A Coherent Method for Recognizing Coherent Concepts
A Coherent Method for Recognizing Coherent Concepts
The concept of a being or state of affairs is coherent if it is possible that the being or state of affairs exists or obtains. If the concept of God is coherent, for example, it is possible that God exists. Determining the coherence of a central religious idea such as God is not the same, however, as determining the coherence or incoherence of some theoretical or mathematical proposition or idea. Number theory and logical consistency may be all that is needed to determine the coherence of some theorem. However, with respect to certain more metaphysical claims, such as the claim that persons can survive the death of their bodies, more than logical consistency will be required; we will need to test relevant concepts such as being a person, having a body, and personal identity. Engaging in various thought experiments in which we try to imagine (picture, describe, conceive of) persons without bodies, we come to see that this state of affairs is not a bona fide possibility. In thinking about theism, we will need not only logical consistency, clarity, and powers of imagination but also a sound sense of values. This will come to the fore when we discuss the divine attributes of power, knowledge, and essential goodness below. We will also make use of an important insight from feminist thinkers to refine the philosophy of power at work in the concept of omnipotence.
Of all the values that would be useful to note at the beginning of our inquiry, probably the most important is humility. When it comes to the concept of God in theistic tradition, we are approaching the concept of a being who is both immanent and transcendent. God is believed to be immanent insofar as God is the omnipresent Creator, without whose ongoing causal sustaining power the cosmos would not exist. But God is also believed to be transcendent in the sense that God is more than we are able to grasp. In theology, the positive statements we can make about God are part of what is known as cataphatic theology or the via positiva (the positive way), while the denial that we can fully grasp the divine is part of apophatic theology or the via negativa (the negative way). In what follows we are engaged in the via positiva; but although we defend the intelligibility of the concept of God as necessarily existing and so on, we also want to acknowledge in the end that (if theism is right), God is more than we can fully grasp. And this calls for a sense of humility, not stemming from what the New Atheists think of as infantile fear or the love of mystery but from a sense of the overwhelming, awesome nature of God.
Let us now explore a set of divine attributes and consider the cause for or against their coherence.