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Can God be Both Perfect and Free?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

David R. Mason
David R. Mason
Affiliation:
Professor of Religious Studies, John Carroll University
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Extract

The difficulty of ascribing metaphysical predicates such as absoluteness, necessity and perfection to God while simultaneously ascribing personal predicates such as compassion, freedom and agency has often been noted. Most efforts to resolve this dilemma have tended to fall into one of three categories: (I) a merely verbal solution such as that God is ‘compassionate in terms of our experience but…not so in terms of [God's] own’; (2) the univocal and unqualified ascription of the metaphysical predicates to God coupled with equivocation with respect to the personal predicates which results in the final elimination of the latter; (3) the fideistic denial that intelligible language is applicable to God. Unfortunately, none of these is satisfactory. The first solution is seen to be but a version of the second, and it is arguable that the second is, as Feuerbach contends, tantamount to a ‘subtle, disguised atheism’, since ‘to deny all the qualities of a being is equivalent to denying the being himself’ or, alternatively, ‘an existence in general, an existence without qualities, is an insipidity, an absurdity’. The third ‘solution’ is no better and is hardly more than an evasive tactic.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 191 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

page 191 note 2 Anselm, St, Proslogium, translated by Sidney Norton, Deane B. A. (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1958), p. 13.Google Scholar

page 191 note 3 Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity, translated by Eliot, George, introduced by Barth, Karl with a foreword by Niebuhr, H. Richard (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), pp. 15 and 14.Google Scholar

page 191 note 4 Ogden, Schubert M.., The Reality of God and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 26.Google Scholar For a good example of the atheistic attack on the fideist position see Nielsen, Kai, ‘Can faith validate God-talk?’, New Theology No. 1, edited by Marty, Martin E. and Peerman, Dean G..(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1964), pp. 131–49.Google Scholar

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page 197 note 1 Hartshorne, Charles, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1970)Google Scholar, especially chapter xvi, ‘The Aesthetic Matrix of Value’, pp. 303–21.Google Scholar

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