The Flexibility of Theism and the Importance of Experience
The Flexibility of Theism and the Importance of Experience
In this overview of attributes, objections, and replies, one can begin to see the difficulty of establishing the incoherence of theism. Many options are available to the theist in refining the concept of God. If, for example, an argument from simultaneity were reworked effectively, a theist can always revise her understanding of eternity and hold that God is not atemporal but everlasting or without beginning. (Richard Swinburne and Nicholas Wolterstorff adopt this alternative.) And, as we noted earlier, one can address the apparent conflict between freedom and omniscience on multiple levels. Although there is not room to develop a fuller philosophy of God here, we suggest that a crucial point where flexibility is essential concerns integrating our concept of God with the experience of suffering and oppression. Along with a number of other philosophical theists, we believe that a loving God affectively responds to and is in solidarity with those unjustly oppressed. We think that a combination of biblical testimony, religious experience, and reflections on value theory and love should lead us to see God as affectively responsive to the cosmos that God sustains and loves. Theism has sufficient openness so that one may be a classical theist and affirm God as impassible (not subject to passion) and immutable (not subject to change), but one may also be a Christian theist 10 and hold that God is passible (God does have love as a passion) and God's will for the creation involves an engaging, intimate divine-human interplay.
What we are calling the flexibility of theism is especially important as we move beyond a general theistic worldview and take serious God's Triune nature and the incarnation. For the Christian, God is not like a stagnant, impersonal principle. All the divine attributes are involved in the dynamics of the incarnation and the interrelationship of love within the Godhead, where love is not in ignorance but through complete knowledge and where such inner love comes to fruition through power in the creation.
Exploring reasons for recognizing the truth of theism is immediately relevant to exploring reasons for recognizing the coherence of theism. Some of the best reasons for thinking x is possible are the reasons for thinking x is actual. Several other chapters in this book take up such positive arguments. For our part, we note that merely entertaining the possibility of theism can open oneself up experientially to the possibility of a living encounter with God. As Peter Donovan observes:
A religious believer who looks on the world as a domain in which God may possibly manifest himself (in one way or another) has the potential for a whole range of significant experiences not open to the person without such a world-view. He does not just view the world in a religious way. He lives within it, and acts and responds and experiences its events and happenings (including his own feelings and states of mind) with the possibility in his mind that in doing so he may be coming in touch not just with the world and other people in it, but with the activity and manifestations of God.11
Advancing theoretical arguments against the New Atheists over the coherence of God is merely the beginning of inquiry. The next step is to explore the possibility of encountering God's existence with humility, mindful that the divine attributes such as omniscience are not less than we can conceive, but rather such attributes and indeed God's being are far greater in profundity and richness than we can imagine.12