Tag Archives: attributes of God

Who Made God? (Again)

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

If God created everything, then who created God?

The Christian answer to this question is that nobody created God because He is the one self-existent, uncaused, uncreated, eternal Being. Only things that come into existence need a cause, but God never came into existence. He has always existed and will always exist.

It is impossible for God not to exist.  While the universe and everything in it came into existence, and therefore all need a cause, God is the only Being that exists necessarily and eternally.

To ask a Christian who made God, then, is to ask who made the un-made or who created the un-created. It’s a nonsense question.

#2 Post of 2013 – If God Cannot Change, Then Why Should We Pray?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

The Bible teaches, and theology argues, that God cannot change. This is called divine immutability. But if God cannot change, then why do we pray to him? After all, when we pray, aren’t we trying to change God’s mind?

Norm Geisler answers this question in his Systematic Theology, Volume Two: God, Creation. Listen to what he says:

God is omniscient . . . , and an all-knowing Being cannot change His mind. If He does, He is not really all-knowing. Therefore, God cannot change His mind in answer to prayer.

When we pray (or have prayed), God not only knew what we were going to pray, but He ordained our prayer as a means of accomplishing His purpose. Prayer is not a means by which we change God; it is a means by which God changes us.

Prayer is not a means of our overcoming God’s reluctance; it is a way for God to take hold of our willingness. Prayer is not a means of getting our will done in heaven, but a means of God getting His will done on earth.

If you think about it for a minute, we don’t want to change God’s mind anyway. After all, who knows what is best? Us or God? Geisler reminds us of why we should rejoice in the fact that God is immutable:

Since God is unchangeable, we can trust His Word: “God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?” (Num. 23:19).

Also, we can trust God’s promises completely: “In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. Like clothing you will change them and they will be discarded. But you remain the same, and your years will never end” (Ps. 102:25–27).

Further, we can be sure of our salvation, because “if we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself” (2 Tim. 2:13). What is more, God’s immutability provides an anchor for our souls: “Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged” (Heb. 6:17–18).

Finally, we have a stable foundation for service. Paul wrote, “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58).

God is unchanging and we can all give praise for that. I don’t know about you, but I would have a hard time worshiping a God whose mind I could change.

Why Do You Need to Understand the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity?

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

One of my favorite writers these days is Edward Feser. He has a unique way of explaining the most complex concepts about theology and philosophy in ways that laypeople can understand. I was reading a blog post he wrote that explains why the doctrine of divine simplicity is so important.

Feser begins:

At the core of classical theism is the notion of divine simplicity — the idea that God is non-composite or without parts.  This is a doctrine having its philosophical roots in Plato and Aristotle and defended by pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers as diverse as Philo of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius, Plotinus, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, Aquinas, and Scotus.  The doctrine is the de fide teaching of the Catholic Church and is endorsed by many Protestant theologians.  The point of all this name-dropping is to emphasize how absolutely central the doctrine of divine simplicity is to the mainstream Western tradition in philosophical theology.

Feser is pointing out that divine simplicity, the idea that God is not composed of parts, has a deep philosophical history among the greatest thinkers of the past 2,500 years. So why is it so important that God doesn’t have parts, that he is simple?

The reason is that for the classical theist, whatever else we mean by “God,” we certainly mean by that label to name the ultimate source, cause, or explanation of things.  Properly to understand classical theism, the hostile atheist reader might even find it useful to put the word “God” out of his mind for the moment — given all the irrelevant associations the word might lead him to read into the present discussion — and just think instead of “the ultimate source of things.”  The classical theist maintains that whatever is in any way composed of parts cannot be the ultimate source of things.  For wherever we have a composite thing, a thing made up of parts, we have something that requires a cause of its own, a cause which accounts for how the parts get together.

Feser backs this point up from our everyday observations of the world:

This is obviously true of the ordinary things of our experience.  For example, a given chair exists only because there is something (a carpenter, or a machine) that assembled the legs, seat, etc. into a chair.  And the chair continues to exist only insofar as certain combining factors — such as the tackiness of glue or friction between screw threads — continue to operate.  The point applies also to things whose composition is less crudely mechanical.  A water molecule depends for its existence on the oxygen and hydrogen atoms that make it up together with the principles of covalent bonding.

So why must God be simple? Anything composed of parts must have had a composer, but we are looking for the being that has no composer, that is uncomposed. So the ultimate source, cause, or explanation of things cannot be composed by a composer.

Any doctrine of God which denies his simplicity, then, will fall prey to the Dawkins question, “Who designed the Designer?” A simple God needs no designer, but a God composed of parts does.

Introduction to Classical Christian Metaphysics – Part 5

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 4 we introduced being and goodness. In part 5 we analyze ultimate being, or what Christians call God.

As metaphysics is the study of being, the question arises: what is ultimate being?  Aquinas reasoned that given any change in the world (a movement from potency to act), there must exist a being who is changeless, who is pure actuality with no potency.  Joseph Owens summarizes the argument:

Every sensible thing . . . has its being from something else. . . . Its nature, prior to the reception of being from an efficient cause, has no existence at all.  Its nature, accordingly, cannot produce its own being.  Its being is caused efficiently by an agent other than itself.  If that agent in turn exists through an act of being that is accidental and prior to its own nature, it will similarly depend upon another agent for its proper being.  It will be a caused cause, in the order of efficient causality.

The series of causes will have to continue.  Even an infinite regression of these caused causes, however, would not account for the least being in the world.  In every instance and in all the instances together there would be only nature that contained no being, nature that merely remained open to receive being from something else. There would be an infinite series of existential zeros. . . . This means that for any series of efficiently caused causes there is a first cause.  It is first in the sense that it does not have its being from anything else.

Thus Aquinas concludes that “it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.”

From God existing as pure actuality, reason leads us to several other attributes of God.  “Since being is the act of all acts and the perfection of all perfections, where it subsists it will be perfection in the highest degree. . . . It therefore contains within itself the perfections of all other things.”

From pure actuality and from the perfections deduced from observation of the world, we reason that God must be immutable, immaterial, eternal, intelligent, volitional, morally perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, simple, omnisapient, and so forth.  God is the greatest conceivable being.

With the conclusion of this 5-part series, we have introduced a handful of basic concepts from classical Christian metaphysics. Armed with act and potency, form and matter, the four causes, being and goodness, and, most importantly, God as ultimate being, we can now construct a foundation for Christian ethics. That is the task we take up in another blog post series.

Does God Know What I Will Freely Do? Part 2

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Yesterday, I posted on the issue of free will and God’s knowledge of of human free acts in the future.  This is an area the church has grappled with for centuries.  But how do other major worldviews deal with this issue?

Most atheists think they can avoid the issue by denying that God (or divine fate) exists.  Unfortunately, once you banish an ultimate mind as the source of the universe, you are only left with impersonal physical laws operating on matter and energy.

So free will, for the atheist, is just an illusion that our highly evolved brain gives us.  Fundamentally, we are completely determined in our actions and choices by chemistry and physics, by the mechanistic movement of atomic particles .  Free will, under atheism, does not exist.  So the atheist does not really solve the problem of fate and free will.  He just rids us of both, thus denying that the problem is real.

Monistic Pantheists argue that all of earthly life is just an illusion, that we are actually part of one ultimate, impersonal being.  When we realize that we are part of this one ultimate being, the illusion of our individual lives ends as we merge with the ultimate being.

In this sense, our individual free will is also an illusion because we, ourselves, are an illusion.  The only thing that really exists is this ultimate, impersonal being.  Their solution to the problem is to affirm divine fate at the complete expense of human free will or even true human existence.

Oddly enough, even though the theistic God seems to cause problems with the existence of human free will, without a personal God, free will cannot exist!

The Christian concept of God allows for mind to precede and transcend matter, which allows human free will to exist, in opposition to atheism (who only believe matter exists).

Christians also recognize that individual people exist apart from God, in opposition to pantheism.  The concept of human free will cannot exist without individual humans truly existing.  This the Pantheists deny.

Even though we Christians struggle with this doctrine, as do other theistic religions, at the end of the day a personal God is the best ground and source for free will.  Get rid of God, and free will quickly vanishes.

Does God Know What I Will Freely Do? Part 1

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Some people get hung up on the idea that God can know, for sure, what I will freely do in the future.  Their argument goes something like this:  if whatever God knows will certainly occur (as virtually all Christians agree), then either I am not free to act or God does not know what free acts I will perform in the future.

Some Christians take one horn of the dilemma and claim that humans are not really free because human free will would spell the end of God’s infallible knowledge and sovereignty over all creation.  They severely throttle back the meaning of free will to the point that most people would not recognize it any more.  These folks understand humans to be far more similar to animals, operating on instincts, impulses, and desires – all properties that God exercises direct control over.

Others grab the second horn of the dilemma and claim that God does not really know what free creatures will do in the future.  At best, he is making educated guesses, but he cannot know, for sure, what humans will do.  The future free acts of humans are unknown, even to God, until they are actually executed.

I, and most traditional Christians, reject both of these positions.  The Bible seems to clearly teach that God does infallibly know the future, including all free acts that will be performed, and that humans possess a robust free will.  Admittedly, it is difficult to hold these two concepts without tension, but Christian theologians have always done so.

Do we know precisely how God’s infallible knowledge of future free acts coordinates with human free will?  No, I don’t think so.  We always run into the intractable problem of an infinite being interacting with finite creatures.  God knows everything we will do and we are free to do those things, but I don’t think we can ever explain exactly how it works.  There is a mystery to it, but there is no contradiction.

It isn’t just Christians that have had to deal with this issue.  Throughout history, great thinkers have struggled with the seeming paradox of fate and freedom.  If all things are decreed as part of an unchangeable fate, then how is it that we humans are free to do anything?  Rather than toss one of these notions aside, many thinkers have proposed solutions to retain both realities – that some sort of divine fate exists along with human free will.  Two viewpoints – atheism and pantheism – have found other ways around the problem.

Check back tomorrow to see if their worldviews better deal with this problem.

Why Should We Trust God?

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

There are many passages in the Bible that speak to this issue, but I want to explain it in simple theological terms.

First, God is omnibenevolent (all-good).  That means that he desires our highest welfare.

Second, he is omniscient (all-knowing).  That means he knows everything that is possible to know.  He has all the information he needs about us – our past, present, and future.

Third, he is omnisapient (all-wise).  Wisdom refers to God’s unerring ability to choose the best means to accomplish the best ends in our lives.  He makes no mistakes.

Fourth, he is omnipotent (all-powerful).  He has the power to accomplish the best ends for your life by the best means for your life.

With these four attributes, you, as a believer, can completely trust in God.  He desires your best, he knows what you need, he knows the best way to accomplish it, and he has the power to make sure it happens!

Rest assured in God, because there is nobody else like him.

Are There Things God Does Not Know?

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Christians believe that God is omniscient, which means that God knows everything—past, present, and future.  In addition, he knows the actual and the possible; only the impossible (the contradictory) is unknown to God, as the logically contradictory is unknowable to anyone.

But there are passages in the Bible that seem to indicate that God is ignorant of certain facts and that he needs to discover them.  One of the best examples is in Gen. 18:20-33, where Abraham bargains with God to save people in Sodom.  God says that he “will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached [him]” (Gen. 18:21).  If this verse is taken in a strictly literal sense, it indicates that God does not know how bad is Sodom without first visiting himself.

So how do we deal with passages like this?  The answer is that we must always interpret any passage in light of all the other texts in the Bible.  They must all integrate together and they cannot contradict each other.

Reading the rest of the Bible, we discover a multitude of verses that speak of God’s unlimited knowledge.  Consider Job 37:16, which says,  “Do you know how the clouds hang poised, those wonders of him who is perfect in knowledge?”  In Ps. 139, David speaks of God’s knowing everything about him, even his words before he speaks them.  In Psalm 147, the writer proclaims that God’s “understanding has not limit.”

God announces things to men before they ever occur (Is. 42:9).  Jesus teaches that God knows every person’s needs before they ever ask (Matt. 6:8).  Every hair on your head is numbered (Matt. 10:30).  Paul proclaims the “depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God” (Rom. 11:33).  The writer of Hebrews reminds us that “nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight” (Heb. 4:13).

There is a strong theme of God’s unlimited knowledge running throughout the Bible.  So, if we understand the Genesis 18 passage to be teaching that God does not know what is happening in Sodom, we run head-long into contradiction.  How can the God who knows every hair on every person’s head not know what’s going on in Sodom?

The answer is fairly simple.  Students of the Bible have traditionally understood passages like Genesis 18 to be anthropomorphic in nature.  This means that the passage is written from a human perspective, rather than a divine perspective.  God already knows how many wicked people are in Sodom, but he wants to teach Abraham something about the wickedness of the people.  God must speak to human beings in terms they can understand, so he sometimes asks questions and expresses uncertainty to elicit appropriate human responses.

Recognizing anthropomorphisms in the Bible is extremely important.  The person who claims that passages like Genesis 18 must be taken literally is knocking an infinite God down to a finite creature.  In addition, once you deny the presence of anthropomorphic language in the Bible, you must admit that God has wings, arms, and eyes; that he repents and forgets things.  The list could go on.  The Bible, like any other literature, employs figurative and metaphorical language.  Failure to recognize this leads a reader into all kinds of serious problems.

Does God Need Anything?

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Christians believe that God is completely self-sufficient, that he is complete within himself.  There is nothing that God needs that he doesn’t already have.  The quote below, from A. W. Tozer in The Knowledge of the Holy,  summarizes the point extremely well.

To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being.  Need is a creature-word and cannot be spoken of the Creator.  God has a voluntary relation to everything He has made, but He has no necessary relation to anything outside of Himself.  His interest in His creatures arises from His sovereign good pleasure, not from any need those creatures can supply nor from any completeness they can bring to Him who is complete in Himself.

Practically speaking, it is a serious error to think that humanity is somehow providing God assistance that he needs to accomplish his tasks.  God may use human beings to complete certain tasks, but he never needs them.  He allows them to participate with him in the affairs of the world, but only out of his good pleasure.  Whenever humans start to think they are indispensable to God, a prideful fall is sure to follow.