Thinking about God ‐ A response to Patrick McGrath

Extract

In his article ‘Professor Geach and the Future’ (New Blackfriars, Vol. 54, No. 642, Nov. 1973), Patrick McGrath depicts what any non-academically inclined Christian must read as a bleak situation. He says that ‘if God knows everything that will happen, there is no room for free will. If he does not, he cannot be infinite and unchanging’. The upshot of this is that ‘a great deal of hard thinking on the character of the divine attributes is required from theologians, philosophers and scripture scholars’. What are the implications of this, and ought they to be accepted?

Clearly McGrath has his finger on some problems. To say that God is omniscient, and to maintain at the same time that he is changeless, looks on the face of it like a contradiction. It may, at least, appear to be something approaching one. To affirm that God comes to know things and to add that he is changeless seems likewise open to objection. Furthermore, it goes against the grain for thinking people, and, because of special reasons, for Catholics in particular, to deny the need for research, discussion and debate in religion. Unless we are prepared to refuse tolerantly to consider the fruits of experience and scholarship, or unless we are prepared to abandon the notion of an historical, teaching Church, so much seems a sine qua non. McGrath’s article is, however, disturbing. For, assuming (as seems natural) that most Christians are committed to the belief that, on certain occasions at least, human actions can be free and that God is immutable and omniscient, it reflects a regrettable tendency which many must now recognize as perennial. The tendency in question leans towards the view that the average theist or Christian needs to wait on the findings of certain academics for the right to give his complete assent to certain beliefs about God.