Answering Tim Pool's Questions About God
Tim Pool recently asked several questions about God that received—as you might expect—a fair bit of attention. Here are my responses.
Tim Pool recently asked several questions about God that received—as you might expect—a fair bit of attention. Here are my responses.
Tim asks: Is God real?
I responded on Twitter—sorry, “X”:
The answer, @Timcast, is yes! I’ve even done academic work on the topic—happy to discuss if you’re interested. :)
But since we’re not on X anymore, let me say a little more.
As I explain in my book, I believe God (as understood by classical theists) is the best and simplest explanation for the widest range of data most people agree requires a worldview explanation. This includes—but is not limited to—phenomena like:
Contingency: The fact that certain things exist but could have been otherwise or might not have existed at all.
Stability and order: The inherent structure and predictability of the universe, including the precise physical fine-tuning required for intelligent-interactive life to exist.
Consciousness: The emergence of subjective awareness and the inner qualitative experience of "what it is like” to be you.
Rationality: The ability to grasp abstract concepts, engage in logical reasoning, and pursue truth.
The Moral Dimension: The existence of objective moral facts and obligations that transcend individual preferences or societal whims.
Suffering and Evil: Even these, controversially, can point toward God under certain theodicies, insofar as certain patterns of suffering—particularly those with moral significance—are better expected if God exists than if He does not.
In some cases, I believe arguments can show that classical theism—that is, God as ontologically simple, whose essence just is His existence—is the only conceivably adequate explanation for these phenomena. In other cases, where competing explanations might exist, they are often far more complicated and, for that reason, significantly less likely to be true.
Of course, these are claims that require far more defense than the brief assertions I’ve tossed around here. Fortunately, I provide that defense in The Best Argument for God for those interested.
Tim asks: Is it possible for man to know the true and complete nature of God?
I responded (on X):
We can’t fully grasp the essence of God—at least not in this life. But philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Leibniz have long argued that we can know some truths about God through metaphysics and natural theology: that God is immaterial, omnipotent, purely actual, perfectly good, etc. These insights are limited and analogical (God’s power isn’t like ours), but they’re still genuinely true.
Now, let me expand on that.
While there are different philosophical approaches to understanding God—such as perfect being theology (considering which properties are inherently great-making and attributing them to God on the assumption that God is the greatest conceivable being) or negative (apophatic) theology (identifying the categories God must transcend to provide an adequate explanation thereof, such as God being non-contingent)—virtually all agree that a complete grasp of God’s essence is impossible in this life. However, depending on the approach, one can arrive at a more or less descriptive picture of God.
My preferred approach falls somewhere between perfect being theology and negative theology, though it leans closer to the latter. Natural theology, for example—which is nothing more than philosophical reasoning about God—is invaluable in helping us understand what God is not: God is not composed, not qualitatively finite, and so on. Yet we can still make real, positive attributions to God from natural theology as well—such as that God is powerful, loving, etc.—so long as we understand these attributes are 1) applied analogically and 2) necessarily attributed to God as the first cause or ultimate explanation of various phenomena.
For example, we know God is not just powerful but all-powerful, as the single, unique entity that imparts existence to all things apart from Himself (for an argument on why there can only be one such being, see my book)—things whose essence is really distinct from their existence. However, this is not simply attributing power to God because we intuitively regard power as a great-making property (though we might). I would argue that such intuitions can often be misleading, as they tend to conceive of God as a limit simpliciter (merely the greatest instance of power on a continuum), rather than a limit case. (In fact, the intuitions employed by perfect being theologians can sometimes be outright wrong—or at least highly contestable and unclear—which is why, in my not-so-humble opinion, the classical approach is far more reliable.)
A limit case is that toward which an ordered series converges but which is not itself a member of that series. For example, think of a circle as the limit toward which a series of polygons with increasing angles converges. There is a real similarity between the circle and the polygons, but also a radical distinctiveness. That, my friend, is the right way to think about God. Moreover, this "limit-case" perspective, often entirely missed by perfect being theologians, is pretty much forced upon philosophers like Aquinas, who follow the traditional metaphysical approach to God—an approach that begins with obvious and undeniable facts of reality and deduces the necessary conditions for their existence.
Another key aspect—or benefit, really—of analogical predication is that it not only helps us conceive of God as the limit-case instance of various attributes but also resolves difficulties related to the idea that "all that is in God is God," which must be true given God’s absolute simplicity. In other words, God’s power is God’s knowledge, which is God’s love, and so forth.
The reason, simply put, is that while it may seem difficult to understand how power and knowledge, in modes familiar to us, could be identical, there is no reason to think that the limit-case instance of power could not be identical to the limit-case instance of knowledge.
Nevertheless, even when we make positive (analogical) attributions about God, our actual understanding of these attributes remains extremely limited, precisely because we lack any immediate familiarity with them. Thus, in many cases concerning what we say about God, we have only a "fingertip grasp" that enables us to go beyond merely stating what God is not.
Finally, Tim Pool asks whether God can make a stone too heavy for Him to lift and whether God must follow the rules of logic.
I’m combining these questions because they’re closely related.
Paradoxes like the "stone paradox" are—or at least can be—quite helpful for understanding (by further probing) the nature of God and His relation to the world. However, before looking specifically at the stone paradox, it’s important to clarify what omnipotence means, especially in the classical or traditional sense, which is where I’m coming from.
Oh, and real quick: there’s a veritable bumper crop of literature on these topics—generally categorized under the coherence of theism. Unsurprisingly, many different resolutions have been proposed for various paradoxes. These differences often arise from competing views not only about God’s nature but also about the nature of logic itself (that is, differences in meta-logic).
All that is to say: what I’m going to propose below obviously deserves far more detail and substantiation. However, I believe it points in the generally correct direction and represents the most classical account.
What Is Omnipotence?
Classically, omnipotence is defined as the ability to bring about any possible being. As Aquinas explains when discussing the power of God:
“Whence, whatsoever has or can have the nature of being, is numbered among the absolutely possible things, in respect of which God is called omnipotent. Now nothing is opposed to the idea of being except non-being.”
This means God’s omnipotence extends only to what is possible and does not include producing things that are contradictory—precisely because these do not represent real possibilities of being. Importantly, as well, this conception of omnipotence relates specifically to production. It does not mean that God can just “do” literally anything (for instance, as an immaterial being, God obviously cannot swim in a lake of cheese).
Another important point is this: Philosophers like Aquinas arrived at this more restricted understanding of omnipotence through a posteriori reasoning—reasoning from effect to cause or from necessary condition. This is precisely the metaphysical approach described earlier, in contrast to perfect being theism. They affirm God’s existence and attributes (including omnipotence) by identifying what is necessary to explain broad-scale features of reality, such as the existence of contingent beings.
In short, these metaphysical investigations ultimately lead to a being that supplies existence to all contingent things that actually exist and whose essence is existence itself. That being is God. (Obviously, there’s a lot that goes into this line of argument, but you can check out my book or a bajillion other posts for more detail—I talk about this stuff all the time : )
Anyway, with this understanding of omnipotence in mind, we can see why God’s inability to produce contradictory entities does not "compromise" His omnipotence. The short answer, as we’ve already hinted, is that contradictions are not genuinely possible beings.
As Aquinas puts it:
“For a thing is said to be possible or impossible absolutely, according to the relation in which the very terms stand to one another: possible, if the predicate is not incompatible with the subject, as that Socrates sits; and absolutely impossible, when the predicate is altogether incompatible with the subject, as, for instance, that a man is a donkey.”
For example, God cannot create a "man-donkey" because what it is to be a donkey necessarily negates or excludes what it is to be a man—just as what it is to be square necessarily negates or excludes what it is to be a circle.
Ultimately, contradictions are merely negations of being—they aren’t genuinely possible "things" to begin with. For those unfamiliar, traditional predicate logic deals with the composition and division of ideas (represented by terms) to uncover further relationships and distinctions between them. When properly understood—at least according to the classical (largely Aristotelian; see Metaphysics, Book IV) account—logic tracks ontology (or onto-logic), mirroring the very structure of reality, the very nature of being, itself.
Thus, when Tim mentioned God being bound by “human logic” in one of his posts, this can be quite misleading, as it implies that logic is something we construct, which is not accurate. While we may construct representative symbols or terms to express logical relations, ultimately, we are discovering something—something deeply significant about the structure of reality as a whole, which encompasses, but is by no means limited to, human thought.
Take, for example, the law of non-contradiction. You know this one—or at least, I hope you do! It says that a proposition cannot be both true and not true at the same time and in the same respect. This rule—again, following smart folks like Aristotle—is fundamentally rooted in the ontological (or metaphysical) principle of identity, which tells us that a thing cannot both exist and not exist at the same time and in the same respect.
In other words, the laws of logic aren’t arbitrary rules that humans—or God—just happened to make up. Rather, they describe the very nature of being itself. And because of that, they ultimately reflect an aspect of the divine nature, as God is subsistent being itself (ipsum esse subsistens).
Now, with all that being said, let’s turn to the classic paradox of a stone too heavy to lift. As is often the case with puzzles like this, there seems to be a linguistic trick at play. After all, a stone, by its very nature, is (very plausibly) something inherently liftable. Thus, upon closer conceptual analysis—particularly when assuming traditional philosophical ideas related to essentialism and materiality—the idea of an "unliftable stone" likely turns out to be inherently contradictory, much like the concept of a "man-donkey."1
And as we’ve seen, contradictions are not real possibilities of being. So, there’s no issue for God’s omnipotence, properly understood, in saying, “No, God cannot make a stone too heavy for Him to lift,” because such a thing does not represent any really possible being in the first place.
Though the paradox may also be confused (or confusing) in its use of the term lifting; indeed, it’s important to clarify that God is not a physical being who "lifts" in a human sense. Rather, He is the ultimate prime mover (primum movens) or—in more contemporary speak—the Unchanged Changer. Anyway, as the cause of all motion (change), God could certainly “move” any stone—which, as a material being, inherently and necessarily possesses a principle of motion—regardless of its size or weight, without any physical effort or limitation whatsoever. (It just wouldn’t be a stone if it couldn’t be moved, at least within the Aristotelian system.)
With these understandings in place, it’s not difficult to see why the "stone-too-heavy-to-lift" paradox is just nonsense and not a genuine threat to divine omnipotence, properly understood. Granted, I’m assuming a somewhat controversial system, but since I work out my natural theology within the Aristotelian program, I am certainly entitled to deploy its resources to help resolve paradoxes like this!