, or of Christ’s recapitulation of Israel’s story:

A nominalist metaphysic, which continues to be the (often unacknowledged) go-to approach of much biblical scholarship, cannot account for Saint Paul’s participatory soteriology. The apostle’s theology operates with a metaphysic in which we are ontologically linked together and in which we genuinely become one new humanity, and it is only a realist metaphysic that is able to do justice to this ... What could it possibly mean to be “in Christ” on the assumption that the human Jesus is his own person and that we are persons ontologically separate from him? Only a realist metaphysic can robustly claim that human beings are saved through a participatory or real sharing in Christ.

What do you think about that?

DR. CRAIG: I think that this is just incomprehensible, frankly. When the Scripture talks about our being “in Christ” and becoming a new man, I don't think it imagines that we become a universal! That we turn into an abstract object. Nor is there some sort of an entity called Humanity that exists of which all human beings are pieces or parts. That, to me, sounds just like nonsense. Rather, I think the thrust here is that Christ is our proxy before God. He substitutes for us in dying in our place to pay the penalty for sin that we deserved, and that he represents us before God. In that sense we are in him. So insofar as Christ is our proxy before God, I think we can understand this idea of being united with Christ. But this idea that we all become a new Humanity – some kind of a real entity – to me is just incomprehensible.

KEVIN HARRIS: The article concludes,

This is bound to bother people. The idea that we require any categories from Greek philosophy to make sense of the Scriptures always sparks allegations of Hellenism drowning out Hebraism, pagan philosophy trumping biblical writings, and so forth.

Your concluding thoughts?

DR. CRAIG: I would agree that we should not disdain the achievements of Greek philosophy for doing good theology. But I must say in writing my systematic philosophical theology, I really have been impressed anew with the way in which Hellenism did drown out Hebraism in some respects. What I'm thinking here is the doctrine that God is absolutely simple, that he has no properties at all, that his essence just is the pure act of existence, that God is therefore impassable and incomprehensible. It seems to me that in this case it really is true that Hellenism has triumphed over the traditional Jewish concept of God. Fortunately, I think that many biblical scholars and theologians have returned to a more biblically faithful concept of God.^[2]