Reading God's mind (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by David Turell , Friday, December 02, 2022, 01:00 (511 days ago) @ dhw

Ed Feser's approach:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/12/davies-on-classical-theism-and-divine.html#more

A theistic view:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/12/davies-on-classical-theism-and-divine.html#more

"Davies is well-known for contrasting classical theism (represented by Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, et al.) with what he calls the “theistic personalism” that is at least implicit in thinkers like Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, open theists, and others. The difference between the views is that theistic personalists reject divine simplicity and, as a consequence, often reject other classical attributes such as immutability, impassibility, and eternity.

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"Among the important additions to the new edition are a few pages addressing the question of whether, given the significant differences between classical theists’ and theistic personalists’ conceptions of God, they are even really referring to the same thing when they use the word “God.” Davies suggests that it may be that “if differences in beliefs about God on the part of classical theists and theistic personalists are serious and irreconcilable, then classical theists and theistic personalists do not believe in the same God.” (my bold)

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"For the classical theist, God creates eternally or atemporally, and what is eternal or atemporal does not undergo change. Still, he could have done otherwise than create, so that this eternal act of creation is free.

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"But given that the divine nature is as classical theists, on independent grounds, argue it to be (pure actuality, perfect, omnipotent, etc.) there can be no need in God for anything distinct from him, so that nothing in his nature can compel him to create. And since, the classical theist also argues (and again on independent grounds) there is nothing apart from God that God did not create, there can be nothing distinct from him that compels him to create. Hence we cannot make sense of God’s being in any way compelled to create, and thus must attribute freedom to him.

"Third, Davies notes that those who suppose that freedom in God would entail changeability often presuppose an anthropomorphic conception of divine choice. In particular, they imagine it involving a temporal process of weighing alternative courses of action before finally deciding upon one of them. But that is not what God is like, given that he is eternal or outside time, and that he is omniscient and doesn’t have to “figure things out” through some kind of reasoning process."/b] (my bold)

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"Davies emphasizes the idea that the ascription of attributes to God should be understood as an exercise in negative or apophatic theology. The main arguments for classical theism, he points out, emphasize both that the world is contingent or conditioned in various respects, and that an ultimate explanation of the world must be unconditioned and non-contingent in those respects. In particular, God must not be changeable, must not have properties that are distinct from each other or from him, and so on. This is what it means to characterize him as simple. But by the same token, he must not be compelled to create by anything either internal to his nature or outside of him. Hence divine simplicity, divine freedom, and the relationship between them are properly understood as characterizations of what God is not.

Comment: note the bolded comments that many people have their own version of God. The message here is there is only one theistic accepted version of God, as described. I strongly agree with this description of God's attributes. dhw please note.