Handout: Nature of God

by admin2015

December 1, 2012

Hartshorne’s view of limited omniscience

Charles Hartshorne, followign the insights of AN Whitehead (so-called process theology) sees God as having a peculiar kind of qualified omniscience. God’s mind perfectly knows what is happening and has happened. It knows all about the present and the past. But, contrary to what both versions of the Traditional View hold, God does not know all about the future.

Hartshorne (1984) rejects complete divine knowledge of the future for two connected reasons: (1) The future is not yet entirely determined, according to him; so how could anyone have complete knowledge of it? (2) God’s mind is not the ultimate source of all decisions: beings other than God, such as you and I, make choices independent of God’s plans. (If we couldn’t do this, Hartshorne believes, our actions would not be free and we would never be responsible for them.) Now, if God does not entirely make the future, He cannot be entirely sure what it will be.

Hartshorne argues that divine foreknowledge does not follow from omniscience unless it can be shown that divine foreknowledge is possible. But divine foreknowledge is not possible unless future events exist, as fully determinate, to be known. Hartshorne denies that future events exist in this sense (1960:604). More precisely:

“The future is irreducibly potential rather than actual, and this means in some degree, however slight, indeterminate rather than determinate. Becoming is the passage from incomplete definiteness to definiteness. It is creation” (MTG 30).

God is omniscient, on Hartshorne’s view, but “omniscience” here refers to the divine ability to know everything that is knowable: past things that happened as already come to pass; present realities to the extent that they are knowable according to the laws of physics (eg, what is present may very well be the most recent past, given the speed of light); and future possibilities or probabilities as possibilities or probabilities. On the traditional conception of omniscience, however, God has knowledge of future possibilities or probabilities as things which have already occurred.

According to Hartshorne, this is not an example of supreme knowledge, but is rather an example of ignorance of the (at least partially) indeterminate character of the future.

Q. Can God’s timelessness (in the traditional view) be reconciled with his activity in the world (for example, miracles?).

Further: wku.edu

An article by Donald Viney explores William Craig’s attack on Hartshorne’s view.

Omnibenevolence

God’s judgment at the end of time is strongly suggested by Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats, the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16) and the revelation of God’s character in Exodus 34 “who will by no means spare the guilty’. In Jesus’ story the goats, who have not helped the least of all those in need, are destined to eternal fire reserved for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25). Somehow God’s attribute of love needs to be reconciled with the attribute of justice and holiness. But again some questions are raised by this idea.

Is the punishment fair? Is it proportionate to the crime?
Is love compatible with punishment?
Why does evil continue to exist?

The Bible suggests God rewards and punishes on the basis of God’s love and justice. Adam and Eve sinned against God and they were punished by exclusion from the garden, and the curses of toil for the mana and pain in childbirth for the woman. But not just for this man and woman – but every man and woman ever born, who had nothing to do with the original crime.

In the Book of Amos it is God’s love for his chosen people which singles them out for punishment. ‘For you alone have I cared among all the nations of the world; therefore will I punish you for all your iniquities’ (Amos 3:2, NEB translation). Suffering is thus received as a token of God’s special concern for Israel. Indeed, some Jewish theologians have come to understand the HOLOCAUST as God’s judgement on a world that has forgotten God.

Punishment as judgement on a chosen people

This is an extract from a fascinating article on Jewish perceptions of the profound evil of the Holocaust:

An example of how the idea of God’s judgement is used to explain the Holocaust, consider Elchanan Wasserman (1875-1941), one of the leading rabbis of the pre- war generation. His writings, speeches, life and martyrdom offer a paradigm of the orthodox theology of suffering. Wasserman visited the United States in 1938, and was there when the news of Kristallnacht arrived. He was dismayed by the lack of Torah learning and observance amongst the Jews he met in America, and there he completed, in Yiddish, his booklet ‘In the footsteps of the Messiah’, in which he predicts that dire destruction will come upon the Jewish people on account of its lack of faith and its laxity in the observance of God’s commandments.

Gershon Greenberg, in a paper on Wasserman has summed up his view as: “Reform [of the authentic revealed
tradition] is responsible. It, along with the suffering it evokes, is now pressing eastward. The response must be education to engender faith and Torah”. Wasserman blames religious and cultural assimilation and denunciation of Torah. The response called for is the same for both leaders. For some Rabbis, Torah and faith are means to endure the suffering, to turn the catastrophe back, and to bring redemption. Wasserman believes the catastrophe is the birth pain of the Messiah and man’s role is to turn to God through Torah.

Similar views are nowadays commonplace in orthodox writing, and have even received popular expression, as in Benjamin Maza’s With God’s Fury Poured Out (1984). To understand the rabbis who spoke in this way it is necessary to know how deeply they felt the gulf between the ideal demanded by Torah and the reality of modem secular civilization.

‘It is clear beyond all doubt that the blessed Holy One is the ruler of the universe, and we must accept the judgment with love’.

These words of the Hungarian Rabbi Ungar exactly express the simple faith of those who entered the gas chambers with Ani Ma’amin (the declaration of faith as formulated by Maimonides) or Shema Israel (Deut 6:4-9, declaring God’s unity and the duty to love him and obey his commandments – it is read daily at the morning and evening services and forms part of the death bed confession) on their lips. What was happening defied their understanding, but their faith triumphed over evil and they were ready, in the traditional phrase, to ‘sanctify the name of God’ – kiddush Hashem. Hence it is normal amongst Jews to refer to those who perished under the Nazis as kedoshim, ‘holy ones, saints’.

The concept of ‘dying for kiddush Hashem’ is analogous to that of martyrdom. It is applied to those killed because of their faith even where they had no choice. Its use is extended to those killed not because of their faith but, as in the Shoah, because of their ‘race’.

Other Jewish thinkers have rejected this interpretation. For them, the holocaust was an act of evil people. Such people will always exist in a world that has been given genuine freedom. For them, God’s just punishment for wickedness is tempered in the Bible by God’s love and forgiveness.

In traditional Christian belief this punishment of death is inherited by every human being. But, importantly, God provides a way back through faith in Christ who died to take the punishment of Adam and Eve on our behalf “the righteous for the unrighteous to bring us to God” (I Peter 3:18), so that human beings are once more restored to a relationship with God. God is defined in the New Testament as unconditional love. God will not stop loving human beings whatever they do. So, God sends his only Son to take God’s own punishment, meant for us, on Himself so that in Christ all human beings may be redeemed. In the death of Jesus on the cross, “he was bruised for our sin” (Isaiah 53) and the punishment that was due to us was laid on him.

Should God, who is perfectly good and loving, punish anyone?

Love is a central attribute of God in both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. In the Torah, God reveals himself as “abounding in love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6). The word hesed in Hebrew is translated loyalty, loving-kindness, mercy and occurs over 120 times in the Old Testament. The prime meaning is covenant love, a commitment which cannot be broken – it is an attitude rather than a feeling, an attitude which include a loyalty and unconditional commitment.

I the New Testament John announces boldly that “God so loved the world he gave his only Son that whoever believe in Him should not perish” (John 3:16). The letter of John proclaims “God is love”. Peter explains: “it is not God’s will that any should perish but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Universalists believe everyone is saved irrespective of their beliefs. But traditionally Christians believe that God’s holiness demands justice – that sinners must be punished to show the gravity of sin. In the Hebrew Bible, Moses kills the people who worshipped the golden calf, and Elijah orders the slaughter of the prophets of Baal: in the New Testament, Jesus teaches eleven times of a hell like Gehenna, the place of everlasting fire for those who do not do the will of God and urges us to “fear Him who has the power to cast into Gehenna” (Luke 12:5).

God’s goodness seems to demand two things:

A person has the real freedom to choose to be wicked.
People are treated fairly; this would entail that people who are wicked are indeed punished and people who experience lives full of suffering for which they are not to blame are appropriately compensated, as in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) which echoes the parable of the sheep and the goats.

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’ He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house– for I have five brothers – that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'”

Kant argued that the rational moral law requires the postulate of God’s existence to ensure the correct proportioning of happiness to virtue (the SUMMUM BONUM). But this is arguably the weakest part of Kant’s moral philosophy and seemed to undermine his main point that moral action is done for its own sake without the need for an incentive in the afterlife.

Nevertheless, many Christian philosophers from Aquinas to Swinburne have argued that the goodness of God is nothing without the justice of God. The justice of God requires reward for the good and punishment for the wicked. Aquinas, for example, quotes Anselm in arguing “Justice, therefore, in God is sometimes spoken of as the fitting accompaniment of His goodness; sometimes as the reward of merit. Anselm touches on either view where he says (Prosolog. 10): “When Thou dost punish the wicked, it is just, since it agrees with their deserts; and when Thou dost spare the wicked it is also just; since it befits Thy goodness.” (ST I Q21) However, Aquinas qualifies this by saying that God is PASSIONLESS (he cannot feel in the sense that we do), and so is not motivated by a sense of pity but by the attribute of absolute goodness.

“To sorrow, therefore, over the misery of others belongs not to God but it does most properly belong to Him to dispel that misery”. (St I Q21).

It is not that God sets out to punish people but that he gives people a choice. If they want punishment they can choose it by acting wickedly. Freedom, according to Swinburne, only makes sense if there are genuine consequences that follow from our choices. A loving God would not punish people out of spite. Punishment is a necessary feature of genuine freedom. God offers people a choice of good and evil. Those who choose evil are also choosing punishment because evil choices, like good choices, have genuine consequences.

However, Swinburne also believes that God takes into account bad circumstances which may influence us to do evil, such as poverty, lack of education, homelessness, or abusive parents.

“If there are any lives which nevertheless are on balance bad, God would be under an obligation to provide life after death for the individuals concerned in which they could be compensated for the bad states of this life, so that in this life and the next their lives overall would be good…Thus God treats us as individuals, each with her own vocation”. (Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil)

Why does evil continue?

To many people it is not just the presence of moral and natural evil, but the scale of it. Over 40m people died as a consequence of Hitler’s plans for world domination; millions are ravaged by the AIDS virus which is still killing one third of babies born of AIDS infected parents; Tsunamis continue to wipe out towns and villages causing death and suffering on a huge scale. We consider this question in detail in the section on the problem of evil, but as already hinted by the brief discussion on holocaust theology, there are a number of different interpretations even of evil as monstrous as genocide.

Can God’s perfect love be reconciled with his perfect justice (and wrath and judgement)?

Conclusion: a radical change in the understanding of God’s nature

Modern theology has produced interpretations of God’s nature radically different for the traditional view of Aquinas and Augustine. Modern views see God as a complex being, within time, the suffering God of Barth and Bonhoeffer. Traditional views see God as simple, changeless, the God outside of time and impassive (without feeling). These modern re-interpretations change our conception of God, for example, by reducing his omnipotence and omniscience. The differences are summed up in the table below. Do they reject so much of the traditional idea of God, that we are being asked to believe in a different God altogether?

Traditional (Aquinas, Augustine)	Modern views of God (Whitehead, Hartshorne)
Absolute (God’s nature never changes)	Relative (his nature expresses itself in different ways in history)
Actuality – everything has been realised perfectly.	Potentiality (not everything is realised). the future is about probabilities and potential – the future is not linear with one predetermined development.
Necessity (God’s nature is a necessary part of his essence)	Necessity and contingency, some attributes are contingent eg knowledge of the future.
Omnipotence limited by logical necessity e.g. God can’t make a round circle square.	Omnipotence is limited by lack of foreknowledge.
God is passionless – he does not feel.	God suffers with us – God feels.
God is outside time, looking down.	God is within time, looking forward.

Extract: Boethius on eternity, Consolations V

Eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite life. This will appear more clearly if we compare it with temporal things. All that lives under the conditions of time moves through the present from the past to the future; there is nothing set in time which can at one moment grasp the whole space of its lifetime. It cannot yet comprehend to-morrow; yesterday it has already lost. And in this life of today your life is no more than a changing, passing moment. And as Aristotle said of the universe, so it is of all that is subject to time; though it never began to be, nor
will ever cease, and its life is co-extensive with the infinity of time, yet it is not such as can be held to be eternal. For though it apprehends and grasps a space of infinite lifetime, it does not embrace the whole simultaneously; it has not yet experienced the future. What we should rightly call eternal is that which grasps and possesses wholly and simultaneously the fulness of unending life, which lacks naught of the future, and has lost naught of the fleeting past; and such an existence must be ever present in itself to control and aid itself, and also must keep present with itself the infinity of changing time. Therefore, people who hear that Plato thought that this universe had no beginning of time and will have no end, are not right in thinking that in this way the created world is co-eternal with its creator. For to pass through unending life, the attribute which Plato ascribes to the universe is one thing; but it is another thing to
grasp simultaneously the whole of unending life in the present; this is plainly a peculiar property of the mind of God.

If Providence sees an event in its present, that thing must be, though it has no necessity of its own nature. And God looks in His present upon those future things which come to pass through free will. Therefore if these things be looked at from the point of view of God’s insight, they come to pass of necessity under the condition of divine knowledge; if, on the other hand, they are viewed by themselves, they do not lose the perfect freedom of their nature. Without doubt, then, all things that God foreknows do come to pass, but some of them proceed from free will; and though they result by coming into existence, yet they do not lose their own nature, because beforethey came to pass they could also not have come to pass.