The Coherence Of Theism
THE COHERENCE OF THEISM
Charles Taliaferro and Elsa J. Marty
Philosophers have long been concerned with the coherence of the concept of God. The stakes are high. Atheist philosophers from ancient Greece onward have sought to show that the idea of God or gods makes no sense. Other philosophers have found that the concept of God or gods is supremely intelligible. God has been described as the most real being (ens realissimum), and some philosophers (beginning with Anselm of Canterbury in the twelfth century) have argued that if the idea of God is coherent, we may legitimately reason through logical premises that God actually exists. There is a long history of philosophical debate about the concept of God, which has been well thought through and elaborated upon over time. As the seventeenth-century philosopher Henry More once observed, the idea of God is pregnant with rich possibilities and virtues.
New Atheism, a movement led by people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, however, treats the concept of God as an ill-designed hypothesis, based on what they think is fear, ignorance, and wishful thinking. Often hostile and militant in their attacks, they cannot comprehend how an intelligent person could possibly believe in the existence of God. Yet their depictions of theism are, in our view, simplistic caricatures. It is as though they have completely overlooked the millennia of sincere, dedicated, and nuanced philosophical reflection on the concept of God. In The God Delusion, for example, Richard Dawkins describes “the God Hypothesis” as the thesis that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.” Later in the book he asserts that “goodness is no part of the definition of the God Hypothesis, merely a desirable add on.”1 Apart from Dawkins's absurd stipulation that the concept of God is the concept of a “superhuman” (as if God were some kind of supersized Homo sapiens), the idea that goodness is a mere “add on” with respect to God utterly misses the whole central idea of God. Most fundamentally, the concept of God is one of a reality that merits our highest praise and deepest faith.
Philosophers have worked hard to refine the concept of God as unsurpassably good and worthy of praise because that is the key to recognizing the attributes that make God, God: God's necessary or underived existence, incorporeality, omnipotence, essential goodness, omniscience, omnipresence, and eternity. Each one enhances the others. Consider omnipotence without omniscience. Arguably, a being without omniscience would have less power than one with omniscience. The attributes of God are therefore not a patchwork of arbitrary characteristics. Each one is, rather, interconnected, and together they form a coherent whole. Appreciating this helps one avoid the more crude depiction of God one finds in Dawkins's work. Dawkins's conception of goodness as a mere add-on shows the failure of the New Atheists to comprehend the concept of theism. Philosophers do not arbitrarily pick and choose what attributes they would like God to have. Theism makes sense as a coherent whole; one does not add and subtract aspects of God at will.
In this chapter we seek to defend the coherence of the concept of God. We begin with a brief word on how to discern coherency in arguments regarding theism and proceed to outline six divine attributes, or properties, involved in the concept of God: necessary existence, incorporeality, essential goodness, omnipotence, omniscience, and eternity. With respect to each, we offer a brief account of at least one skeptical challenge and a reply. We conclude with reflections on what may be called the flexibility of theism.
We, the authors, come from the Christian tradition and make sense of God in light of Jesus the Christ. The divine attributes inherent in the concept of God are generally agreed upon by theists from other religious traditions as well. Our aim in this essay is simply to defend from a philosophical standpoint the coherence of theism and thereby defend the coherence of a concept that is central to both Christian and other theistic traditions. Specific Christian teachings about God as Triune and God incarnate further enrich the philosophy of God beyond what may be a general theism, and we comment on this at the end of our chapter.