2.3 Comments on the Above
As I have said, my aim in this book is primarily to explain what Aquinas says in the SCG. Yet what I have just reported him as claiming raises questions that you should, perhaps, reflect on as you read SCG 1,10–12. So let me now list and briefly comment on some of them.
2.3.1 Should Natural Theology Not Be Avoided Altogether?
I noted in the previous chapter that, although Aquinas is an advocate of natural theology, some philosophers and theologians have been suspicious of it in general. In the present chapter, I have explained that the natural theology that Aquinas favors consists of deductive causal arguments. Before we even bother to look at how he develops his position on this matter, however, might we not consider rejecting his line of thinking on it at the outset? For are there not reasons for supposing that there never could be any worthwhile natural theology?
Philosophers and theologians hostile to natural theology have defended themselves in a variety of ways, not all of which I can flesh out here. But some of the most discussed among them boil down to the following theses:
1. There could never be any good natural theology since the assertion “God exists” is not even possibly true or since its truth is highly unlikely.
2. It is not the job of philosophy to argue that God exists. All philosophers can do is explain what belief in God amounts to.
3. To engage in natural theology is to offend against God by preferring to rely on human reasoning rather than divine revelation.
4. The whole enterprise of natural theology stands condemned on biblical grounds.
Why suppose that there could not be a God? One notable answer to this question holds that God is supposed to be a nonmaterial being, while the notion of a nonmaterial being is nonsensical. Such was the view of A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) and of members of the school of philosophical thinking known as logical positivism. According to them, “God exists” is strictly meaningless since it does not express a truth of logic, does not express a mathematical truth, and is not a statement that can be verified by means of sense experience.24 Even before the time of Ayer and logical positivism, this was a position embraced by David Hume (1711–1766). “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics,” says Hume, “let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”25
What Hume says here is surely somewhat beguiling, like the call of the sirens as depicted in Homer’s Odyssey. Considered as a philosophical movement, logical positivism lost the interest of philosophers some years ago, largely for technical reasons concerning its criteria for meaningfulness.26 But Hume seems to be saying what tons of people believe: that there is something very fishy in any claim to the effect that there exists something whose existence cannot be empirically confirmed even in principle. One might, of course, reasonably believe in the existence of something that one has not been able to see or touch for oneself. Yet what if someone says that X exists, where X is supposed to be completely beyond the grasp of human sensation? Would we even understand what someone who says this might mean? One might say that someone who lacks understanding at this point is just lacking imagination. But can one imagine something existing that is beyond the grasp of human sensation? Surely not, since to imagine there being such and such is to be able concretely to picture it somehow.
This line of thinking does not, however, show that there can be nothing nonmaterial. At best, it indicates why such a thing would be something the nature of which would defy our abilities to classify and comprehend as we take ourselves to classify and comprehend things in the material world. And, as I have said, Aquinas positively insists that God is not something to be classified and understood as strictly comparable to such things. Aquinas is well aware that God is not subject to empirical investigation, but he does not therefore conclude that God cannot exist. Instead, he asks if there are any reasons to suppose that God does exist, and one might wonder why he should be forbidden in advance to do so. It might be said that we know that X cannot possibly exist for various reasons. But proof that X exists is, of course, proof that the existence of X is possible. So, perhaps, rather than supposing in advance that Aquinas is deluded as he embarks on his natural theology in the SCG, it might be prudent to let him carry on with this and see what results from it.
What, however, of the supposition that the existence of God is unlikely as opposed to impossible? Here again one can hear the sirens calling, and for many people they call because of the evils that we find in the world. For God is supposed to be wholly good, while we know very well that there is much that is bad in the world. There is cancer, from which people often die in much pain. There is AIDS and there is Ebola. There are natural disasters that cause endless amounts of grief, and on top of all of that there are people who inflict great misery on others. Think of the Holocaust, or think about the history of warfare in general. How could a God who is wholly good permit any of this to occur? It obviously has occurred. So, should we not forget about arguments of natural theology while assuming to begin with that what they purport to establish is hugely unlikely to be true given what we know about badness in the world?
Once again, however, proof that such and such exists is proof that it exists and has to be deemed as trumping arguments to the effect that it probably does not exist. So even the occurrence of great evil in the world cannot be thought of as rendering God’s existence so unlikely as to force us to conclude that we should just ignore any arguments for the conclusion that God, indeed, exists. As he continues to write the SCG, Aquinas is obviously assuming that this is a reasonable assumption on which to proceed, which it surely is. In SCG 1,10–11 Aquinas does not refer to badness in the world as an objection to considering arguments for God’s existence. But he does so in Summa Theologiae 1a,2,3. There, while citing an objection to what he wants to go on to say, he writes:
It seems that there is no God. For if one of two contraries were infinite, the other would be completely destroyed. But by the word “God” we understand a certain infinite good. So, if God existed, nobody would ever encounter evil. But we do encounter evil in the world. So, God does not exist.27
In response to this argument, Aquinas replies: “As Augustine says, ‘Since God is supremely good, he would not permit any evil at all in his works, unless he were sufficiently powerful and good to bring good even from evil.’ So, it belongs to the limitless goodness of God that he permits evils to exist and draws good from them.”28 Considered as a response to the objection just quoted, this remark might seem somewhat lame. Yet Aquinas clearly does not take it to be a final word on how it is that evil and God can both be real. He is pointing forward to things he will go on to say in the Summa Theologiae concerning why God can be thought to be both supremely good and all-powerful. Taken in context, therefore, what he is saying presumes that a case can be made for a good and omnipotent God existing. Now it may be that no such case can be made. Yet the issue should surely not be decided in advance of any such case being offered and considered on its merits. The reality of evil might leave one skeptical concerning the existence of God just as the behavior of a husband might leave his wife skeptical concerning his fidelity to her. Such skepticism, however, would be unreasonable if it amounts to a refusal to consider any arguments offered for conclusions that might show it to be misguided.
What, however, of the view that one should not argue that God exists but should confine oneself to giving an account of what belief in God amounts to? This is a view that has been championed by philosophers claiming to be influenced by Wittgenstein, a notable example being D. Z. Phillips (1934–2006). According to Phillips: “It is not the task of the philosopher to decide whether there is a God or not, but to ask what it means to affirm or deny the existence of God.”29 Why so? Because, says Phillips, philosophical arguments for the truth of “God exists” ignore the fact that belief in God is not a hypothesis based on grounds and held to by believers in a tentative way, and it is certainly not an empirical hypothesis. Phillips writes:
One will never understand what is meant by belief in God if one thinks of God as a being who may or may not exist. … Let us assume, for a moment, that the reality of God is akin to the reality of a physical object. It will then make sense to assume that one day we will be able to check whether our belief is true. Let us assume, further, that such a day comes, and that we find that there is a God and that He is as we had always thought Him to be. What kind of a God would we have discovered? Clearly, a God of whom it would still make sense to say that He might not exist. Such a God may, as a matter of fact, never cease to exist. … A God who is an existent among existents is not the God of religious belief.30
Indeed, Phillips adds, “God exists” is not an indicative statement. He says:
Talk of God’s existence or reality cannot be considered as talk about the existence of an object. … To ask whether God exists is not to ask a theoretical question. If it is to mean anything at all, it is to wonder about praising and praying: it is to wonder whether there is anything in all that. This is why philosophy cannot answer the question “Does God exist?” with either an affirmative or a negative reply. … “There is a God,” though it appears to be in the indicative mood, is an expression of faith.31
If Phillips is right here, then Aquinas’s interests in natural theology in the SCG derive from confusion. But is Phillips right?
Phillips was always much concerned to attack natural theology that has as its focus a notion of God that takes God to be part of a collection of things, something whose existence might be confirmed by sensory investigation, something that might be thought of as a “Top Person,” a very knowledgeable and powerful, though invisible, human being, or something seriously like a human being.32 Yet Phillips never paid any serious attention to the natural theology of Aquinas, who would, I suspect, have sympathized with much that Phillips says concerning what it is to believe in God. As I will show, Aquinas holds that God belongs to no species or genus. He also holds that it is God’s nature to exist. In this sense, Aquinas would be at one with Phillips when it comes to the statements “God is not an existent among existents” and “God is not an object.” And he would certainly deny that God is something in the world accessible by empirical investigation or inference from this. Arguably, therefore, Phillips’s attack on natural theology, while possibly undermining some kinds of natural theology, does not undermine that of Aquinas since it does not engage with it.33
At this point, though, we are still left with questions 3 and 4 above. Does someone embarking on an essay in natural theology not display unseemly pride before God, whose word is Truth? And is natural theology not condemned by the Bible?
Insofar as the first question here is implying that one should not prefer human reasoning to what God has revealed, Aquinas would obviously approve of it. He takes God to be Truth itself, and he thinks that one would be wrong to deny what he takes to be divine revelation (the articles of faith). But he does not, therefore, jump to the conclusion that reason can lead us nowhere when it comes to God. And he is surely right to do so since “We should believe what God has revealed” does not entail “We should believe only what God has revealed” or “It is an offense against God to argue about the existence of God without relying on revelation.”
When it comes to the Bible and natural theology, I take James Barr (1924–2006) to have well demolished the claim that the Bible can be cited as condemning natural theology in some wholesale way. He does so in his book Biblical Faith and Natural Theology.34 As Barr well argues, though the Bible does not contain anything that reads like a sustained essay in natural theology, it seems to leave plenty of room for there being a knowledge of God apart from Christian revelation.35
Take, for example, Acts 17. Here we are told that St. Paul spoke at the Areopagus in Athens. He praises the Athenians for being “extremely religious,” and he notes their altar inscribed “To an Unknown God.” He goes on to say “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”36 So Acts 17 clearly has Paul, in a thoroughly Gentile context, appealing to some knowledge of or belief in God not derived from Christian revelation. All human beings, says Paul, come from God, as even Athenian poets have said.37 The most natural reading of Acts 17 is to see it as attempting to place specifically Christian belief in the context of a universal knowledge of God, incomplete as it might be, independent of Christian or Jewish revelation. As Barr observes, “Acts 17 cannot be fully expounded without opening the gate to some sort of natural theology.”38
Again, consider the first chapter of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Defenders of the notion that belief in the existence of God might not be something that has to rely only on revelation have long appealed to this text. Hence, for example, the First Vatican Council teaches that “God, the beginning and end of all things, can be known, from created things, by the light of natural human reason.” Having said this, Vatican I goes on immediately to cite Romans 1:20: “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.”39
Paul’s argument in Romans 1 (and it clearly is an argument) can be represented thus:
1. God’s wrath is revealed against all who are ungodly and wicked (vs. 18).
2. These people know something about God since his power and nature have been understood and seen through what he has made (vss. 19–20).
3. These people are, therefore, without excuse for engaging in idolatry and making images of God in the form of people and animals (vss. 19–23).
4. So, as punishment, God “gave them up” to “impurity” and “degrading passions” (vss. 24–27).
5. And, for the same reason, God “gave them up” to all sorts of wrongdoing (vss. 28–32).
Paul seems to suppose that there is some knowledge of God apart from Christian or Jewish revelation. As Barr observes, Romans 1 appears “to imply that there is something ‘known of God,’ which is accessible to all human beings through their being human.”40 And, as Barr goes on to note, it is not astonishing that St. Paul should think along these lines since he had precedent for doing so in both the Old Testament and the writings of Hellenistic Judaism. In the Old Testament, we might, for example, note Psalm 104, which points to the world as evidence for and as manifestation of God’s generosity. We might also note Psalm 19, with its insistence that “the heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.”41 When it comes to Hellenistic Judaism, the book of Wisdom comes especially to mind. As Paul seems to do in Romans 1, Wisdom declares that there is a knowledge of God on which people have culpably failed to act, a failure leading to vices of all kinds.42
In short, the Bible does not exclude, and even seems to encourage, the belief that God can somehow be known by human reason. If to sympathize with the claim that natural theology is at least worth taking a look at is to suppose that there might be something in the idea that God is knowable through one’s perception of the world, and to think that this knowledge might have been available or accessible to people regardless of Christian revelation, then the Bible contains natural theology. So, if it is said that God is beyond reason because of what the Bible asserts, the claim should be rejected. Or, so one might more provocatively say: “If you thoroughly reject natural theology, and if natural theology underlies the Bible in any significant degree, then you must judge that the Bible is inadequate as a theological guide.”43
2.3.2 “God Exists” as Self-Evident
What now of Aquinas’s arguments to the effect that “God exists” is not self-evident but needs to be made evident by causal reasoning? As I have shown, a major refrain running through them is that we do not know what God is, but I shall leave that refrain aside for the moment since it is something that Aquinas develops in some detail later in the SCG than SCG 1,10. I should, though, say something about his first and second argument to the effect that “God exists” is not self-evident to us at present (per se notum quoad nos). That is because these arguments seem to be rejecting what many have taken to be true—that there is a valid “ontological argument” for the truth of “God exists.”
By “ontological argument” I mean an argument that purports to prove that God exists because of what the word “God” means. Many such arguments have been provided over the centuries.44 I think it fair to say, however, that, with one notable exception, most distinguished contemporary philosophers find arguments for “God exists” based on what “God” means to be unsound.45 I also think it fair to say that those who are skeptical when it comes to ontological arguments for belief in God predominantly tend to be so because, to put it bluntly, they think that one cannot define something into existence. From “A wizard, by dictionary definition, is a being with properties X, Y, and Z” it surely does not follow that there are any wizards. So, why should it follow from “God is, by definition, X, Y, and Z” that God exists? As I have noted, Aquinas thinks that to suppose that it does so is wrong. He holds that a bare understanding of the meaning of the word “God” cannot entail that there is anything in reality to correspond to it.
I would suggest that Aquinas is right here. We should distinguish between the “is” in dictionary definitions (as in “A wizard is someone who casts spells”) and the “is” we have in mind when saying that something actually exists (as in “There is such a continent as Asia”). If we knew that God exists, and if we knew that God’s nature is to exist as something that could not fail to exist, then we would, as Aquinas himself agrees, presumably know that there is no question of God not existing. The question, however, is “Do we know that God exists and do we know that God’s nature is to exist as something that could not fail to exist”? In his Proslogion, St. Anselm of Canterbury famously holds that it is absurd to say that God, if taken to be “something than which nothing greater can be conceived” can be thought to be nothing but an idea in our heads and not something “out there,” as it were. And his arguments for this conclusion are nothing if not sophisticated.46 But they always seem to be articulating what belief in God entails rather than proving that God exists.47 So, perhaps Aquinas is reasoning well when it comes to his SCG treatment of the thesis that we can know that God exists because of what “God” means.
Yet some philosophers would say that “God exists” is “self-evident” because we can actually perceive God directly as readily as we can perceive things around us, the existence of which Aquinas would take to be self-evident to us. If I bump into you, it would seem that I could be taken to know of your existence directly and noninferentially. So, what is to stop someone saying that God is something that we can perceive by experience, and that “God exists” is therefore a proposition that can be thought of as “self-evident”?
The thesis that “God exists” can be known on the basis of something like our perception of objects around us has been defended. Many people have claimed to have had a direct experience of God, and the claims of these people have been supported, in principle, at least, by some well-known philosophers. Take, for example, William Alston (1921–2009). He recognizes that some people say that they are immediately aware of God, and he argues that we should not assume that they are wrong to do so. Why not? One reason Alston gives is that “any supposition that one perceives something is prima facie justified.” According to Alston, one is justified in supposing that one perceives something “unless there are strong reasons to the contrary.” “Beliefs formed on the basis of experience,” Alston suggests, “possess an initial credibility by virtue of their origin. They are innocent until proved guilty.” He adds: “Unless we accord a prima facie credibility to experiential reports, we can have no sufficient reason to trust any experiential source of beliefs. This is the only alternative to a thoroughgoing scepticism about experience.”48
In other words, Alston thinks that people like Aquinas would be wrong to discard the claim that “God exists” can be known to be true as self-evident because based on experience of God. And some other philosophers would agree with him on this, even if they do not target Aquinas by name, as, indeed, Alston himself does not.49 Yet should we now conclude that, contrary to what Aquinas says in SCG 1,10 and 11, “God exists” can be known to be true directly and noninferentially on the basis of experience? I think that Aquinas would reply to Alston by arguing that, in the present life and apart from a miracle, there is no direct knowledge of God akin to what we have in the sensory perception of things in the world.
Aquinas never denies that there can be noninferential knowledge of this, that, or the other. In general, he thinks that, for example, I can be justified in thinking that there is a cat in front of me just because I seem to be seeing a cat in front of me. Aquinas also thinks that noninferential knowledge of God’s existence is had by the blessed in heaven. The saints, he says, enjoy “the beatific vision,” which he sharply distinguishes from what we have on the basis of a deductive argument.50 Again, in his discussion of ecstasy (raptus) in Summa Theologiae 2a2ae,175, Aquinas, with reference to 2 Corinthians 12, accepts that, even before he died, St. Paul directly saw the essence of God. So it is not as though Aquinas denies that there can be a direct and noninferential knowledge of or contact with God. On the other hand, however, he thinks that such knowledge cannot come about just as living people employ their natural (albeit God-given) faculty of knowing. He thinks that grace has to be at work if someone directly and noninferentially enjoys anything that might be called “perception of God.” And he does so because, as I will show, he thinks that human beings are essentially material individuals whose knowledge of things other than themselves typically arises because of the impact on them of material objects. In other words, Aquinas holds that, abstracting from miracles and considerations to do with life after death, our ability directly to know other things is confined to our knowledge of material things and does not extend to knowledge of God.
In response to this conclusion one might say that it stinks of what Alston calls “epistemic imperialism,” which he defines as “subjecting the outputs of one belief-forming practice to the requirements of another.”51 Here I take Alston to be saying that one should not suppose that claims to be directly aware of God must be ruled out because they seem to be suspect by criteria commonly used to validate ordinary claims to have perceived something in the world. Yet, and especially because of what he says about St. Paul and ecstasy, I do not think that Aquinas would disagree with Alston on this point. On the other hand, Aquinas, and, I presume, Alston, would say that direct knowledge of God comparable to perception of things in the world is the exception rather than the rule, which is the thought that lies behind SCG 1,10 and 11. In these chapters Aquinas is concerned with what human beings can rise to as things in the world whose ability to know (where “know” means “know what X is essentially”) generally depends on what they can figure out on the basis of sensory experience. He argues that God is not an object of sensory experience and, therefore, cannot be known as such. So, the most damning criticism of SCG 1,10 and 11 based on the claim that God is directly known by people in this life would have to establish that God is indeed something the essence of which all of us have the ability or potential to know or understand just by being human. At this point I leave it to you to consider if such a criticism can be defended, especially in the light of what Aquinas goes on to say in the SCG concerning the nature or essence of God. As I have said, Aquinas has no problem with the suggestion that we might know that something is there because we have encountered, perceived, or stumbled across it. On the other hand, he does have a problem with the suggestion that we can know that it is God that we have encountered or perceived or stumbled across in something like the way in which we might perceive a cat and know it to be a cat and not, say, a dog. If I know, even without inference, that there is a cat in front of me, then, thinks Aquinas, I must have already acquired some concept of what a cat is. Yet, Aquinas asks, to what prior understanding of God can we appeal when claiming, on the basis of “perception” or “experience,” that God exists?
As you will now realize, in his SCG discussion of God, Aquinas does not take us to have a knowledge of what God is that entitles us to claim that we know that “God exists” is obviously true without argument. But what kind of argument for the truth of “God exists” does Aquinas have in mind as he writes SCG 1,10–12? This is the question he turns to in SCG 1,13.