Questions on Attributes of God and the Ontological Argument

KEVIN HARRIS: A very warm welcome to you. This is Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. It’s Kevin Harris. It is getting to be that time of the year. Lots to love about the holiday season. One thing to love about it is something that we do every year – it’s our matching grant campaign. From now until the end of the year, a group of committed donors has promised to match every dollar up to $250,000. That means your gift, whatever you give, will be doubled up to $250,000. That is going to increase your gift’s reach all over the world. This is not funny math. It is not quantum physics. Well, it may involve quantum physics at some level. But it is just straightforward – whatever you give will be doubled by a group of committed donors up to $250,000. So, please, take advantage of that and do it at your end-of-the-year giving. Go to ReasonableFaith.org, and you give right there. We appreciate it. Another thing to talk about. You have been hearing about Equip. It’s free. We just launched a free online teaching platform. It is called Equip, and it is designed to develop a community of believers equipped to effectively share their faith in today’s world. It is all based on our content here at Reasonable Faith, and – did I mention? – it is free! Check out Equip when you go to ReasonableFaith.org. We get lots of questions. Dr. Craig has lots of answers. Let’s do some Q&A on Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig.

Here’s a question from Scott.

Dear Dr. Craig, how can we come to believe reasonably that there is one God as opposed to multiple gods, solely through the use of reasoned argumentation without reference to biblical revelation? A friend of mine posed this question a few years ago. It is one I have pondered on several occasions but have come short of an adequate answer. How can one unembodied mind be deciphered rationally from several unembodied minds that are outside of time, space, and material existence?

DR. CRAIG: All right. The second part of that question – “How can one unembodied mind be distinguished from several unembodied minds?” – I think we already tried to answer in the analogy I gave for the doctrine of the Trinity. Namely, think of a soul or spiritual substance which is endowed with three sets of rational faculties each sufficient for personhood. That would distinguish a tri-personal being from three distinct substances or beings. So that part of the question, I think, is answered by the model I give of the Trinity.

Now, are there any arguments that one might give for monotheism – to think that there is only one God? Well, I don’t think that, for example, the kalam argument or the design argument will give you a proof of monotheism. It leads to a creator and designer of the universe but not necessarily to one. I think what proponents of those arguments would do would be to justify belief in one God on the basis of Ockham’s Razor. Ockham’s Razor says do not multiply causes beyond necessity. You are only justified in inferring such causes as are sufficient to explain the effect. It would be to violate Ockham’s Razor to postulate a plurality of designers or a plurality of creators of the universe when one is sufficient. So I am quite content to simply appeal to Ockham’s Razor to justify belief in the existence of one creator, one designer.

Some of the other theistic arguments, though, do go farther than that. For example, the Leibnizian cosmological argument, that there must be a sufficient reason for why anything at all exists, gets you back to an ultimate ground of being, a metaphysically necessary being which is the explanation of everything else that exists. There couldn’t be a plurality of such beings because then you would have some of them be unexplained in their existence with regard to the others. It seems to me that that argument plausibly leads back to a monotheistic view of the ground of being.

I also would say that on the basis of Jesus’ claims we are justified in believing in monotheism. Suppose on the basis of certain arguments for God we come to believe that there is a creator and designer of the universe. On the basis of Ockham’s Razor, we wouldn’t be justified in postulating a plurality so we say that it looks like there is one but we don’t know – there could be more. But then we have reason to believe God has revealed himself in Christ by his resurrection from the dead and that, therefore, what Christ taught is true. And what Christ taught was monotheism. He taught Jewish monotheism – that Yahweh is the only God. So on that basis we would affirm, again, Christian monotheism. That is not to appeal to the Bible as special revelation. That is based upon Christian evidences for the resurrection and the authority of Christ and therefore accepting his teaching. So I would be content as well to base my belief in monotheism upon the authority of Christ as ratified by his resurrection from the dead.

KEVIN HARRIS: Sure. Even though Scott is asking, “Are there any arguments solely through reasoned argumentation without reference to biblical revelation?” you can certainly go to arguments for Jesus and get to monotheism.

DR. CRAIG: Right, because that is not to appeal to biblical revelation as such. You are using a historical argument for the person of Jesus of Nazareth being the absolute revelation of God and therefore what he says about God is true and he taught Jewish monotheism. That isn’t an appeal to revelation as such. That is historical apologetics.

KEVIN HARRIS: It certainly makes more sense that there would be one eternal being or mind than this complexity of gods.

DR. CRAIG: Even on the kalam argument or the design argument (which don’t, strictly speaking, prove one designer or one creator of the universe), it would be bizarre to think that there was a plurality of these things that existed. It is obviously much simpler to say that there is one.

KEVIN HARRIS: Ockham’s Razor shaves them off.

DR. CRAIG: It really does.

KEVIN HARRIS: This is from Mumbai, India:

Dear Dr. Craig, I heard your lectures on the Trinity. I don’t have a problem explaining the individuality of the three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But I face a problem in explaining their unity. How best can we explain that we worship one God? How best can we explain the oneness of the Trinity? Please help me.

DR. CRAIG: Very good. OK. The model that I try to provide of the Trinity in my chapter in Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview tries to capture both the unity of God as well as the diversity of the persons.^[1] This individual doesn’t have a difficulty in seeing that one is dealing with three persons here but he is asking how three persons can be one being. The model that I provide there is based upon the human soul, or the analogy of the human soul. A human soul is a single spiritual substance. It is an immaterial entity. It is a self-conscious entity – it is a person. It is a person because it is endowed with certain rational faculties like intellect, freedom of the will, and so forth. My question is: What if you think of God as a soul, as a spiritual, immaterial entity, who is so richly endowed that he has three sets of rational faculties rather than a single set of rational faculties? In that case, God would be tri-personal. He would be three persons. There would be three centers of self-consciousness. Yet, because these faculties are all the faculties of a single soul, you would still have one God – one being. You wouldn’t have three separate souls, three distinct souls, you would have three persons who are in one being – one soul. So I think that that analogy is one that preserves both the diversity of the persons – you have three separate centers of self-consciousness – yet it also preserves the unity of the person because there is one spiritual entity, one spiritual substance, there which is just so richly endowed that it has three complete sets of rational faculties each sufficient for personhood. Thus you have both the unity of the substance as well as the diversity of the persons.

KEVIN HARRIS: We get a lot of questions on the Trinity and I’m glad. Because it seems like the doctrine of the Trinity has fallen on hard times either because of anti-intellectualism in the church or because of the proliferation of cults that deny it, or for whatever. So I am glad we get the questions on it. It reminds me when, on Lee Strobel’s program Faith Under Fire, several years ago you had an exchange with a rabbi, Rabbi Singer. It was on the Trinity. He just said, “Just from the Hebrew Scriptures you cannot derive the Trinity.” You seem to agree with that. The Old Testament and the New Testament combined will give us a fuller picture of the progressive revelation of God.

DR. CRAIG: Exactly. It seemed to me uncontroversial that the reason that the church believes that God is tri-personal is because of the advent and personal claims of Jesus of Nazareth to be distinct from the Father and yet to be equal to the Father, as well as what he taught about the Holy Spirit. So I was surprised at the rabbi’s attitude. I think he had been dealing perhaps with Messianic Jews or others. Evidently people who tried to prove the Trinity based upon the Old Testament alone. I just see no reason why we should so handicap ourselves, as though we were ignorant of the revelation of God that comes in Jesus Christ. It is because of Jesus and his radical claims that we think that God is tri-personal. So I would think that the doctrine of the Trinity is compatible with the Old Testament revelation of God, but I wouldn’t pretend to read it out of Old Testament texts alone.

KEVIN HARRIS: Compatible with. In other words, I think that it is very telling and very strong that there is really nothing in the Hebrew Scriptures – the Old Testament – that would contradict the doctrine of the Trinity. Maybe there are some hints of it. Like in Zechariah when he says, “They will look on me whom they pierced and mourn for him as one mourns for an only son.” Maybe a few things like that that we can see some hints. But there is certainly nothing that would absolutely contradict.

DR. CRAIG: Right. And that is the nature of progressive revelation. The whole idea of progressive revelation is that God’s full revelation of himself was disclosed over time and comes to its climax in the person of Christ.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here’s another question.

Dr. Craig, I have a philosophy of religion class this semester with a professor who is head of the student atheist organization on campus. He writes off all of your arguments for the existence of God because he says they do not even identify half of what he calls the big five attributes of God. Well, the big five are that God is singular [what we’ve just been talking about, that there is only one God], personal, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. I know if he were to come to discover the type of cause discovered by arguments such as the kalam, teleological, and moral argument, he would indeed be awe-inspired as I am. But still he seems to have a point. Are there any good arguments that warrant a belief in an omni-God?

DR. CRAIG: I think that the assumption that this professor is making that is quite mistaken is that in order to prove that something exists you have to show that this thing has all of its essential properties. I don’t think that is true at all. In order to prove that you exist, I can’t prove that you have all of the essential properties that you have. For example, one of your essential properties would be being created by God. So in order to prove that you exist, would I have to prove that you have the property of being created by God? Obviously not. I think that we can say that on the basis of the evidence the best explanation is that there is a creator of the universe, a designer of the universe, a ground of moral value, and so forth. We don’t need to prove that this being is also all-powerful, all-knowing in order to be justified in saying that God exists.

If you do want to be a stickler about this, then I am quite happy to make more modest conclusions. In my own work I have said, for example, that what the kalam cosmological argument proves is that there exists a beginningless, uncaused, spaceless, timeless, immaterial, changeless, enormously powerful, personal creator of the universe. And I am quite content to rest with that conclusion. If he doesn’t want to call such a being God, well, that would be a very strange form of atheism indeed to believe that such a being exists. So I am just not bothered by the fact that the arguments don’t issue, for example, in proving that God is all-powerful or that he is all-knowing. What you simply show is that he is enormously powerful; he brings the universe into being out of nothing. Or that God is enormously intelligent in that he fine-tuned the universe for life with incomprehensible precision. That is sufficient to justify, I think, theism. Of course, some of the arguments do give you some of these attributes. For example, that there is one God – we just talked about that. That God is all-good – that is given to you by the moral argument. What was the fifth one?

KEVIN HARRIS: All-powerful, and all-knowing.

DR. CRAIG: Right. Those two I wouldn’t claim to be able to prove, unless the ontological argument goes through. Now if the ontological argument goes through then you’ve got a maximally great being who does have omnipotence and omniscience and moral perfection in every possible world. So the professor is assuming the ontological argument fails. I think it is a good argument. I think it is sound. So that would give you all of these omni attributes.

KEVIN HARRIS: This distinguishes arguments for the existence of God that are adequate to show that without showing all these attributes. Then if you want to show that God has these attributes as well, you do a little more work. You bring some other things in.

DR. CRAIG: Right, in particular biblical revelation. Suppose you have good reason to believe that there is an uncaused, spaceless, timeless, immaterial, enormously powerful, personal creator of the universe who is the locus of moral goodness, who has designed the universe, and who raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead? Then you would say, “What else can I know about this being? How has he revealed himself so I can know him more fully?” Then you discover that he has revealed himself in the history of Israel and in Jesus Christ as an omnipotent and omniscient being who is active in history, and so forth. Then you have a full revelation of God. So the professor is asking that we do systematic theology in order to be justified in inferring theism. I think that is just quite unnecessary.

KEVIN HARRIS: One more question then related since you brought up the ontological argument. Randy writes,

Dr. Craig, I have very much enjoyed your website. My question concerns the ontological argument. I have really favored this argument in its seven step form. I get that at ReasonableFaith.org, by the way. Or the Plantinga form as well, which is, as far as I can tell, virtually the same. The problem for me arose in negating the first premise; that is, it is possible that a maximally great being does not exist. From this would flow the same premises resulting in the opposite conclusion, therefore God does not exist. I know this to be false, but I can’t put my finger on the fallacy.

He seems to be saying that if you take the first premise of the ontological argument and negate it – that is, it is possible that a maximally great being does not exist – then that will lead to the conclusion that God does not exist.

DR. CRAIG: Correct. Right. And there is no fallacy there. This isn’t a matter of fallacy. It is just a question of which is true – the first premise or its negation? Is it true that it is possible that a maximally great being exists? Or is it true that it is impossible that a maximally great being exists? In other words, it is not a contingent matter whether God exists. Either he necessarily exists or he necessarily does not exist. So which do you think is true? At face value, the ontological argument at least shows that if you think it is possible that God exists, then God does exist.

KEVIN HARRIS: That is what is amazing about that argument. If it is even possible that God exists, then God exists.

DR. CRAIG: Right. If it is even possible that he exists then it follows that God exists. So the reader here, Randy, or the person he is talking to just needs to ask himself, well, do you think it is possible that God exists or do you think that it is impossible that God exists – that it is possible that there is no maximally great being? It seems to me that the premise that such a thing is possible is more intuitively obvious and is supported by other theistic arguments as well. I think that it is, in fact, not possible that a maximally great being does not exist. It seems to me that it is impossible that a maximally great being not exist. Because it is possible, therefore it follows that God exists. So there is no fallacy involved here. The question is just: Which do you think is true? The first premise or its negation? It seems to me that both intuitively and through the support of other theistic arguments we have good grounds for thinking the first premise is in fact true.

KEVIN HARRIS: One more thing on the ontological argument. A lot of people assume that it has been refuted and it is no longer discussed. Nothing could be further from the truth.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, no, it is still very much au courant in the philosophical scene. In the recent Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology that J. P. Moreland and I edited, we have a chapter by Robert Maydole of Davidson College on the ontological argument in which he frames a number of versions of the argument that he thinks are sound and convincing. And these have yet to be refuted by skeptics.^[2]