Incorporeality
Incorporeality
God is sometimes portrayed in the Scriptures of the monotheistic traditions in terms of a material embodiment: Adam and Eve “heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden” (Gen 3:8).2 But virtually all philosophical theists interpret these passages as metaphors to describe God, who is a nonphysical reality—a being not identical with any material object. “God is spirit” (John 4:24). Traditional Christians believe God became incarnate (embodied), but this is not the same thing as believing that God's being turned into a corporeal object. (The problem with thinking that God became a physical object is that identity is strict and symmetrical. If A is identical with B, then B is identical with A. If God is identical with a physical body in the first century, then God has always been identical with that body, which means, absurdly, that that body has always existed. For this reason traditional Christians see Jesus as God incarnate or—literally—enfleshed and in that sense fully human rather than holding that God became numerically identical with an animal body.)3
Some philosophers have argued that there might be a powerful, knowledgeable, good god only if this being has a body like Zeus or Thor because an incorporeal agent is a contradiction of terms. Don't all coherent ideas about agents require embodied, material beings?
The difficulty with this objection is that there does not appear to be anything about being an agent (a subject who intentionally brings about events) that ipso facto requires any kind of body. Agents are not necessarily physical or embodied. Even if we humans are essentially embodied (we cannot exist without our bodies), it does not follow that every conceivable (or unconceivable) being is corporeal.
Besides, even in our own case, it is difficult to establish that our power of agency (our desire and ability to bring about some event) is itself physical. We can observe what happens in the brain when a person desires to think about mathematics, but arguably that is not to observe the person's desire to think about mathematics. Contemporary brain science has not shown how our subjective experience (our thinking, sensing, and emotions) can be the same thing as our brain processes. There is good evidence of correlation, but correlation is not identity. And even if it turns out that our mental states and activities are the same things as our brain activity, this does not rule out the possibility of other agents being incorporeal agents.
Some philosophers further oppose the concept of an incorporeal agent on the grounds that any explanation of events by such an agent would be empty or void of significance because of their inability to be subjected to scientific observation or explanation. Matthew Bagger, one of the New Atheists and a professor of religion at Brown University, argues that we simply cannot ever resort to theistic accounts:
[W]e can never assert that, in principle, an event resists naturalistic explanation. A perfectly substantiated, anomalous event, rather than providing evidence for the supernatural, merely calls into question our understanding of particular natural laws. In the modern era, this position fairly accurately represents the educated response to novelty. Rather than invoke the supernatural, we can always adjust our knowledge of the natural in extreme cases. In the modern age in actual inquiry, we never reach the point where we throw up our hands and appeal to divine intervention to explain a localized event like an extraordinary experience.4
Bagger appeals to what we moderns assume in all other contexts of explanation, and none of these seems to allow for an appeal to God (or what Bagger calls “the supernatural”). Jan Narveson, a Canadian philosopher, offers a more pointed, direct assault on theistic explanations, which he sees as empty of content. We cite him at length:
It ought to be regarded as a major embarrassment to natural theology that the very idea of something like a universe's being “created” by some minded being is sufficiently mind-boggling that any attempt to provide a detailed account of how it might be done is bound to look silly, or mythical, or a vaguely anthropomorphized version of some familiar physical process.
It is plainly no surprise that details about just how all this [creation] was supposed to have happened are totally lacking when they are not, as I say, silly or simply poetic. For the fundamental idea is that some infinitely powerful mind simply willed it to be thus, and, as they say, Lo!, it was so!…“How are we supposed to know the ways of the infinite and almighty God?” it is asked—as if that put-down made a decent substitute for an answer. But of course it doesn't. If we are serious about “natural theology,” then we ought to be ready to supply content in our explication of theological hypotheses just as we do when we explicate scientific hypotheses. Such explications carry the brunt of explanations. Why does water boil when heated? The scientific story supplies an analysis of matter in its liquid state, the effects of atmospheric pressure and heat, and so on until we see, in impressive detail, just how the thing works. An explanation's right to be called “scientific” is, indeed, in considerable part earned precisely by its ability to provide such detail.5
If Narveson and Bagger are correct, a theistic explanation of the cosmos is not a live option.
Against Narveson and Bagger one may reply that there are two general kinds of explanations for events: intentional accounts (which invoke values, designs, purposes), and nonintentional accounts (which lack values, designs, and purposes). So, for example, scientific accounts of heat, light, gravity, and chemical bonds consist of nonintentional causal explanations. An account of the speed of light contains no recourse to desire, purpose, or value. Intentional explanations are essential, however, if one wants to explain our writing and your reading of this book. Some eliminativists (materialists who avoid appeals to mental activities) have proposed that all explanations must (in the end) avoid intentionality, but we shall assume (as most philosophers today hold) that an account of your reading this book must include some beliefs, desires, and intentions (a curiosity about religion, a desire to think critically about it, and so on).
If there are such intentional explanations, there must be what some philosophers call basic actions. These are acts one does for reasons, but one does them directly and without the mediation of other acts. You might do one thing (get your friend's attention) by doing another (calling out to her), but some acts are not mediated. Your calling out to your friend because you want to meet her may require a host of factors to come into play in a full explanation (factors including social expectations, language use, personality type, etc.). But some acts will be not further accountable by other acts. When you called, you did not do so by your willing that certain neurons fire or that your nervous system react in some way; you simply did the act.
When Narveson complains that theistic explanation lacks certain mechanisms and causal elements, his complaint cuts against intentional explanations in ordinary human (and other animal) activities. In everyday, bona fide explanations of human agency, there are basic acts that are not further reducible into “impressive detail.” (It should also be noted that if there must always be an answer to “how things work” in physical causation, there can be no basic physical causes. This seems counter to many views of causation in the physical world and threatens an infinite regress.) If divine intentions are basic, so are some human intentions even though the latter are exercised by beings with animal bodies. This implies that Narveson is not successful in ruling out the possibility of theistic accounts.
If Narveson is not successful, then it is hard to see how Bagger could be. In his characterization of naturalism in Religious Experience, Justification, and History, where he seeks to rule out all theistic explanations, he explicitly does not commit himself to materialism or to the emptiness of intentional explanations. If he allows intentional explanations in principle, it is difficult to see why an appeal to our “modern” sensibilities and values can exclude theism in principle. Recall Bagger's treatment of what is natural, cited earlier. His use of “natural” is surprisingly broad, for his definition appears to allow for a natural world that is radically nonmaterialistic (perhaps even idealist, according to which reality consists of mental states) or pan-psychic (the view that all of reality has mental properties) so long as God is not included. But if the natural can include such capacious reference to the mental and the intentional, how can it rule out, as a general principle, an appeal to divine intentionality?