Why Classical Theism Isn’t Just About God

When someone describes themselves as a classical theist, I submit that they are saying more than just what they believe about God. Being a classical theist means holding specific views about God based on broader philosophical commitments. For example, classical theists believe that God is absolutely ontologically simple, meaning there are no real distinctions in God that amount to composition. While many people associate classical theism primarily with the doctrine of divine simplicity, simplicity is really just a necessary consequence of deeper commitments regarding causality, composition, and intelligibility. As the fundamental first cause of everything apart from Himself, classical theists believe that God is a purely actual being whose essence is identical to His existence.¹ Naturally, this claim about God only makes sense within a particular ontology—namely, a constituent ontology with a robust conception of existence.²

For example: classical theists generally maintain that contingent things—things that could possibly not exist—are those whose essence is really distinct from their existence. They also believe such things require a cause, as their essence doesn’t guarantee their existence, and their existence is not a brute fact. This sets up the causal search for the ultimate being—something that imparts existence to essence but requires no cause for its own existence. Why? Because its essence simply is its existence. For the classical theist, existence itself exists, and that is God. Moreover, there can be only one being whose essence is identical to its existence and is perfect in the absolute rather than relative sense. Classical theists hold that monotheism is a metaphysical necessity, not just a contingent happenstance.

Another commitment of classical theists is that they are real essentialists. They believe things have mind-independent essences (natures), individuated within them. This means classical theists reject nominalism, insofar as nominalism denies any conceptual space for sameness outside strict identity. Furthermore, classical theists are moral realists, grounding ethical truths in the fact that some natures are inherently, at least partially, normative. For example, being a dog inherently means being the kind of thing that should have four legs. This allows us to say that a three-legged dog, though defective, is still a dog—which intuitively seems correct (and, of course, it doesn’t mean the dog isn’t cute or lovable!).

Building on this, one can see why classical theists call God good—and, moreover, why God's goodness is identical to God Himself. It’s tied to His pure actuality, where His essence is identical to His existence. Let me explain. Classical theists don't conclude that God is good by considering how "nice" He is or by tallying good and bad events in the universe to see if the balance tilts toward benevolence. Instead, they adhere to the theory of transcendentals, which holds that goodness is nothing more than being, viewed under the aspect of perfection or desirability. Something is good to the extent that it actualizes certain relevant potentials necessary to be an excellent instance of its kind (e.g., a dog that has all four legs or a human acting rationally). If this theory is correct, then it follows necessarily that God, as pure actuality, with no unrealized potential or higher state of perfection to achieve, just is pure goodness as well. For classical theists, God just is the form of The Good.

Classical theists likewise subscribe to a privation theory of evil, where evil is not a positive entity but rather a deficiency in being where something is due. For example, it’s not evil for a rock to be blind because rocks aren’t meant to see, but it is evil (in a broad sense) for a human to be blind, because humans are meant to see. Moral evil extends this concept to rational beings: moral evil occurs when someone fails to consider a rule necessary for their flourishing, based on the kind of being they are, when making a judgment. The evil lies in the lack of proper consideration—something that should have been there but wasn’t.³

What classical theists say about God’s other attributes (which are ultimately identical to God’s essence, and God’s essence is identical to God) doesn’t begin with arbitrary definitions of omnipotence or omniscience, followed by debates about whether these definitions are intrinsically coherent or logically compatible. Instead, these attributes are inferred—and conceptually constrained—through the same “bottom-up,” effect-to-cause reasoning used to infer that God’s essence is His existence. For example, God is called omnipotent because any possible being must ultimately be actualized by God. If something cannot be actualized by God, it simply isn’t a possible being, as it cannot receive actuality. Therefore, God can bring about all possible beings, which is why He is called omnipotent. This doesn’t mean that God can do anything, like swim in a lake of cheese. This doesn’t mean that God can do anything, like swim in a lake of cheese. As an immaterial being, God obviously can’t swim in a lake of cheese, but that has little to do with the classical theistic understanding of omnipotence, which relates to production.

The point of this little exposition is to show that what classical theists say about God arises from broader, traditional metaphysical commitments (such as constituent ontology, immanent realism, the act-potency distinction, etc.), in conjunction with a natural theology that seeks the necessary underlying condition to ultimately explain and stabilize these commitments. Admittedly, the claims of classical theism regarding God can seem rather strange, especially when abstracted from this underlying metaphysical system—or worse, when assumed to be embedded within an alternative paradigm. In such cases, classical theism can often appear outright incoherent—such as when Plantinga suggests that divine simplicity turns God into a property or abstract object—but this is only because it’s being judged by metaphysical assumptions that classical theists would never accept. In other words, to understand classical theism correctly, it is essential to grasp the system from which it has traditionally emerged.

Of course, I believe there are enormous theoretical advantages to being a classical theist, which requires embracing the entire philosophical system. For one, I am quite convinced that only classical theism can reduce brute facts to zero, fully satisfying the principle of sufficient reason or intelligibility (see chapter 4 in my book). I definitely don’t think simply claiming that God is a perfect being is enough to achieve this, unless you arrive at God’s perfection through His simplicity first. And I certainly—certainly—don’t believe any form of naturalism can succeed in providing a fundamental theoretical entity that explains everything, including itself.

In my opinion, the best feature of being a classical theist—and what ultimately drew me to Thomism (or Big Tent Platonism)—is how everything coheres. There’s a systematic harmony to it all. For the classical theist, what is said in metaphysics is deeply connected to what is said in ethics, philosophical anthropology, and epistemology. Everything is interrelated, and, in my view, it all works remarkably well. The same constituent ontology that explains the nature of familiar objects—how they endure through time, persist through change, and how certain parts (like an animal’s organs) are whole-dependent (deriving their nature from the organism’s form)—also provides a teleological basis for grounding ethical truths. And it is the entire framework which ultimately leads to the necessity of a being that is in no way composed: the absolutely simple first principle of everything—God.

Moreover, I believe each of the systematic components of classical theism represents the best ideas philosophy has to offer. It’s not as if I think, “Classical theists are committed to moderate realism, which is swell, but if only I could be a consequentialist—then this system would really have it all!” No—classical theism already has everything, precisely because it is either the consequence or constitutive of Perennial (true!) Philosophy, which as Lloyd Gerson argues, is necessary for the very possibility of philosophy itself.⁴ I believe real essentialism is correct, virtue ethics and natural law theory are correct, and the metaphysics of good and evil are correct. It’s not just that everything fits together for the classical theist—what fits is also the best available. This, I submit, stands in stark contrast to the garbled, patchwork, and often contrived philosophical “systems” of today, where it is rarely clear how commitments in one area align with those in another. In fact, it’s often evident that they don’t align at all (for instance, how moral realism is supposed to fit with nominalism—something that certain non-classical theists and many naturalists affirm simultaneously).

Are there challenges to classical theism? Of course. But in my view, all the challenges—whether they concern modal collapse or charges of incoherence regarding something being identical to its existence—can and have been ably addressed.⁵ Many objections often misunderstand (or entirely overlook) crucial aspects of the broader metaphysical system from which these commitments about God arise, and within which there are adequate, non-adhoc solutions. For example, Aristotelian action theory, the distinction between active and passive potency, the partly extrinsic nature of knowledge, the thick (rather than thin) conception of existence, and the principle of analogy all play vital roles in resolving these issues. (See the appendix in The Best  Argument for God where I work through a considerable number of objections to classic theism).

I’m not saying all challenges to classical theism are easy to think through, but after many years of reflection, I find that the most difficult thing a classical theist must accept is some form of “spooky mystery” (which is to be expected, given God’s radical transcendence)—but never outright incoherence or contradiction. This is far more than can be said of other systems. I believe—really and truly!—that both theistic personalism and naturalism face insuperable difficulties, ultimately falling prey to brute unintelligibility and becoming almost hopelessly unsystematic if not outright inconsistent in their various philosophical commitments. But I’ll leave those critiques for another time.

For now, I hope to have clarified a bit of what it means to identify as a classical theist: it’s a claim about an entire system (or it should be, anyway!)—a comprehensive philosophical perspective that entails certain beliefs about God, including, but not limited to, divine simplicity. These beliefs may seem strange, spooky, or weird to some, but they make a lot of sense when viewed within the philosophical system from which they emerge. Of course, this post has been primarily reporting these positions, rather than motivating them, so I’ll once again point to The Best Argument for God for those seeking a deeper exploration and defense of (at least some of) these views.⁶

P.S. If you enjoyed the content of this article, then I draw your attention to this recent announcement:

1. And this theory of existence is motivated in part as a solution to perennial philosophical issues, like The One and the Many.

2. That is, where existence is a real, first-level property of contingent concrete beings, distinct (in an extra-conceptual, extra-linguistic sense) from their essence, and it is that by which a thing and all its properties have any actuality at all. Which is to say, classical theists hold to a thick conception of existence but a thin conception of essence (bounded to bound).

3. Classical theists are also largely unbothered by the logical problem of evil. Why is this? Because many versions of this problem of evil present “moral requirements” they claim God violates in how He creates and governs the world, thus suggesting God is imperfect and thus not God. But this assumes that God is under a moral law, as we are. Classical theists shrug this off as a category mistake, since, within their theory, the moral law—for us, anyway—is determined by our nature, which is human nature. God, however, does not have a human nature; He is the reason there is human nature at all. So, God is no more subject to moral law than He is to physical law; rather, He is the necessary condition for either to exist.

For whatever it’s worth, I do not believe that what has just been said leaves us completely in the dark about the kind of world God would create, nor does it prevent us from offering a successful theodicy—as in an adequate explanation of suffering in relation to God’s providence (I present such a theodicy in my book). While I don’t think we should “assess” God’s character solely based on moral considerations relevant to humans, classical theists hold to other principles, such as the idea that goodness is naturally self-diffusive or self-communicative, and the principle of plenitude. As I argue in The Best Argument for God, these principles strongly anticipate a world like ours—one with immense variety and a hierarchy of different types and grades of beings, ultimately culminating in the human person as a microcosm within the macrocosm, whom God intends to bring into union with Himself. I even contend that something like the incarnation and atonement are anticipated within this framework, which means classical theism pre-empts something like Christianity—rather beautifully, I think. 

4. See Platonism and Naturalism.

Another way to think about what I’m saying here, just borrowing from Gerson: people are classical theists because they are Big Tent Platonists. They think perennial philosophy works, because it is true. The God of classical theism is simply the ultimate, inevitable ontological source and explanatory anchor of that entire system, a system which thoroughly rejects mechanism, skepticism, relativism, reductionism, and nominalism.

5. See Barry Miller’s A Most Unlikely God, for example.

6. Another way to think about it: people are classical theists because they are (to borrow from Lloyd Gerson) Big Tent Platonists. They think perennial philosophy works, because it is true. The God of classical theism is simply the ultimate, inevitable ontological source and explanatory anchor of that entire system, a system which thoroughly rejects mechanism, skepticism, relativism, reductionism, and nominalism.