The Rise of the DIY Deity
The Build-A-God Workshop & The Trouble with Custom-Made Deities
My sister used to love Build-A-Bear—that store in the mall where you’d pay a ludicrous amount of money to assemble a stuffed animal by picking out all the pieces. (If I remember right, the final piece to go in was the heart. Adorable, I know.) As the name implies, the creations were completely custom, with people walking out with all sorts of different-looking teddy bears. I think it’s still around? My sister’s not really the target audience anymore—I just remember hating being dragged into that shop whenever we went to the mall as kids. Mostly, I just wanted to get to GameStop.
Anyway.
Much of what goes on in contemporary philosophy of religion among theists is like a Build-A-Bear workshop, except instead of building a bear, they’re building a model of God—a sort of working theistic hypothesis. They’re presented with a buffet of divine attributes and ways of understanding them. Sometimes, they even invent brand-new attributes to sprinkle into the recipe.
Some choose omnipotence, others settle for just a huge amount of power. Some say God creates the universe he does because of moral motivations, others because of aesthetic ones. Some pick timelessness as the permanent divine state, while others prefer mutability, and some choose timelessness pre-creation but time-bound post-creation. Some opt for God’s omniscience to include passive propositional knowledge, others reject this—whatever looks good to them. Whatever seems cute.
Of course, this isn’t to say people build their god all at once. Sometimes, they construct a lot of their god initially but then tweak it after running coherence tests—checking whether any attributes are in tension or contradiction with each other or with obvious features of the world. These tests might even lead them to discard earlier components (say, omnipotence or timelessness) and replace them with others.
Other times, it’s not a coherence issue but an explanatory or predictive one that drives someone back to their Build-A-God workshop to swap parts. For instance, they might find they can better explain the range of suffering in creation by holding that God is motivated not by moral considerations but by aesthetic ones. In that case, they might incorporate a new or different component into God that drives him to create a cosmic work of art or a story with elements of tension, chaos, and so on.1
You can probably guess that I’m not a fan of this approach to the philosophy of God, for several reasons.
First, it tends to produce a hugely anthropomorphic god. That is, God almost always ends up as some (minimally, metaphysically) composite entity—not relevantly different from things that stand in need of extrinsic explanation. Sure, he’s typically more powerful, immaterial, etc.—essentially, a super-person—but he’s still an entity with a certain number of brute facts: things that seem to demand further explanation but for which no explanation is forthcoming.
Indeed, many champions of this Build-A-God approach (not that they’d ever call it that, of course) simply admit that God is (or has) at least one significant brute fact. Swinburne’s big theistic appeal, for example, is just to argue that theism has fewer brute facts than naturalism—namely, just one fundamentally brute, existing omnipotent entity—but that it explains more overall.2
But fewer brute facts, to my mind, isn’t good enough. The ultimate principle of everything either explains everything (including itself) or it doesn’t—and only in the former case does it deserve the title “God.”
By contrast, classical theism doesn’t run into these concerns because its methodology isn’t about constructing a deity out of thin air and seeing how well it satisfies certain explanatory virtues. Classical theists aren’t in the business of creating a Franken-God—that is, scrounging around for various (presumably excellent-making) attributes, stitching them together, and then seeing if the whole thing can somehow hold itself together when pressure-tested.
Heavens no!
Instead, they developed their philosophy of God through philosophy of nature and metaphysics—that is, as embedded within and emerging from an already established metaphysical program—by working through a chain of reasoning based not on what is merely possible but on what is undeniably actual. This meant starting from certain effects—broad features of the world that are not self-explanatory, such as change, composition, and becoming—and reasoning toward the necessary conditions that account for them.
For them, God not only had to exist to make these broad categories of reality intelligible but also had to be the kind of theoretical entity that could ultimately explain these phenomena while also explaining himself. That meant God had to be a certain way—simple, incorporeal, purely actual, whose essence just is his existence—if, that is, one is to ultimately move from the realm of the hetero-explicable to the auto-explicable. In other words, to be God just was to be the kind of ultimate explanatory entity required to render reality—all of it—completely intelligible. (Naturally, this meant such thinkers were committed, quite doggedly, to a thoroughgoing anti-skepticism—which, as Lloyd Gerson has emphasized, entailed firm opposition to materialism, reductionism, nominalism, and the like.)
And of course, the designation of God was anything but arbitrary, since conceptual analysis, once applied to this ontologically ultimate reality—The One—unlocked the divine attributes from the root of pure actuality.3 These attributes were not distinct add-ons to God but rather were all really identical to each other (even if conceptually distinct), as limit-case instances of attributes commonly found among creatures, and ultimately identical to the divine essence itself.4 (While simplicity may well be a “spooky” doctrine, it obviously avoids the issue of having to explain how really different attributes are all somehow stitched together and necessarily so.5)
Put differently: For the classical theist, the divine attributes are not distinct little tropes or property instances that one can put in or take out at their convenience. No, for the classical theist, only one thing can have any divine attribute, and to have any one divine attribute is to have them all.
Naturally, one might take issue with this approach—they might think there’s some contestable element in certain arguments for God within this tradition: Aristotle’s arguments, or Plotinus’s, or Aquinas’s, etc. Of course, I don’t think these arguments, often deductively structured, are any harder to justify than the more probabilistic ones commonly used in contemporary worldview comparison (such as fine-tuning arguments or arguments from consciousness). In fact, I’d argue many of them rest on far more plausible premises. But to each their own, I suppose—and all that, of course, is a different conversation entirely.
All I’m highlighting now is how this approach to God avoids certain issues that plague the contemporary Build-A-God methodology.
More than anything, it provides a precise, non-arbitrary, and non-anthropomorphic conception of God—one that properly captures divine transcendence: a being that possesses a totally unique mode of existence and resides at a more fundamental layer of reality than everything else. (In this view, both one’s conception of God and the divine attributes themselves are appropriately constrained by prior work in the philosophy of nature and metaphysics.) Hence why traditional theists often say that God is not “a being among beings.” This isn’t to deny that God is a concrete entity but rather to clarify that God has no finite or restricting essence, is not an individual in the sense of being individuated, and is thus not metaphysically complex, etc.
And—finally—if this approach works at all, it doesn’t merely boost one’s probabilistic credence in some theistic model or other as a working hypothesis; it yields metaphysical certainty about the fundamental nature of reality—hence why these arguments are often called metaphysical proofs—since God is claimed to be the necessary condition for certain (quite undeniable) features of the world.6
Of course, as I’ve emphasized before, this doesn’t mean such arguments need to persuade every individual or provide any subjective feeling of certainty. They only need to deliver a true conclusion via premises that are publicly accessible and rationally decidable through the usual methods of philosophy (analytic, phenomenological, existential).7 And these conditions, I think, are almost certainly met by numerous arguments in this tradition.
This actually relates to an objection from Paul Draper, where he thinks the possibility of “aesthetic deism” really eats away at the likelihood of traditional omni-theism—a powerful point, I think, against the non-classical approach to God.
But perhaps not a decisive one, since I think there are some problems with the way Draper carves things up. But that’s a topic for another post.
For a contemporary exposition, see my book The Best Argument for God.
To hedge a common objection—which almost always fails to consider the principle of analogy in traditional philosophy of God—the classical theist isn’t saying that power or knowledge, as we commonly know or experience them, are identical in God. Rather, something like power and something like knowledge—more precisely, the limit-case instances of these attributes—are identical in God and, indeed, identical to the divine essence.
This claim may be challenging to grasp (though, of course, we have good prior reason to expect that anything we say about God will be hard to grasp!), but it is far from the incoherent babble critics of classical theism often assume—usually without taking the proper time to actually understand it.
Bah humbug.
Sure—some try to argue that certain divine attributes are entailed (an odd word here, since "entailment" is really a relation between propositions; a result of validity) by some deeper root characteristic, like omnipotence or perfection.
But what exactly is this entailment relation supposed to be?
It certainly can’t be causal. If it were, God would end up being a caused entity, with some part of God as the real fundamental thing-y. And if perfection (which seems more promising than omnipotence for deriving other divine attributes) causes some other attribute, then it seems perfection initially lacked something that was better to have than not.
But if that’s the case, then we weren’t dealing with absolute perfection in the first place.
Nor does it make sense to say that existence (or necessary existence) is just part of the essence of perfection. If existence is merely one among other "parts" of perfection, then all the other parts—including perfection as a whole—would depend upon that existence part.
But this, once again, smacks of contradiction. It reduces "perfection" to a composite of features, one of which is existence, making perfection itself dependent rather than self-explanatory.
On the other hand, if one wants to claim that these attributes are simply different aspects of perfection—conceptually distinct but not really distinct—then they’re essentially saying what proponents of divine simplicity have been arguing for centuries. (But that’s not usually the route these thinkers want to take!)
So, better, again, to just go with the classical theist—who already has a metaphysics of perfection!—and maintain that perfection, which merely signifies whatever is not lacking in actuality, is, in the absolute sense, just unbounded existence. Subsistent existence. God.
In fact, there is a traditional distinction here—one that I actually think is legitimate—namely, the distinction between metaphysical certainty and psychological certainty.
Metaphysical certainty (certitudo rei) refers to the objective necessity of a truth in reality itself, independent of whether anyone recognizes it. By contrast, psychological certainty (certitudo cognitionis) concerns an individual's subjective conviction, which may or may not align with reality. A person can feel certain about something that is false (for example, they might be convinced they turned the oven off when, in fact, they didn’t) or be uncertain about something that is necessarily true (plenty of examples there).
"Publicly accessible" doesn’t mean universally accepted (since people can always deny things for various—often ridiculous—"reasons"), but rather that the premise or principle in question doesn’t require specialized scientific training, technical equipment, or esoteric knowledge to understand or evaluate. It’s something that can be grasped through common experience or arrived at through rational reflection upon such experience—for example, the principle of causality (specifically, from nothing, nothing comes).