Introduction
In my recent video assessment of the late Dr. Gordon Stein's opening statement in his debate with Greg Bahnsen on, "Does God Exist?", I described two possible ways of defending the non-existence of something. First, I said that one way to defend a universal negative is to use what I call an "impossibility argument." Second, I said that one way to defend a particular negative is to use what I call an "improbability argument."
As I explained in the video, there are two caveats. First, I do not claim that these two types of arguments are an exhaustive list of the various argument patterns which might be used to support universal or particular negatives. Second, my names for these argument patterns are not standard. For example, a standard name for one type of improbability argument is "evidential argument." The standard name for one type of impossibility argument is "logical argument." For example, J.L. Mackie's famous "logical argument from evil" argues that God is impossible because theism is logically inconsistent with evil. I don't like that name because it sounds funny to outsiders. Imagine an atheist saying, "I'm going to defend a logical argument for atheism." That invites the question, "As opposed to what? An illogical argument for atheism?" While my names are nonstandard, I think they are more intuitive than the standard argument names and so I prefer my names for that reason.
In this article, I will quickly sketch two impossibility arguments for a particular negative: the proposition, "Craigean Christianity is false," where "Craigean Christianity" means the version of Christianity defended by William Lane Craig.
The Timeless-vs-Creator Argument
Now if time had a beginning at some moment in the finite past, it follows that God sans the universe exists atemporally, even if subsequent to the moment of creation He is temporal. Now prima facie such a conclusion seems bizarre, even incoherent. For on such a view there seem to be two phases of God’s life, which stand to each other in a relation of earlier/later than. But a timeless phase can hardly be coherently said to exist earlier than a temporal phase of God’s life.[2]
If we assume for the sake of simplicity that time came into existence with the Big Bang, then God, in creating the universe, was also the Creator of time. But it has been alleged that such a doctrine is untenable. Adolf Grünbaum, for example, has argued vigorously that it is incoherent to posit an external, prior cause of the Big Bang because according to that very model there were no instants of time prior to the initial cosmological singularity. But I think it is evident that Grünbaum's objection has no purchase against the model of divine eternity which I have proposed. For God may be conceived to be causally, but not temporally, prior to the origin of the universe, such that His act of causing the universe to begin to exist is simultaneous with its beginning to exist.[3]
Again, even if the last sentence of that quotation is correct, however, that would do nothing to undermine the Timeless-vs-Creator Argument, which allows for causes to be (temporally) simultaneous with their effects. Even if causes may be simultaneous with their effects, it would still be the case that such causes be temporal. Craig's model of divine eternity requires that a timeless cause ("God's act of causing the universe") is simultaneous with a temporal effect ("the universe beginning to exist at t0"). But it is necessarily true that a timeless cause cannot be simultaneous with a temporal effect. Thus, Craig's model of divine eternity is logically incoherent.
The Aseity-vs-Trinity Argument
A single footnote reveals Craig is aware of the difficulty, but seems remarkably facile about it. Citing his previous work on the Trinity, he writes: ‘since the doctrine of the Son’s being begotten in his divine, as opposed to human, nature is unattested by Scripture … [and] is merely a vestige of the Logos Christology of the early Greek apologists, I am inclined to dispense with it, holding the persons of the Trinity to be underived.… There is then no difficulty in claiming aseity belongs to the divine nature’ (G&AO, 59). Respectfully: yes, there is. If the divine nature is distinct from the persons, then it, not the persons, exists a se (and what would the divine nature be, if not an abstract object?). And the persons cannot be said to be a se in virtue of sharing in the divine nature, because aseity is incommunicable. Worse, I don’t know of a single model of the Trinity where each of the three persons are a se in the sense of being self-existent, independent, and underived. In fact, could there be a clearer affirmation of tritheism than to say there are three divine persons, each of whom are self-existent, independent, and underived? And the irony of Craig citing his own work on the Trinity here is cringeworthy, for on his view, all three persons depend on (are ‘supported by’) an underlying substance of which they are parts, and so cannot be a se in the minimalist sense.
The waters get even murkier. Later, in discussing the conceptualist’s attempt to preserve aseity by construing divine thoughts as parts of God, it’s as if Craig is reminded of his view of the Trinity, for there he introduces for the first time talk of being ‘acceptably’ a se. The modest qualifier is a noticeable departure from what is otherwise confidently referred to as ‘the’ doctrine of divine aseity, all views deemed contrary to which be damned. Craig writes: ‘What counts as a part of God? We might take the persons of the Trinity to be parts of God which, though not God, exist acceptably a se.… Could God’s thoughts be taken to be aspects of God which similarly exist acceptably a se?’ (G&AO, 199). He answers this last question affirmatively, so long as God’s thoughts are construed as undetached concrete parts.
Why would undetached concrete parts get a pass, but not undetached abstract parts? It is unclear. He writes: ‘For plausibly if something creates non-successively all its parts, it creates itself, which, apart from its apparent metaphysical impossibility, would render God a created being. So God cannot create His parts, and yet, being parts of God, these objects are clearly not examples of things existing a se apart from God’ (G&AO, 201). Is Craig assuming the massively implausible view that composition is identity? In what sense can a part be self-existent and independent, and how can a whole made up of parts be underived? We are not told. No matter, for Craig is ready to play an anti-realist card here, too: ‘If undetached parts are not really existing objects, so much the better!’ (G&AO, 201). But how is it at all better to say that the persons of the Trinity are not really existing objects? Perhaps the thought is that there are no challenges to God’s aseity if God doesn’t even exist.
The conclusion, I think, is a rather dour one for Craig: the challenge facing the coherence of the attribute of aseity is God’s being asymmetrically dependent on anything, and that problem remains even if abstract objects do not exist. This is clear from Medieval expressions of aseity, which, buttressed by divine simplicity, regard even undetached concrete parts as anathema to God’s metaphysical ultimacy. But Craig (rightly) rejects simplicity, despite speaking on behalf of ‘classical’ theism. So what’s his solution? Nothing in GOA or G&AO tells us.[5]
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