Chapter 10 - THE NEED FOR A NEW BEGINNING

Dr. Roy A. Clouser 

10.1 INTRODUCTION

We have now seen striking examples of how some of the most important theories developed within three sciences differ among themselves owing to the way they are regulated by competing ideas of the basic nature of reality. And we have seen how those ideas of the nature of reality are, in turn, governed by contrary ideas of what is divine per se. As I mentioned earlier, however, these examples are offered in order to clarify the meaning of the claim that theories are religiously regulated, not to show its truth. So far no argument has been given to show why such religious control is unavoidable. So the first task of this chapter will be to do just that. It will begin by presenting reasons why  the religious control we observed in the casebook chapters is unavoidable for any scientific or philosophical theory whatever. If these reasons succeed, they will therefore have shown why theories of science and philosophy can never be neutral relative to some one or another divinity belief so that theoretical thinking is not autonomous. At the same time they will also have shown why it is the indirect sort of religious control we observed in the casebook that deserves to be understood as the core of the biblical claim that belief in God impacts all knowledge and all truth.¹

The second task of this chapter will then be to re-examine the arguments given during the first task in order to notice how they also supply a philosophical critique of reduction theories. The critique will thereby further support my contention that Christians and other theists should abandon the ploy of attempting to adapt reduction theories by adding to them the stipulation that God created whatever aspect(s) the rest of creation allegedly reduces to. We have already noticed that this stipulation does nothing to alter the fact that it’s the reduction claims that wield the explanatory power of the theory, so that belief in God fails to regulate its content. The critique of reduction will go beyond that objection, however, to show why the very idea of reduction as a strategy for explanation is hopeless.

The final task of this chapter will be to close with an examination of what I take to be the main reason most theists have remained committed to adapting reduction theories. It will therefore amount to a religious critique of reduction offered to supplement the philosophical critique. We have already seen why the strategy of reduction, taken neat, assumes an underlying commitment to one or another pagan divinity belief. This is why theists have always felt obliged to neutralize that assumption in order to make such theories compatible with belief in God. The religious critique to be offered will show, however, why the very ploy used to neutralize the pagan character of reduction has pagan assumptions, and so fails to baptize (or circumcise) reduction theories into theistic acceptability.

The cumulative effect of these two critiques will be to clear the way for a program of theorizing that is deliberately regulated by belief in God — a program requiring that existing theories be re-interpreted, or new theories be developed, in a thoroughly non-reductionist way. So chapter 11 will begin with an account of a theistic, systematically non-reductionist theory of reality, the one developed by Dooyeweerd.² That theory will be further fleshed out in chapter 12 by using it to develop an outline of a distinctively non-reductionist sociology. And it will be developed still further in chapter 13 by applying both it and its consequences for sociology to sketch a distinctively non-reductionist political theory. Since these further applications of the theory will also make use of several New Testament teachings, the sociological and political theories outlined will not only be broadly theistic, but specifically Christian.³

10.2             WHY ARE THEORIES UNAVOIDABLY REGULATED BY SOME DIVINITY BELIEF?

Let’s begin by reviewing some points already established.

Aspects, we saw, are basic kinds of properties and laws, and what I’m about to say about them applies equally to any listing of them a thinker accepts, not just the list I’m provisionally working with.⁴ My examples will, however, be drawn from that list because most of its members are so widely accepted. You may also recall that theories of reality have traditionally taken some one or two aspects as the basic nature of all reality. They have done this by proposing either that their favored aspect is the only genuine one (the strong version of reduction), or that their favored aspects generate all the others (the weak version of reduction). Both proposals are said to “reduce” the world given to pre-theoretical experience to whatever aspect(s) are favored as the basic nature of reality. The strong version is reductionist because it trims from reality (as we experience it pre-theoretically) all the kinds of properties and laws other than the one it favors. The weak version is reductionist in the sense that it lowers the status of all other aspects by making them products of, and thus less real than, the aspect(s) it favors. Finally, we saw that both sorts of reduction confer the status of divinity upon whatever aspect(s) they favor, since any aspect taken to be the basic nature of reality is thereby also treated as unconditionally non-dependent.⁵

What, then, has driven theorists to propose reductionist theories? Why have so many theorists felt compelled to speculate about the basic nature of reality? Why can’t theories just bypass that issue and construct explanations within aspects? To invoke again the metaphor used earlier: why can’t theories be content with examining the beads of the necklace and simply not ask about its string? The best way to answer these questions, I think, is to pose another one first. That is, we need to state the question reduction theories are offered to answer. The question is this: what makes it possible (and actual) for properties of the different aspectual kinds to be connected in the way we find them to be in our experience, or postulate them to be in our theories? Each of the kinds, after all, exhibits an implacable qualitative difference from every other kind. Yet properties of different kinds combine in the objects we experience in such a way that those objects are presented to us as unities not unions; each is an individual with its own identity. In theories, also, the question of interaspectual connectedness arises. For theories propose concepts that combine properties of different kinds and specify how they relate. The question, then, is about what makes possible the strong connectedness between the kinds. This is why hypotheses about the basic nature of reality (the string for the beads of the necklace) were among the first to be proposed when systematic theory making first arose (so far as we know this was in ancient Greece). So if theories are to truly avoid such overviews of reality, and thus avoid ascribing divinity to anything, they would have to avoid the issue of inter-aspectual connectedness. What’s at stake, then, is whether that issue is avoidable or not. My answer is that it is not, and I’ll offer the argument for this claim in distinct stages so as to make it as clear as possible.

The first stage of the argument in favor of the unavoidability of accounting for inter-aspectual connectedness is drawn from the activity of abstraction necessary to the construction of any theory. Think back to what was already pointed out about abstraction in chapter 4. We noticed that it meant singling out and extracting from a wider background some narrower scope for the focus of our attention. We noticed, too, that a high degree of abstraction is required for theories of science and philosophy, a degree that isolates not only individual properties but whole kinds of them from the objects that exhibit them. This is how the various sciences were first differentiated, namely, by abstracting different kinds of properties and laws as their fields of investigation. Therefore, so long as high abstraction is unavoidable to forming theories, the question  of how the different aspectual kinds connect is also unavoidable. For once we abstract them from objects and sharply differentiate them from one another, we are then forced to say how they relate so as to explain what we’re trying to explain. By contrast, pre-theoretical thinking never raises the question of how the law-and-property-kinds relate, since it never abstracts them from the things that exhibit them, nor distinguishes them from one another sharply enough to make their connectedness into a problem.

Because this first stage of the argument points to the way the issue of interaspectual connectedness is raised by the activity of abstraction and differentiation, it is also important to recall that the account of abstraction given earlier was not itself a theory. It was not a hypothesis about how abstraction works, but a description of what goes on in abstraction — a description you can confirm in your own self-reflection.⁶ So the argument for this point does not rest upon some set of privileged premises that everyone must accept on pain of being dismissed as sub-rational. Nor does it depend on any assumption as to the nature of the knowing human self. It merely describes the activity of abstraction and asks if you can reflectively catch yourself in the act of doing what it describes. Moreover, that description needn’t be complete, but only true so far as it goes.

The second stage of the argument concerns a difference between the degree to which we can be successful in abstracting aspects from things that exhibit them, as compared with what happens when we try to abstract them from one another. Our claim about this is that while we can, indeed, isolate aspects from the objects of pre-theoretical experience, we can never completely isolate them from one another. (That’s why in the previous paragraph I spoke of “sharply distinguishing” aspects, not of abstractively isolating them.) The connectedness between aspects is so intense, that it’s not possible for us so much as to think of any one by itself. This is what prevents us from constructing a theory strictly within the boundaries of any one of them. Any attempt to do that always ends up needing to relate properties of the aspect being investigated to properties of other aspects. Thus, a theory is always confronted with the question of what kind of connectedness relates its aspect to all the others. A theory may or may not address and answer that question, but if it doesn’t it will still tacitly assume the connectedness satisfies some description, and so is of a specific kind.

This stage of the argument is like the first stage in also not being a hypothesis. It assumes that we are presented in experience with things, events, states of affairs, relations, persons, etc., and that these objects of experience exhibit qualitatively different kinds of properties all of which display orderly relations. But clearly these assumptions are not hypotheses; it is not a guess that we experience things-with-ordered-properties! If it is objected that we are also assuming the things-with-aspects to be real, our reply is two-fold. First: they are given to our experience as real, so the belief in their reality is also not a hypothesis; the denial of their reality would be a hypothesis. Second: we need not assume even their reality for this argument to succeed vis-à-vis the point at hand. It succeeds if we assume only that they are given to our experience. (It will, however, turn out that assuming only their givenness, the argument can also show why any attempt to deny pre-theoretical experience wholesale, i.e., to deny there are things-with-aspects, cannot avoid incoherency.)

Likewise, as with the first stage of the argument, this stage also foregoes any claim to have come up with a set of allegedly privileged premises such that no rational person could deny them. Since this stage of the argument isn’t a deduction, it has no premises whatever. Nor is it an inductive inference, so its conclusion is not merely probable. Instead the argument takes the form of a thought experiment you can confirm in your own self-reflection. This means, however, that to fully grasp the force of the argument, you must actually perform the experiment.

The experiment is to try to think of any aspect wholly isolated from all others in the way I just said isn’t possible.⁷ That is, you’re to try to frame the idea of any aspect in such a way as to rebut my claim that it can’t be done.   If you can do it, my argument will fall flat. If you can’t, you’ll have seen for yourself why the question of inter-aspectual connectedness cannot be avoided. So let’s try it.

Let’s start at the most general level, the level of entire aspects. And let’s take as our first example the physical aspect — the physical kind of properties and laws. The experiment is to see if you can frame any idea of that aspect in complete isolation from all the nonphysical aspects. So start by stripping from your idea of “physical” every connection to the quantitative, spatial, and kinetic aspects. Then take away its connection to the biotic, the sensory, the logical, and the lingual aspects. Have you anything left at all? I don’t. Once all the other aspects are subtracted from the physical, I find “physical” to have no meaning whatever. Moreover, I find the same result ensues no matter which aspect this experiment is performed on. Try it with the sensory, for example. What is left of your idea of that aspect once its every connection to the quantitative, spatial, physical, logical, and lingual aspects have been discarded? Logical properties and laws also fall victim to the same result. For example, the fundamental axiom of that aspect, the law of non-contradiction, says “nothing can be both true and false in the same sense at the same time.” It thus makes reference both to other “senses” and to time, and so is unavoidably connected to non-logical properties. Thus the law cannot so much as be thought or stated apart from that connectedness.

Perhaps putting the argument at the level of entire aspects is too abstract for some readers. So let’s try the experiment again, this time at the level of specific properties. Let’s try it with the property of weight in its physical sense (not weight as a sensory feeling, but as the gravitational attraction of one thing for another). Now perform the same experiment: strip from your idea of that property every connection to such properties as its being quantifiable, its being spatially locatable, its being moveable, its being logically identical with itself, and its being able to be referred to in language. Is anything left of it? Or take the sensory quality red, and try the same thing. Can you frame any idea of red that has no quantity, has no location or shape, has no relation to the physical properties of light, and is not logically distinguishable from other colors? Or try it with the logical property of a thing’s being identical with itself (the property of a thing’s being indistinguishable from itself in the sense that the law of non-contradiction would be violated by denying it.) I think you’ll find that a purely logical thing is as literally unthinkable as a purely physical or sensory one; anything would have to possess some ordered combination of non-logical properties for it to be true that, taken together, they distinguish and thus identify that thing. Please notice that this point in no way denies the laws of logic   are real or that they truly hold both for the things we experience and for our thought. It only denies that we can conceive of them in isolation from nonlogical properties and laws.

If the results of this experiment are the same for you as they are for me, then you will have seen for yourself why abstracting kinds of properties and laws makes accounting for their connectedness a truly unavoidable philosophical problem. As I said, a theory may remain tacit on that issue and simply take for granted that all the kinds connect, but it will not be able to do so without also assuming the connectedness to have some particular nature, to be of a certain kind. We have already seen how a number of theories differ on exactly that issue, and we have noticed that it is their competing accounts of the nature of the inter-aspectual connectedness that are the same as their competing theories of the basic nature of reality. For if the aspects are unthinkable apart from their connectedness, then, so far as we know, they depend for their existence on that connectedness. So unless that connectedness is taken to depend in turn on something else, it has thereby been given the status of divinity per se. This is why theories are not able to avoid including or presupposing some divinity belief or other.

In case that last point went by a bit quickly, I’m going to state it again another way.

Whatever makes possible and actual the connectedness between qualitatively different kinds of properties and laws is what they all depend on for their existence, since — so far as we can think of them at all — they can’t exist apart from one another. That is why theories have been forced to offer explanations as to the nature of their connectedness. A weak reductionist theory tries to solve the problem by making its favored aspect(s) the necessary and sufficient reason for the existence of the remaining aspects. In that case the explanation it offers as to how they all connect is that they are generated by the aspect(s) it favors for that role. A strong reductionist theory, on the other hand, tries to dissolve the problem rather than solve it. It claims there are no genuine aspects other than the one it favors as the nature of reality. But even for strong reductionists the issue of inter-aspectual connectedness still unavoidably arises. For they have to admit that the world as it is given to our experience at least seems to display properties of qualitatively different kinds. Were that not so, theorists couldn’t even form alternative ideas of the nature of reality — ideas the strong reductionist admits exist but wants to say are false. So rather than avoiding the issue altogether, the strong reductionist simply handles the question of inter-aspectual connectedness a different way, namely, by construing it as the relation between reality and illusion. For example, one version of strong materialism claims that all seemingly nonphysical things and properties are the products of what it dismisses as “folk-psychology.” But it has to admit that people get their ideas of nonphysical properties from their pre-theoretical experience to begin with. Were strong materialists simply to deny that anyone even experiences what seem to be nonphysical properties, their theory would immediately be rendered so implausible as not to be taken seriously.

In summary: it is the issue of inter-aspectual connectedness that can’t be avoided and that forces theories to assume or specify the nature of that connectedness. It can’t be avoided because the different aspectual kinds can’t so much as be thought of in isolation; we become explicitly aware of them only by abstracting them from the objects of pre-theoretical experience and by differentiating them in contrast to one another. It is this intractable fact that raises the issue of the nature of their connectedness, and it is answering this question that is the same as proposing (or assuming) some idea of the basic nature of reality. For whatever aspect is proposed to be the nature of that connectedness is also therefore the nature of the non-dependent reality all else depends on; it identifies the kind of string that connects the beads of the necklace by producing them. And this is why reductionist theories of reality can’t avoid conferring divine status on whatever they pick to be that string. For whatever a theory takes to be what all else depends on is thereby rendered utterly non-dependent and is thus divine per se.⁸

10.3             A PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUE OF REDUCTION AS A STRATEGY FOR THEORIES

In what follows I will argue that although the question of inter-aspectual connectedness is proper and unavoidable, reduction as a strategy for answering it is neither. Notice that the strategy assumes from the outset that the nature of the connectedness must be qualified by some one or another of the aspects themselves, so that one or more of the beads of the necklace is in fact its string. This is the same as conferring divinity on some aspect(s), and is why the strategy assumes some form of pagan religion. But, as I will now argue, such an assumption is not justifiable in the ways used to justify theories. So despite the fact that it functions within the context of a theory, the assumption itself is a religious belief and not simply a theoretical hypothesis.

Earlier I said that it’s the very same arguments that show why theories can’t avoid some controlling religious presupposition that also supply a critique of reduction as a strategy for explanation. So let’s now review the arguments given above, looking at them from a different angle to see why this is so. Before doing that, however, let me reiterate that what this other angle is intended to show is not that all ascriptions of divinity to any aspect of the world are false, but why they are unjustifiable. The critique will therefore not amount to a proof that God exists or that only God has divine status. Instead it will be evidence that all ascriptions of divinity are brought to theorizing from pre-theoretical experience, and are in that sense every bit as much articles of faith as is belief in God.

The first part of the critique of reduction will be drawn from the first stage of the argument given above, and concerns what was pointed out about the activity of abstraction. It calls attention to the way some thinkers have inferred the independent existence of a particular aspect from the way it appears to be independent as a result of their having abstracted it. For example, Aristotle argued that the human mind’s ability to form logical concepts must be really independent of the human body.⁹ His basis for the claim is that since logical thought is able to form concepts of the body and the rest of the world, it must then exist independently of the body and the rest of the world. So his argument is a clear case of abstracting the logical aspect (of human thinking) and attributing real, separate, independent existence to it despite the fact that its alleged independent existence is the product of his own activity of abstracting and distinguishing it! Descartes, too, made this same mistake, but in his case it’s even worse. For he is clearly aware that he is endorsing the inference that if he can separate one thing from another in thought, then it exists separately from the other in reality.¹⁰

The point of this part of the critique is therefore simple: to abstract any aspect of experience and then take the resulting appearance of its separation as demonstrating its independent existence, is to make the mistake I earlier called self-performative incoherence. Since the abstraction and sharp distinction of the favored aspect is a product of the thinker’s activity, the thinker has no right to believe that its distinction in thought corresponds to its independence in existence. Remember the example of putting a thermometer into a beaker of water to ascertain its temperature? If we were then to say that the thermometer tells us what the temperature the water was prior to inserting it, we’d have ignored the fact that the activity we performed to get that information changed the information. Just so with abstraction. We may isolate an aspect from the things that exhibit it, and sharply distinguish it from other aspects, in order to examine it more closely. But the fact that we can confine our attention to it in those ways can never justify the conclusion that it is really capable of existing independently of all the other aspects.

The second stage of this part of the argument also counts against Aristotle but even more so against Descartes. For the experiment in thought showed that we never really do conceive of any one aspect in complete isolation from the others. Keep in mind, though, that this point is not simply the reverse of Descartes’. It is not that whereas he says if we can think of an aspect in isolation it must be capable of existing that way, and we reverse him and say if you can’t think of it that way it can’t be that way. Our point is rather that if you can’t so much as frame the idea of independently existing X (where X is any aspect you please), then you can never justify the claim that X exists that way. This is not to deny that people can and do form the belief that some aspect of the world has divine status even if they can’t actually frame an idea of it in its alleged independence. They do this for the reason mentioned several times already, namely, that they experience it to be the nature of divinity. Thus there is a sense in which the pagan religious experience is at odds with itself. On the one hand, some aspect of the world of pre-theoretical experience looks to be divine; on the other hand the thought experiment shows we can’t so much as frame the idea of any aspect possessing such a status. So the pagan intuition of divinity amounts to having the experience that something which we cannot think of as non-dependently real, nevertheless has non-dependent reality in a way we can’t think of.

That is a decidedly bad position to be in so far as such a belief is made  the basis of a theory. But more than that, it is a terrible position to be in so  far as the existential religious condition of the thinker is concerned. It is why the various pagan beliefs exhibit the restless character I mentioned earlier, in which the deification of one aspect constantly provokes the counter-deification of another. This is what Augustine referred to concerning his own condition prior to becoming a Christian when he said, “My heart was restless, Lord, until it found its rest in you.”

The hopelessness of justifying pagan divinity beliefs can also be put in a number of additional ways, but perhaps the easiest to see are the two I offer now. One is that our thought experiment has shown why the very expression “independently existing X” (where X is qualified by one or more aspects of the cosmos) is in much the same boat as the expression “square circle.” We can say the words, but we cannot so much as frame any idea of what they purport to name. But if we can’t do that, how will it be possible to give any argument to show that “X has independent existence” is true?¹¹

The other has to do with the usual way such theories try to get around the point about not identifying abstractive separation in thought with actual independence in reality. Most philosophers of the past century or so would agree with my point against Descartes. But they would propose instead to justify the selection of their favored aspect as that on which all others depend by demonstrating the explanatory superiority of that position, rather than by taking its abstraction to entail its independence. That is, they would try to show that taking aspect X as the nature of what all else depends upon is justified by its yielding the only or best explanation of anything we wish to explain. But this approach is also undercut by our experiment in thought. For in so far as the properties and laws of X can be said to explain anything, they are always thought of in relation to other kinds of properties and laws, not in isolation from them. So if the very isolation of their favored aspect X is what can’t be conceived, postulating “bridge laws” between X and other aspects fails to produce any genuine explanation because bridge laws can’t be thought of as exclusively X in nature any more than anything else can. And unless the bridge laws were exclusively X-kind of laws, X wouldn’t be the nature of whatever everything else depends on and reduces to. Thus postulating hypothetical bridge laws does nothing to alleviate the fact that “exclusively X” is unthinkable. It would still be the case that so far as we can know X it depends on its connectedness to other aspects of the whole, while that connectedness is supposed to be explained by bridge laws of an exclusively X nature! In sum, the entire body of arguments offered as evidence for the alleged independence of X constantly appeals to X in its connectedness to other aspects, not to X as independent, while X’s connectedness to them cannot itself be conceived as being purely X in nature. So long as this is so, there can be no good arguments for the explanatory superiority in taking X to be what all else depends upon. Instead, the inconceivability of “independently existing X” simply recurs at every point throughout the theory, infecting all the alleged evidence for the explanatory power of taking X to have independent existence.

It should be noticed that these latter criticisms, like those that preceded them, are also applications of the criterion for theories I called “self-performative coherence” in chapter 4. In each case, what stands against the success of a reduction claim are activities of thought we must perform to make a theory (abstraction) or can perform to assess a theory (the thought experiment). And we can confirm the results of applying these tests in our own self-reflection by catching ourselves in the act of abstraction or by performing the thought experiment.

To further clarify the last two ways I used this criterion, I’m now going to illustrate each of them again, this time by applying them to the concept of an atom. As we noted earlier, atomic theory cannot simply say “there are atoms.” It has to specify what kind of things atoms are supposed to be, and doing that inevitably raises the connectedness issue. What is more, it does this whether the theory proposes that the nature of an atom includes properties of different kinds or it proposes that its nature is constituted of properties from only one kind. For even in the latter case, the theory must specify how the properties constituting an atom’s nature relate to properties of other aspects that do not constitute its nature. So if a theory were to say that an atom is exclusively physical, for example, it would then have to account for how those physical properties relate to, say, the sensory properties of our observations. For unless there is such a connection, and unless it’s a strong one, the observation of experiments could be of no value to physics. A strong reductionist materialist would have to reply that there just are no sensory properties at all, while a weak reductionist materialist would have to say that sensory properties are all generated by combinations of entities having exclusively physical properties. Please notice that whereas the first answer undercuts the value of experiments as they are actually experienced, the second makes the connection between the kinds of properties to be itself physical.

We have already seen why both replies run afoul of the experiment in thought. If we cannot so much as frame the idea of any one kind of properties and laws in isolation from all the others, we can’t frame the idea of exclusively physical atoms or of an exclusively physical causal relation between atoms and any nonphysical properties. (And this is quite aside from the difficulty of explaining how a purely physical cause could produce a nonphysical effect!) With respect to both these issues, proposing such a purely physical causal relation to solve them only re-raises the problems to be solved.

What has just been said about materialism applies equally well to every other “ism.” It won’t matter for this argument which aspect or combination of them is proposed as what everything else reduces to. Whatever aspect is selected, it still remains the case that since none can be thought of apart from the others, none can be justified as existing that way. Nor is this critique effective only against theories that select aspects of the objects of our experience to explain the inter-aspectual connectedness. It applies equally to subjectivist theories which propose that it is the knowing (human) subject that connects all the kinds of properties of things, and thus gives order to the world we experience. Subjectivist theories also run into the same dead-end, because they are still obliged to say what aspect of the human mind or self does that job. This is because humans not only experience and distinguish the various aspects, but also possess them. An act of thought, for example, has quantitative, spatial, physical, biotic, sensory, logical, etc., properties, as we already noticed in our discussion of behaviorism. So the question is unavoidable as to what kind of subjective activity provides the connectedness without which neither individual properties nor entire kinds of them can be thought. In this way the same dead ends arise for reductionist theories of the knowing subject as did for reductionist theories of the objects known.

So once again it is the issue of inter-aspectual connectedness that is the key to seeing why the involvement of some divinity belief in theories is unavoidable. Since we can’t form the idea of any aspect as existing independently of the others, every theoretical explanation is forced to propose or assume something as the guarantor of their connectedness. If one (or more) of the aspects themselves is cast in that role, it thereby becomes the basic nature of the world given to our experience. And since it thereby also becomes the nature of the independent reality all else depends on, it is also cast in the role of identifying the nature of divinity per se. At the same time, however, the fact that every aspect, so far as we can think of it at all, exists only in an unbreakable connectedness to all the others, any belief that an aspect has divine status is incapable of theoretical justification. Such beliefs therefore not only satisfy our definition of per se divinity beliefs, but play a regulatory role in theories while remaining unjustifiable in the ways theories seek to be justified.

To anyone still tempted to deny this last point, I ask: can you really believe theories are decided by a (mythical) faculty of “pure, neutral rationality”? If so, why is it that a Kantian never succeeds in convincing a Thomist by rational argument? Why do not Hegelians persuade materialists? Why is nothing settled between dualists and monists century after century? Notice that these differences afflict not only theories of reality but the very notion of what it   is to be rational! Has not, epistemology, as well as ontology, been reductionist and thus under religious control? There have been theories of knowledge proposing knowledge to be essentially logical, logical/sensory, mathematical, physical/biotic, historical, lingual, ethical, and numerous mix-and-match combinations of them. Theories of knowledge not only differ by whether they are foundationalist, coherentist, pragmatist, externalist, internalist, etc., but by the nature they ascribe to the foundations of knowledge, to the coherence between beliefs, or to what it means for a belief to succeed. Likewise, they posit some nature to the knowing self for which justification is said to be internal, external, practical, etc. In this respect, epistemology is always up to its eyeballs in ontology (and vice versa), while both are equally under the spell of some divinity belief.¹²

Finally, I want to stress that even though the point of this critique is not   to show that all reductionist beliefs are false but to show why they are one and all religious, that is still a significant result. This is because it amounts   to leveling the playing field between theists and non-theists. No longer can various pagan positions pass off the religious character of their reductionist beliefs by dogmatically proclaiming them to be deliverances of “reason” rather than faith, or as “scientific” as opposed to sectarian, or as products of “free thought” rather than dogma. Instead it needs to be admitted that all of us alike theorize under the control of whatever we believe to be divine per se. The fair way to compare these views will then be to judge between their outcomes for theories. For if pagan religious belief and its consequent reductionism can’t produce coherent explanations of the world, that failure will be all the more poignant if it turns out that non-reductionist theories developed upon a theistic basis can.

10.4             A RELIGIOUS CRITIQUE OF REDUCTION AS A STRATEGY FOR

THEORIES

The critique to be offered here will be “religious” in the sense that it will focus on the question of what it is about their understanding of God that has induced so many theists to try to preserve the reduction strategy in their theoretical work. I will begin this critique once again by reviewing some points already established so as to be sure the background for it is clear.

We have already noted that the vast majority of theistic thinkers have seen no need for so radical an overhaul of theory making as abandoning reduction as a strategy for theories. They have instead tried to neutralize the otherwise pagan character of reduction theories by adding to them the stipulation that God created whatever aspect(s) the rest of the cosmos is supposed to reduce to. I have given several reasons why this ploy doesn’t succeed. The main reason is that the real explanatory work of such a theory still lies in its reduction of everything to one or more aspects of creation, so that nothing of its explanatory power is changed by appending belief in God to it. (The only role left for belief in God in such a theory would be to make it an asylum for ignorance as, e.g., Descartes did when he passed off his inability to explain the interaction of mind and body by calling it “a miracle caused by God.”) The ploy therefore leaves the vast majority of the contents of such a theory, and all its explanatory power, unaffected by belief in God. Thus it fails to square with the biblical teaching that knowing God impacts all truth and every sort of knowledge. Moreover, now that we’ve seen how divinity beliefs can and do regulate theories, I ask: why should we think that pagan faiths can regulate theories internally and pervasively, but not belief in God? Why should we not expect that belief in God can at least delimit a range of acceptable hypotheses as pagan faiths do? Why think that only pagan divinity beliefs can provide a basis from which to explain the nature of things, while belief in God can only be tacked onto theories as an after-thought like the tail on a child’s birthday party donkey?

Other already established points also support this initial criticism of the adaptation ploy. The first concerns the way weak reduction theories argue that one or two aspects of creation generate all the others. Such a claim confers upon the reducing aspects a relation to the rest of creation which is the same as the relation God has to the reducing aspects. In this way, the adaptation ploy gives those aspects a semi-divine status; the added theistic stipulation denies they are divine per se but still confers on them a status that is closer to divine independence than is possessed by the rest of creation. Their status therefore corresponds to the pagan idea of a god! For this reason, it is fair to say that the ploy confers on certain aspects of creation the status of crypto-divinities which mediate between God and the rest of creation, whereas scripture always speaks as though God directly sustains everything other than himself. This point is especially telling from a Christian point of view, because the New Testament insists that the only mediator between God and creation is Jesus Christ. And whereas Christ’s mediation of salvation is via his human nature, his mediation of God’s creating and sustaining power is said to be due to his divine nature. It is only he, as second person of the Trinity, not any aspects, properties, or laws of creation “by whom all things were made” (John 1:3), and “by whom all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). As St. Gregory Palamas once put it, other than Christ “Christians cannot tolerate any intermediate substance between Creator and creatures, nor any mediating hypostatis [foundational reality].”¹³

Consider the same point stated in a hypothetical way: apart from one or another pagan divinity belief, what could have been the reason for ancient thinkers to assume from the outset of theory making that the way to construct a theory of reality is by reducing all the rest of the aspects of the cosmos to some one or two? If theory of reality had begun among Jews instead of pagan Greeks, for example, the doctrine of creation could have — and should have — led them in the reverse direction. Had theories begun under the grip of the biblical doctrine that everything of the cosmos depends upon God for its existence, they could have been undertaken on the assumption that it is God alone on whom all else depends for existence so that a guiding principle for theories would have been to deny that status to anything else. Instead of seeing how close theories of reality could come to a pagan view without being outright pagan, Jewish theorists would have been guided by a religious horror of reductionism. Instead of elevating certain aspects as more real than the rest by proposing that God funnels his sustaining power through them, their theories would have started with the assumption that all aspects of creation depend on God directly.

These criticisms of the adaptation ploy are, however, only preliminary to the critique I’m about to offer. Raising them can help to set the background for this critique because the replies they usually provoke make clear the deeper presuppositions upon which the program of adapting and maintaining the reduction strategy rests. My critique, then, will be aimed at these deeper presuppositions, the beliefs which are the real reasons reduction has continued to be attractive to theists despite its inherently pagan character.

The replies to the objections raised above often start with the point that scripture is not a technical treatise, which is taken to mean that scripture cannot be expected to deal with theoretical issues. In particular, they go on, scripture cannot deal with the entities known by abstraction which populate theories of science and philosophy. So the teaching that God is the creator is to be taken to mean that God brought the world of our everyday experience into existence out of nothing. But it does not, says the reply, require us to hold that he also brought into existence such “abstract realities” as laws, properties, kinds, universals, propositions, sets, numbers, etc. Rather, abstract entities may very well have independent existence or a status intermediate between God and the rest of creation. In fact, they say, we are fully justified in believing such independent entities exist because the most plausible way to construe the attributes  of God himself is to say that they are properties which have necessary, independent existence and thus are uncreated. After all, if God is uncreated and non-dependent, the qualities of his nature must be also.

Finally, the replies claim that only this understanding of God’s nature provides a plausible explanation for how our language can apply to God.¹⁴ Their claim is that human language can speak truly about God because there is an analogy between the meanings of terms we use of God and what those terms mean when we use them of creatures. In other words, the meaning of terms drawn from our experience of creatures is something like what is true of God, though not exactly the same. Their meanings are not exactly the same because God possesses the qualities named by those terms in the highest possible degree, while creatures possess them in lesser, imperfect degrees. So whereas God’s justice, goodness, and wisdom are infinitely perfect, human justice, goodness, and wisdom are not. This view therefore accounts for how our language can speak truly of God despite the fact that the meanings of our terms are drawn from our experience of creatures. It accounts both for the ways those meanings are (partially) the same, and for the ways they differ in meaning when used of God. This reply might also conclude by pointing out that not only has this analogy theory of religious language been widely accepted for centuries, but even Karl Barth, the most prominent theologian of the twentieth century to reject it, had to admit he had nothing to put in its place.¹⁵

Here, then, is an impressive array of replies to the (preliminary) objections listed above. They don’t dispel the irony of the fact that theistic thinkers intent on harmonizing their theories with belief in a transcendent Creator, have favored a way of doing it which insists that many entities and properties found in the cosmos are independent of God and therefore uncreated. Nor do they dent the even greater irony that the reason these thinkers have felt compelled to hold such a position is their understanding of the nature of that Creator! But the irony of this theology is not an argument against it. The questions before us are whether this view of God’s nature is (1) internally coherent, and (2) consistent with what is revealed about God in scripture. These questions are important because it is this view of God’s nature which is what I referred to above as the deepest presupposition of the attempts of theists to retain reduction theories. So in the course of examining it I will try to make clear why and how it commends rather than forbids the reduction strategy for theories, as well as say why I find it to be an unacceptable view of God. I will argue that it is unacceptable because it has difficulties of internal coherence which can only be solved in ways that leave it incompatible with the biblical doctrine of creation. Since that is to be a central point of this critique, it is therefore necessary that we be as clear as possible about the meaning of the term “created” before going any further. To that end, we must now distinguish three senses in which something may be said to be created.

The sense in which we most commonly use the term is that something is said to be created if there is a time at which it comes to be, before which it did not exist. From now on, I will call this sense of the term created₁. Another sense in which one thing is said to be created by another is when it is produced by and is distinct in being from the other. This sense is important in speech about God since it is how scripture speaks of everything other than God as His creation. I will call this sense of the term created₂. The third sense is one I will follow Thomas Aquinas in distinguishing from the first two senses. In this third sense, something will be said to be created₃ if it is wholly dependent on God for its existence such that had not God brought it about it would not exist. God can, of course, do this ex nihilo; that is, He can do it “out of nothing” where “nothing” is not the name of a reality but the assertion that aside from God bringing something else into existence there would be only God. But once God has brought it about that there are creatures in addition to Himself He can also use the agency of some of them to bring about yet other things and events, all of which would also entirely depend on Him in this third sense. This sense is therefore intended to be indifferent to whether or not what God creates is brought about ex nihilo or through the agency of other creatures, and to whether or not it is brought about timelessly, for all time, or had a beginning in time. It is even indifferent to whether or not what is brought about is distinct from God.

It differs from having a beginning in time, as Thomas points out, because something could be everlasting in time but still be everlastingly dependent  on God’s sustaining its existence.¹⁶  Anything like that would therefore not  be created₁, but would still be created₃. And it differs from created₂ because God’s own actions in the world, while brought about by Him and dependent on His performing them, are not anything distinct from Him. Thus whether or not they were created₁ (whether or not they are something God brought about timelessly or in time), they would be uncreated₂, but would still be created₃.¹⁷ One final point: I will take created₃ to be the most basic sense of the term since it is included in the first and second senses, while they are included neither in one another nor in the third sense. Created₃ is therefore the most important sense of the term as we use it of God and is the one which, in combination with created₂, reflects the way scripture speaks of God as Creator. In all that follows I will therefore take it to be a non-negotiable revealed requirement for theistic thought that for everything other than God, its existence and nature is created₃ (brought about) by God.

This third sense of “create” is not, of course, the way we usually use that term of ourselves or of other creatures. We can’t create ex nihilo. And we don’t ordinarily speak of creating our own actions, although that’s precisely what does happen in this third sense when we perform acts that would otherwise not exist. So it will also sound odd to say that God “creates₃” His own actions — actions which are therefore at the same time uncreated₂! Perhaps this is why most theologians have preferred to cover all three senses of “create” by one expression, and simply say that everything other than God is the product of God’s will.¹⁸ It’s a way of asserting that only the being of God is unconditional and divine per se, while all else is creation over which He maintains sovereign control.

But it is exactly this last point that I find violated by the view of God taken by the replies to my preliminary objections. Moreover, the way that view violates this point is also precisely the way it provides a haven for the reduction strategy. I say this with great reluctance given the many prestigious advocates the view has had, and in view of the fact that it has dominated Christian theology in the Western, Latin, wing of the Church as well as had some influence in Jewish and Muslim theology. Its way was paved by no less a thinker than St. Augustine, was ensconced by St. Anselm, and refined by St. Thomas Aquinas (so from now on I’ll call it the AAA view for short). Some of its central claims have already been introduced, but we now need to look more closely at them, and deal with them one at a time.

The first of these premises is that the biblical teaching of God’s having created₁₂₃ humans in His image is to be understood to mean that humans share properties and capacities with God. I mention this first in order to set it aside, since it seems absolutely right. Let’s proceed, then, to examine its other, more problematic premises.

A second main premise of the AAA theology is that whatever may be truly ascribed to God must be as uncreated as He is. This means that the properties predicated of God in scripture (called His “attributes” in theology) are not His free choice and so are not created₃ by him. This is not simply to say, however, that there never was or will be a time God didn’t have them and that they are not distinct from God — both points with which I have no dispute. For the AAA view says more than that, it says they do not depend on Him for their existence and that He has no control whatever over their existence or over the fact that He possesses them. The traditional way of phrasing this premise has been: God’s attributes all exist necessarily, and necessarily God has them all (where “necessarily” means “could not possibly be otherwise” and “not alterable by anything,” God included). This premise I do have a dispute with, as I deny both that God’s attributes must be uncreated₃ because He is and that they are outside His control.

Yet another main premise of this view is that these attributes of God are all perfections, that is, they are the highest possible degrees of the properties ascribed to Him. Another way of putting this has been to say that God possesses His attributes in the infinite degree, so that His having them all makes Him the greatest possible being. This premise is further understood to mean that God possesses every such perfection however many there are, and whether or not we know of them. It is in this sense that God is called “infinite”; not to mean that all reality is included in Him (which is the Hindu/Buddhist sense of infinite), but to mean that He is infinitely perfect. Owing to the influence of St. Anselm, this point is often expressed by saying that God is the greatest possible being, so that His perfections are understood to be the highest degree of what Alvin Plantinga calls “great-making” properties.¹⁹ This premise, too, I find objectionable.

Finally, there is the premise that God has only perfections. This means that God not only possesses all the great-making attributes, but that nothing else is true of Him. He has all and only perfections; that is why He is the greatest possible being. Put another way: if God had properties that were less than perfections, He would not be the greatest conceivable being, for we could then conceive of a being with only perfections and it, not God, would thereby be the greatest being conceivable. Once again, I find this premise also to be highly objectionable.

The premises of this view have been so widespread for so long in Western theology that it is difficult for many theists brought up on them to imagine that there could be any serious objections to them, let alone that they could have any plausible alternative. Nevertheless, I will argue that there is an alternative view which is not only more than plausible, but which antedated St. Augustine. Rather than state this alternative view right away, however, I’m first going to raise some objections to the AAA premises sketched above. After that I will offer a contrasting sketch of the alternative in order to show how it avoids the difficulties of the AAA view. I will then defend that alternative, which is the view of God that was elaborated by the Cappadocian Fathers of the Greek Orthodox tradition, rediscovered in the west by Luther and Calvin in the sixteenth century, and championed by Karl Barth in the twentieth century (I’ll call this Cappadocian and Reformational position the C/R view for short). Please keep in mind as we proceed, that the reason for this excursion into philosophical theology is to show how and why the AAA view requires the cosmos to be explained reductionistically, while the C/R view of God forbids reduction. What I will argue, then, is that the AAA view of God is faulty and needs to be corrected, and that the corrections remove any theological reason for theists to retain reduction as a strategy for theories. That is the negative side of this critique. Its positive side will consist of showing how the C/R view of God not only avoids the difficulties of the AAA view, but also forbids rather than requires reduction as a strategy. Together, these two sides will constitute the whole of this religious critique of reduction. And it, along with the philosophical critique already offered, will conclude my case for embarking on a new, theistic, non-reductionist, program for theories.

 A.     An Assessment of the AAA View of God

Let’s start with the premise that all God’s attributes are to be understood  as perfections, the highest possible degrees of whatever properties it would take to make a being the greatest possible being. My first objection to this is to point out an important difference between the meaning of “perfect” as it is used in Greek philosophy and the Hebrew sense of that term as used by Bible writers. For no Bible writer ever used “perfect” to mean the highest degree of a property. The Hebrew sense of the term means “complete,” “completely,” or “unfailingly.” So when Jesus said to his disciples “You should be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” he was not admonishing them to be God! Rather, he was saying that they should be as completely (unfailingly) faithful to their end of the covenant as God is to His end of it. The fact is that no Bible writer ever ascribes to God the “highest possible degree” of a property; and to construe God’s attributes as identical with that pagan Greek idea is to have already imported a clearly Platonic notion into the interpretation of scriptures that are profoundly Hebraic documents.

No doubt saying God’s attributes are perfections and that God is the greatest conceivable being is intended as a compliment to God. After all, Plato had postulated a realm of perfections distinct from the world we inhabit, and his theory not only dominated the ancient world but has enormous influence still. So isn’t it not only harmless but imperative to propose that these perfections be ascribed to God? That way it isn’t an impersonal realm of many individual abstract entities that are divine per se, but rather the one true God who has all perfections as attributes of His nature.²⁰ Shouldn’t theists therefore be quick to affirm that God is the greatest possible being? The answer to this question is that although it may at first seem harmless to construe God’s attributes as Platonic perfections, and a compliment to God to refer to Him as the greatest possible being, these departures from the ways Bible writers speak of God actually have very serious consequences which are utterly unacceptable from the point of view of a number of scriptural teachings. I will return to this issue in more detail later, but for now think about just this one point: doesn’t calling God the “greatest possible being” require that there be standards for both greatness and possibility that are independent of God? Doesn’t it require that God be judged and measured by those standards? If so, then even if the conclusion is that God comes out at the top of the scale when judged by them, God has still been subjected to standards independent of Him. That is not a compliment to God, even if it’s intended to be. Rather, it’s an unintended denial of His unique per se divinity and His creatorship of every standard by which anything can be judged.

We could also ask why we should believe there are any such things as independently existing perfect justice, wisdom, moral goodness, etc. Why couldn’t it be instead that there is no highest possible degree of such properties just as there’s no last natural number? If there are no such things, then denying God has them does not slight God in any way; God is no less great for lacking perfections if there are no such things.

But my strongest objection to the existence of perfections is directed against the claim that each of them has necessary existence and so is not created₃ by God. You may recall that among the main AAA premises were the claims that each of the perfections has necessary existence, and necessarily God possesses them all. The first of these requires that each individual perfection has unconditional, independent reality while the second requires God to possess them. Taken together, these claims make God depend on realities He didn’t create and over which He has no control.

My argument against the first claim is one now familiar to you, as it is nothing other than the same thought experiment we performed to test the strategy of reduction for theories. There we saw the failure of every attempt so much as to frame an idea of any kind of properties and laws as existing independently of all the others. So I now want to apply that same thought experiment to the ideas of individual perfections. Try to think of, say, perfect justice in the splendid solitude of its alleged independent, necessary existence. Strip from your idea of it all connection to actions or states of persons in so far as they are quantitative, spatial, kinetic, physical, biotic, sensory, logical, historical, lingual, social, economic, aesthetical, ethical, or fiduciary (or whatever list of aspects you please). Is there anything then left of justice? If not, why suppose that there is any such thing as a quality of justice which has necessary, independent, existence? Keep in mind, please, that the view we are examining is a theory about how to understand God’s attributes. So the thought experiment counts against there being independent perfections in the same way it counted against there being independent aspects, namely, that the hypothesis of their independence can never be justified so long as attributing independence to them destroys the very idea of them.

Notice that it will not do to reply that the reason for thinking there are such things as necessarily existing perfections (despite our inability to form any idea of them) is that God’s justice, etc., must be perfect and must have independent existence because He does. That would be a circular argument in this context since precisely what is now in question is whether God’s attributes should be thought of as perfections in the technical sense derived from ancient Greek philosophy, and whether those attributes must be regarded as uncreated because God is. Notice, too, that my impending denial of both these points does not in any way deny that God is perfectly just to us in the Hebrew sense; God’s being unfailingly and completely just toward us does not have to be explained by saying He possesses the highest possible degree of a necessarily existing great-making property. It is equally accounted for by the way Bible writers speak of it, namely, that God’s justice is a free covenantal promise, a facet of His grace rather than of His being compelled by something not under His control. And such an understanding does not in the least undermine the teaching that He really is, and always will be, just in his dealings with us.

There is a further result the thought experiment yielded concerning aspects that also applies to ideas of the attributes of God. It is that since we can think of them only as connected, so far as we can know them they can’t exist apart from their connectedness to one another. So what would supply the connectedness on which they depend? In the case of God’s attributes the answer is more obvious than it is for aspects: their connectedness consists in all being attributes of God. But if they depend on their connectedness and their connectedness consists of their being true of God, then they do depend on God! So rather than having necessary, independent existence, they should be thought of as created₃ by God. This, as we shall see, is the very heart of the C/R position.

But isn’t this going too fast? Isn’t there yet another way to construe the AAA view? Why couldn’t we say that God’s attributes exist necessarily and necessarily God has them all without their being created₃ by God, since they are identical with God? That is, if they just are God, then there’s no problem left about how God possesses them; He doesn’t possess them, He is them. Wouldn’t this avoid any inconsistency with the doctrines that God alone is divine and that everything other than God exists because God wills it so?

This is, in fact, the position taken by both Anselm and Aquinas. They saw that if God’s perfections were thought of as independent of Him and necessarily possessed by Him, then God would be dependent on them. In other words, they realized that if God is defined as the being with all and only perfections (the greatest possible being), then God must have the perfections in order to be God. That is, they saw that if the perfections exist necessarily and are thus independent of God, then God would depend on something other than Himself in two senses. First, because having those perfections is essential to God, God couldn’t exist unless they did; and second because God’s character would be what it is because of perfections that exist independently of Him. Either way, God’s divinity, i.e., his non-dependence (they called it His “aseity”) would be denied.

Now Anselm and Aquinas were at one in regarding any denial of God’s aseity as unacceptable. They didn’t emend their view in the direction I just argued for, however. Rather than drop the contention that God’s attributes have necessary existence and instead take them as willed by God, they retained the necessary existence of the perfections but denied they are anything different from God. Thomas deals with the issue at greater length than Anselm, so it’s his version I’ll consider. (In fact, Thomas took this to be so important an issue that he began his major work with it.²¹) His solution of the problem is to propose that God be regarded as “simple.” By this he means that God is identical with the perfections that comprise His nature. According to this theory, then, God just is His nature. This gets him out of the bind of denying God’s divine aseity because he no longer needs to say that the perfections exist independently of God. They can still be said to exist necessarily since, according to his theory, we cannot distinguish God from His nature, or His nature from His existence, or His existence from His perfections. God just is the very same thing as His existence and His nature which is comprised of perfect goodness, justice, wisdom, etc.

But this, to put it mildly, is a desperate remedy. For one thing, if God is identical with His perfections, then His perfections must somehow be identical with one another. And that means God’s justice is actually the very same quality as His power, which is the same quality as His mercy, which is the same as his wisdom, which is the same as His love, etc. But that destroys the meaning of these terms! To say that they all name the same quality is to say that we don’t know what any of them mean. We simply have no idea whatever of justice that is the same as power, which is the same as mercy, for example. The result is that our language can’t tell us anything about God, and Thomas’ own view that our talk about God is analogical is swept away. If simplicity is true, our language conveys nothing that is even like what God is.

Bad as that result is, however, it’s not the only disaster to follow from the theory of simplicity. For if God is identical with His perfections, then not only are the perfections identical with one another but they are identical with God. And that makes God a single, undifferentiated, property! This consequence doesn’t merely destroy the possibility of explaining how true speech about God is possible, but makes everything scripture teaches about Him positively false. A property is not a person; it cannot do anything. A property cannot create, or love, or make covenantal promises. I conclude, therefore, that this solution to the difficulties with saying God possesses all and only perfections fails. They cannot be solved by identifying God with His attributes.

In his book Does God Have a Nature?, Alvin Plantinga considers several ways of construing Thomas’s simplicity theory and arrives at this same judgment with respect to all of them. He says, “Taken at face value, the Thomistic doctrine of divine simplicity seems entirely unacceptable. . . . It begins in a pious and proper concern for God’s sovereignty; it ends by flouting the most fundamental claims of theism.”²² Nevertheless, Plantinga too decides not to go in the direction of the C/R alternative because he interprets it to require logical and self-referential incoherencies. I will deal with those shortly. For now we must consider whether Plantinga’s own attempt to maintain the AAA view of God while rejecting simplicity can avoid the consequence of denying God’s aseity.

We have already seen that the main problem is to reconcile the aseity of God with the view that His attributes, along with the necessary truths of logic and math, have necessary existence.²³ Since that means they’d just have to exist no matter what, it makes them independent of God. Moreover, as we noted briefly above, it also seems to make God dependent on them in important ways. Having rejected Thomas’s proposal of simplicity, Plantinga rightly attempts to solve the difficulty by seeking a way to reverse that dependency. To do this he looks for a sense in which God’s attributes and the necessary truths of math and logic may be said to depend on Him despite the fact they exist necessarily. He does this by proposing that the necessary truths be regarded as ideas in God’s mind. On this proposal, he says, it is part of God’s nature to know and to affirm each of them:

This alone, Plantinga recognizes, would not solve the difficulty. To do the job needed, God’s affirming necessary truths would somehow have to make them depend on Him. So he finishes his book this way:

It is important to notice that in making this proposal Plantinga does not purport to have shown that his closing questions can in fact be answered affirmatively. Though subtle and closely reasoned, his concluding suggestion is thus no more than a hope. So if there are good reasons for supposing his questions can’t be answered affirmatively, we will then be left with a powerful case for abandoning the AAA view of God and examining the C/R view to see if it can be defended from the objections to it. There are two reasons that I think show that Plantinga’s questions must be answered negatively, given his view that God’s attributes are not identical with God but nevertheless have necessary existence.

The first is this: not all the necessary truths can be true because God affirms them, nor can they all be explained by, or grounded in, God’s knowing or affirming them. This is because on the AAA view of God, a great many of God’s attributes are ones He would have to possess in order to know or affirm anything. For example, God would have to be conscious in order to know or affirm anything. In that case, the necessary attribute of perfect consciousness couldn’t depend on God’s knowing or affirming it, since God would have to have consciousness in order to know or affirm He has it. For the same reason, God’s knowing or affirming it cannot be the ground of its existence or the explanation of the truth that it exists. Thus there is no plausible hope that this particular perfection can in some sense depend on God. Quite the reverse, since God must have it to be God, God’s aseity is thereby denied; perfect consciousness has the status of divinity per se, but God doesn’t.

Nor is consciousness the only attribute that couldn’t possibly depend in any sense on God’s affirming it. The property of logical self-identity would likewise have to be true of God for God to have (or be) a personal conscious mind. For the notion of a conscious mind to be meaningful at all, such an entity would have to be identical with itself. The necessary existence of this property too, therefore, cannot be said to depend on or be explained by or be grounded in God’s knowing or affirming it for the same reason God’s consciousness couldn’t be: it would already have to be true of God for God to know or affirm it. And since God’s being logically identical with Himself would depend in turn on the laws of logic, they too could not depend on God in any sense. As in the case of perfect consciousness, the laws of logic would thus be divine per se and God would not. Ditto for God’s numerical uniqueness. If it’s essentially true of God that there is only one such being, then God couldn’t exist unless the number 1 existed. So if God’s knowing and affirming that the number 1 necessarily exists depends on God’s existing, and if it is essential to God that He is numerically the only per se divine being, then the number 1 no more depends on God’s affirming it than it does on our affirming it. What happens instead, is that God also ends up dependent on there being numbers and mathematical laws, which are therefore divine per se while He is not.

There are other properties this point is equally true of, but it is needless to go on to name them. For if there is even one abstract property that (on the AAA view) would have to exist independently of God and which God would have to possess to be God, then not only is that property rendered divine per se, but God is thereby debarred from that status. That is exactly the result Aquinas feared and tried to avoid; and it is precisely what Plantinga also wanted to avoid. But unfortunately, neither of their proposals succeed in avoiding it.²⁶

But suppose there is a way to make some other Plantinga-like proposal work; suppose the apparent incompatibility between insisting God’s attributes exist necessarily and God’s aseity can be overcome. Would the AAA view then be home free? I think not. For there is another difficulty with this view that is truly insurmountable. It is this: according to the AAA position, God’s attributes (goodness, justice, or power, e.g.) exist as necessarily and are as uncreated as He is and are shared (in a lesser degree) by humans. The difficulty with this is that humans are thereby made to be (partly) divine because the qualities humans share with God would have to be as uncreated₃ in us as they are in God.²⁷

It will not help at this point to reply that the qualities humans possess are only like those God possesses since humans possess imperfect degrees of them while God possesses the infinite degree of them. Even if true, that is no help here because for two things to be alike there must be some respect in which they are alike, and whatever that respect is must be univocally true of them both. So, for example, if God is (perfectly) good and humans are (imperfectly) good, possessing the quality of goodness must be the respect in which they are the same. It would have to be the same quality of goodness that is possessed in a different degree if the term “good” is to have even an analogous meaning when used of humans and of God. Hence God and humans would both possess an uncreated₃ property. And the same would be true of all the other properties humans share with God.

But the consequence of requiring humans to be even partly divine is surely incompatible with the biblical doctrine of creation. In fact, the original sin is depicted in Genesis as the desire by humans to become divine! The AAA position thus amounts to saying that uncreated₃ features of God have been imparted to creatures, who are therefore precisely not merely creatures in so far as their possession of those properties is concerned. That the AAA position does say this, is not just my accusation but is admitted by Thomas. He says:  “ ‘God is good’ . . . means that what we call goodness in creatures exists in God in a higher way. Thus God is not good (merely) because he causes goodness, but rather goodness flows from him because he is good” (ST Ia q. 13, a. 2). And again: “ . . . God is known from the perfections that flow from him and are to be found in creatures yet which exist in him in a transcendent way”  (ST Ia q. 13, a. 3). Of course, this would still leave humans created₁₂₃ in other respects. Their existence, as well as their spatial, physical, biotic, and sensory qualities, e.g., would still have been created₁₂₃ by God. But humans would not be wholly creatures, which is exactly the way scripture depicts them. My objection, then, is simple but obvious: the AAA view makes humans to be uncreated₃ in a number of important respects.

To this I add two follow-up points. First, humans would not be the only creatures to possess independently existing (divine) qualities. Second, not all such properties can even be said to be possessed by creatures to a lesser degree than by God. As to the first; since God is one, e.g., numerical unity would have to be an uncreated property in God, and surely numerical unity is found in creatures as well as God. But wouldn’t any individual creature necessarily possess that property and do so in the same degree as God? Can there be degrees of being one? If not, there is something about rocks and snails that is as uncreated in them as it is in God and humans. This same point extends to other attributes as well. Can any creature fail to be logically self-consistent or to  be logically identical with itself? Surely not. But just as surely creatures can’t have these properties in any lesser degree than God! What sense does it make to talk of degrees of self-identity or of self-consistency? If it’s a necessary truth that nothing can both be true and not true of any creature in the same sense at the same time, then no creature can conform to that law to a lesser degree than God does. (God’s thoughts could be perfectly consistent while ours are not, of course. My point concerns God’s being, not His thought.) So once again the AAA view not only requires creatures to have attributes that are divine, but requires creatures to have them in the same degree that God does. This not only violates one of the premises of the AAA view itself, but, as I will shortly show, flies in the face of the biblical teaching of God as Creator.

We have now seen enough of the AAA view of God to be able to recognize how and why it supports and encourages the reduction strategy for theories: it does so precisely by holding that certain kinds of properties and laws found in the cosmos exist necessarily and are uncreated₃ while others are not. For if some properties and/or laws of the cosmos are created₃ while others are not, then what could make more sense than to theorize about creaturely reality by looking for the ways its contingent properties and laws depend on those that are uncreated₃? Indeed, how could it be avoided?

By contrast, if the attributes of God are willed by God — if they constitute His nature in the sense of expressing the character in which He has chosen to manifest Himself to humans — as the C/R view maintains, then none of the unacceptable results just discussed accrue. God’s attributes in no way compromise His aseity on the C/R view, as the being of God alone is divine per se. Nor does God’s sharing some of His attributes with humans thereby make humans and other creatures partly uncreated₃, since the attributes are in both cases the created products of God’s will. So if this alternative view of God can be shown to be internally coherent and to comport well with scripture, we will be justified in accepting it instead of the AAA view. And its acceptance will remove the theological reasons that have motivated theists to struggle with the pagan character of reduction theories for centuries. Reduction — even in its weak senses — could at last be abandoned altogether as it so richly deserves to be.

One final point. An objection often made to what I’ve  just said is that it  in effect denies that the necessary truths are really necessary. If God willed (created₃) the laws of math and logic, then they don’t hold “no matter what” but hold if and only if God wills and sustains them. This means, says the objection, that they aren’t truly necessary, in which case we have no basis whatever for reasoning about anything. Since that outcome can’t be right, there must be something seriously wrong with the proposal that the necessary truths are willed by God.

There are several sides to this objection against God having created₃ the necessary truths, and I’ll deal with only one of them here. (I will return to it later in order to treat another more complex side of it.) The side I’ll deal with now is the claim that unless these truths are themselves uncaused and unpreventable they don’t truly express relations that are necessary. My reply is that this objection rests either on a serious equivocation upon the term “necessary” or is a straightforward non sequitur. The sense in which, say, a logical or mathematical law needs to be a necessary truth for it to be reliable for our reasoning is that it states a relation which holds unfailingly, such that nothing in creation could alter the fact that it holds. That is, it needs to be the case that if one state of affairs is true, then necessarily some other state of affairs must be (or can’t be) true. The necessity involved need only be a feature of the relation holding for whatever the law governs. For example, we say that if we have (the quantity) 

Of course, the laws of math and logic are also the laws that govern our thought processes as well as the things we think about. For that reason we cannot conceive of such laws not holding for the things, properties, and states of affairs we find them to govern. But nothing about our not being able to conceive of things differently is in the least incompatible with the belief that God called into being the entire cosmos in all its aspects, such that without His having done so there would be no entities, properties, or laws at all. (As I said, we’ll return to this issue later, and will offer a fuller reply to this criticism under Objection 3 to the C/R position.)

How, then, should the C/R alternative be explicated? Rather than go right into an exposition of the thinkers who developed it, I want to start instead with its biblical basis. Then I’ll briefly recount how a number of its advocates have stated it, and end with offering replies to some of the objections most frequently lodged against it.

B.     Pancreationism

My central objection to the AAA view amounts to taking the biblical doctrine of creation in the widest possible sense, the sense that holds everything found in the cosmos to have been created₃ by God. So we first need to see whether there’s a biblical basis for that, or whether when scripture says God created “all things” it can plausibly be taken the way the AAA view suggests. That is, can it mean only that God created concrete entities but not the (so called) abstract entities?

There is no doubt that the biblical writers do assert God’s creatorship of the world of everyday experience. The sun, moon, stars, along with the earth and the life forms that inhabit it, are all explicitly said to have been created₁₂₃ and to be sustained by God. Moreover, these writers teach that this creating was not, at first, simply the forming of some pre-existing material that was already there; it was a bringing into existence out of nothing, not mere cosmic interior decoration. So what about the expression “all things”? Is it true that this is at best a rough expression, too imprecise to be of value to the issues before us? Is it used by Bible writers only to refer to such concrete objects   of everyday perception as are specifically mentioned in Genesis? If so, the prevailing theological tradition could be right when it says that certain features of the created cosmos may be uncreated₃. And in that case the biblical doctrine of creation will indeed be too vague to provide a basis for objecting to the AAA view of God. On the other hand, if the doctrine of creation is stated in scripture in stronger terms — if it, for example, amounts to saying that God brought into existence everything other than himself such that there is nothing uncreated about what he brought into existence — then the prevailing AAA doctrine of God’s attributes is indeed in need of a serious overhaul. Moreover, such an overhaul, taken in conjunction with what we’ve previously seen scripture to teach about the non-neutrality of all knowledge and truth, would mandate the abandonment of reduction as a strategy for theories.

Before examining the relevant texts, let me say at once that I agree that the scriptures are written in ordinary language and do not reflect technical concepts of science or philosophy. So I agree that we cannot expect in advance that they will address the existence of abstract entities. But there is no reason to suppose that only abstract technical language could express the claim that everything about the cosmos has been called into existence by God and that there are no exceptions. (Indeed, my last sentence just did exactly that!) So it is at least possible that scripture could teach precisely that point of view even if it is devoid of technical language. The point that it’s in ordinary language is not, therefore, decisive. Neither is the point that we can’t expect, in advance, that it will say things relevant to the status of realities discovered by abstraction. We shouldn’t be making up our minds in advance about what scripture can and can’t say about anything! (Surely it’s a surprise to many theists that it says all knowledge and truth are impacted by knowing God, for example.) What  is needed are not hunches in advance about what to expect scripture to say, but a careful examination of what it in fact does say. In particular, we need an examination of how it uses the expression “all things,” including what those uses can be seen to presuppose by comparing them with one another.

Another misguided attempt to settle the issue in advance is the simplistic argument that since God is said to have created all things, then the meaning of that expression alone shows it refers only to concrete objects. This will not work because the word “thing” cannot carry any such interpretive weight. It cannot imply God’s creating does not extend to abstract entities for the simple reason that the word “things” does not occur in the Hebrew or Greek expressions translated into English as “all things.” In each of the biblical languages there is only one word meaning simply “all.” The terms themselves are therefore indefinite with respect to the issue before us so that their extension can only be settled by examining their use; their lexical meanings alone will not suffice.

To start our examination of “all things,” we can notice that in several places the Hebrew scriptures speak of God as sovereign over the laws (bounds or limits) which govern the world (cf. Ps. 119:89-91 with Ps. 148:6). They are part of the “all things” said to be his servants. They are also mentioned as   the order (or ordinances) of creation which are the means by which God rules creation (Jer. 31:35, 36; 33:25; Job 38:33). Moreover, the abiding reliability of the order of the world — the order we speak of as laws — is said in those texts, and in Genesis 8:22, to depend on God. On the biblical view, then, God is not trustworthy because some laws found in creation can be used to show Him so, but just the reverse: the laws of creation can be relied upon just because God promises to keep them in force. Since the orderliness of the cosmos is specifically included among God’s creations in this way, it is already clear that the expression “all things” does not refer only to concrete objects. Yet other statements, such as Isaiah 45:7, also support this last point. There God is said to create the course of history, including whether there is peace or disaster. So once again, the “things” which depend on God are not just concrete objects.

The New Testament extends the reference of “all things” even further. God is said to be the creator of every sort of principle and power (Eph. 1:10; 3:9-10), of space (Rom. 8:38-39), and, yes, even of time (2 Tim. 1:9; Titus 1:2; Jude 1:25; Rev. 10:5-7).²⁸ And there are even stronger statements than these. In Colossians 1:15-16 God is said to have created all things “in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.” Now since everything whatever — including any abstract entity — is either visible or not, the literal meaning of this passage logically entails that nothing about creation is uncreated.²⁹ Nor is this remark alone in requiring “all things” to extend to everything other than God. In Romans 1:18-25, St. Paul speaks of false religion as the changing of the truth about God into a lie so that people “worship and serve something created instead of the creator.” Here the creator-creature distinction is spoken of as exhaustive; everything is either God or something God created₃.

Finally, consider 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 as compared with Colossians 1:17. In the latter passage Christ (in his divine nature) is said to be the one on whom “all things” depend, while the former says that in God’s final kingdom Christ will rule “all things” except for God himself. It seems quite natural to understand “all things” as having the same extension in each case: Christ rules what depends on him. But if that is right, then we have the explicit teaching that nothing about creation₂ is either uncreated₃ or not ruled by Christ except for God Himself. Thus the extension of “all things” is established as everything other than God, visible or invisible!

No doubt the defender of the AAA view will still find this unconvincing. Since the only abstract entities specifically mentioned in these texts are laws, space, and time, they don’t specifically include the attributes of God Himself. So let us now look at a remarkable passage of scripture which not only speaks of a property in abstraction, but ascribes it to God as an attribute and yet asserts it to have been created₃ by Him! It is found in Proverbs 8:22-31 where, in a personification, wisdom is represented as saying of herself:

 Now it is never good procedure to rest too much on any single passage    of scripture, so I am not about to claim that this text alone is sufficient to establish the position I’m arguing for. What is significant here is not this text in isolation, but the way it beautifully fits with all the other texts that speak of God’s having created₃ all things. Moreover, poetic though it is, it is one of the rare scriptural hints about how God possesses his qualities. Thus even all by itself, the passage is too striking to ignore. For, even allowing for poetic license, it seems clear that no one holding the AAA view of God could have written these lines (Anselm couldn’t have written them roaring drunk, let alone sober!). It says that wisdom is possessed by God himself, is also present with — and thus shared by — humans, but nevertheless clearly insists wisdom was brought forth (created₃) by God at “the beginning of His way, the first of His works of old” — a clear reference to the creation account in Genesis. Thus while it neither denies that God shares wisdom with humans nor that there never was a time God didn’t have it, it does deny that God’s wisdom must be uncreated₃ because He is.

What is even more important is the fact that the Proverbs text does not stand alone in yet another sense. It is not the only place where scripture ascribes to God an attribute He created₃. The New Testament speaks in this way concerning no less a doctrine than the Incarnation. It teaches that Jesus was fully a human but was also the incarnation of God. It says that God now bears all His relations to the cosmos through him, including the relation of sustaining it in existence (Col. 1:17). And it seems obvious that God didn’t do that prior to having created₁₂₃ Jesus. Put another way, the second person of the Trinity at one point in time became incarnated in the human Jesus; thus that relation, while true of God, is a relation that would not exist did not God will to bring it about. And since that relation is explicitly said to have cancelled neither the humanity of Jesus nor the fact that he was one person, the most obvious way to understand it is to say that God took into Himself the entire person of Jesus Christ. In the incarnation, then, God becomes the divine side of Jesus just as Jesus becomes the human side of God. Many Christian theologians of various stripes and affiliations have recognized this way of formulating the doctrine. Aquinas, e.g., affirms that in the incarnation “God became man” and “God assumed human flesh” (ST III, q. 1, a. 2) (where “flesh” is obviously a synecdoche for the whole human). And Gregory of Nyssa says that according to this doctrine the Creator was also the Savior who became incarnate by “taking into himself humanity in its completeness” (Eun. 3.3.51).

The cumulative effect of all this textual evidence provides powerful support for the strict interpretation of the doctrine of creation — the view I’m calling “pancreation.” So I find the evidence to be that the Bible is not silent on whether anything is uncreated₃ other than God, including numbers, sets, properties, relations, laws, propositions, or any of the other denizens of Plato’s barnyard. None can be regarded as uncreated₃. Bible writers simply do not allow for exceptions, not even for the attributes ascribed to God Himself. In fact, the texts we have examined not only give the clear impression of trying to teach pancreation, but it is hard to see how they could have made it plainer even if they had used technical language. Therefore, owing to the way Bible writers use the expression “all things,” and the way that Proverbs 8 and the doctrine of the Incarnation converge on how God possesses His wisdom and incarnates Himself in Christ, I propose that all God’s attributes be understood as true of Him in this way.

On this position, then, it is not the case that humans are in the image of God and can know God because they are partly divine and share some of God’s uncreated properties. Rather, humans are in God’s image and can know God because God has assumed to Himself created₃ relations and properties we know from His having also placed them in the world and in us. Moreover, God has created and placed those relations and properties in the cosmos for the very purpose of having them make it possible for us to understand Him. It is these that constitute His revealed nature, the nature by which He has (as St. Basil put it) “adapted Himself to our understanding.” It is this accommodated, revealed nature of God of which humans are the reflective image.³¹ So while this view affirms that God really has both the relations to creatures and the qualities that scripture ascribes to Him, it insists that He did not have to have them to exist. Rather, they are true of Him and constitute His nature because He freely willed it so. Thus they comprise God’s real and only nature although they are all created by Him, and comprise the nature He has sworn will be His forever. In fact, scripture ascribes to God properties of virtually every aspect of creation. He is, e.g., quantitatively one (Deut. 6:4, Isa. 44:6), spatially omnipresent (Ps. 139:7– 12), and physically all-powerful (Exod. 15:6, 1 Chron. 29:11, 12; Ps. 62:11, Heb. 1:3). He is also biologically the living God and our Father (2 Sam. 22:47, Jer. 4:2, Ps 42:2, Rev. 7:2), and sensorily He sees and hears us (Ps. 17:6, 33:18, 34:15); logically he is all-knowing (Job 37:16, Ps. 44:21, Isa. 46:10, Luke 16:15, 1 John. 3:20), economically He is said to own the world (Lev. 25:23, 1 Chron. 29:11, Job 41:11), etc. These are all characteristics God has taken into Himself in order to make Himself known through the covenants He has offered to all humanity.

Moreover, the covenantal form of God’s revelation provides an additional reason in favor of this view of His revealed nature. For the idea of a covenant is that of an oath of agreement by which God has made certain demands and promises, among which are His promises to be faithful, just, loving, merciful, etc. But it would be absurd for God to promise to be these things if he just couldn’t help being them as the AAA view insists. If that were the case, we would expect scripture to say that God is merciful, or faithful, or just, not because He swears to be but because he is simply unable to be anything else.³² So while His promising to be these things makes perfect sense on the C/R view, from the AAA view such promises make no more sense than it would for you or I to promise our friends and loved ones that tomorrow we will not become triangles or shades of the color blue.

Here, then, is a view of God’s nature that has scriptural backing, is consistent with God’s aseity, and also avoids falling foul of the experiment in thought that shows why we can’t even frame the idea of a perfection in its alleged independent existence.³³ It is more consonant with the doctrine of creation, the image of God in humans, and the overall covenantal framework of scripture. And it does all this simply by taking God’s attributes as relations (and properties of relations) He wills, instead of as perfections with independent existence over which He has no control. On this view His attributes therefore express His grace rather than being the products of a set of Platonic necessities that compel Him to be what He is and do what He does.

10.5             THE CAPPADOCIAN AND REFORMATIONAL THEOLOGICAL TRADITIONS

It might seem to some readers superfluous at this point to include even a brief account of theologians who held the view of God sketched above. After all, the truth or falsehood of the position doesn’t depend on who favored it, so why bother? But since this view is little known and so often misunderstood, it may be important to other readers to learn that it has been held by a good number of men and women whose study of the scriptures led them to abandon the neo-platonic interpretation of God’s attributes. So I will offer a brief account of how this view of God has been stated by some of its most outstanding advocates, beginning with the Cappadocians: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Naziansus (Basil’s brother-in-law), Gregory of Nyssa (Basil’s brother), and Basil’s sister Macrina, who not only contributed to the body of work they produced but edited the works of all of them.

The Cappadocians all stressed the point that God’s uncreated being, aside from His accommodations to creation, is utterly “incomprehensible to reason” and that whatever can be rationally understood thereby “belongs to creation.”³⁴ The point is put in various ways by each of them, but the most famous is    the oft-quoted statement of Basil, “We do not know what God is, but what God is not and how He relates to creatures.” They denied that God’s being is to be identified with His attributes³⁵ and asserted instead that “Every name, whether invented by human custom or handed down by the scriptures . . . does not signify what [God’s] nature is in itself.” Rather, “These names are true of God because they refer to His energies, the activities in which God engages in relating to creatures.”³⁶ Of God’s own being, says Nyssa, “we know nothing else but this one thing, that God is.”³⁷

This is further explained to mean that — God’s revealed adaptation to humanity aside — the being of God was “entirely free of qualities”; in other words, there are no properties found in creation and knowable to humans that comprise a nature God can’t help having (contra Aquinas, see note 27). In support of this point, they held that the ordinary rules of predication “do not apply to the God of the universe” in that negative assertions made of God denote “the absence of noninherent qualities rather than the presence of inherent qualities.”³⁸ In other words, to deny a property to God is not at the same time to assert God necessarily possesses its complement, as would be the case for creatures. So, e.g., God’s own uncreated being is nontemporal, since God created time. But that isn’t the same as God’s being essentially atemporal such that God could not take on temporality and act in time. Rather, the being of God transcends every property and its complement, which is why God is free to stand in whatever relations He wills, and those relations may have whatever properties He wills. It is also why such revealed ascriptions can be true of God and yet not inform us about His being “in itself” aside from His accommodations to us. Thus, they insisted, “We say that we know the greatness of God, the power of God, the wisdom of God, the goodness of God . . . but not the very being of God.”³⁹ So Basil says, “ . . . in the various manifestations of God to humanity, God both adapts to humanity and speaks in human language.”⁴⁰ Commenting on this position, the great fourteenth-century expositor of the Cappadocian position, St. Gregory Palamas, remarks: “[God’s] energies do not comprise the being of God; it is He who gives them their existence . . . ” Thus, “God by a superabundance of goodness towards us [although] transcendent over all things, incomprehensible and inexpressible, consents to become particable [sic] to our intelligence” and “in His voluntary condescension imposes on Himself a really diversified mode of existence.”⁴¹

This position, the Cappadocians said, is to be applied even to the doctrine of the Trinity. God’s own being is beyond one and many or any numerability. As Pelikan puts it, “These three names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were, then, not names of [God’s being] . . . they were rather Names of ‘relationship,’ of the relationship of God to humanity and of the relationship of the divine [persons] to one another.”⁴² Since this relation existed before all time and is not anything other than God-in-relation, it is uncreated₁₂. But in as much as that relation involves such features as number, personality, love, etc., it is still to be seen as the everlasting created₃ expression of Himself, which God has chosen to bring about in order to reveal Himself to us.

Finally, the Cappadocians explicitly included the necessary truths among the “all things visible and invisible” that God created₂₃. The necessary truths, they said, are necessary for creatures not for God, and they explicitly mentioned number as part of the cosmic order “devised as a symbol indicative of the quantity of objects.”⁴³ In this connection, part of Palamas’ objection to the Thomist position was precisely that it made logical laws govern God by regarding them as part of God’s being. Palamas insists instead that they were brought about by God and so do not have “absolute value.”⁴⁴

Lossky has summarized the position as follows:

The negative names, without revealing the divine [being] to us, set aside everything that is alien to it. . . . Thus in saying God is good, we are declaring that there is no room in him for evil. . . . Other names, having a truly positive meaning, refer to the divine operations or energies; they lead us to know God not in his inaccessible essence but in what surrounds Him. Wherefore it is true both that the pure heart sees God and that no one has ever seen God . . . [because] he . . . becomes visible by his energies.⁴⁵

Perhaps it would help at this point if I use Lossky’s expression that God “surrounds” Himself with His energies to introduce a refinement into the schema used in chapter 3 to represent the biblical dependency arrangement. Figure 5 below is offered to reflect both the biblical idea of pancreation and the idea of God’s accommodation to creatures, following the model suggested by Proverbs 8 and the doctrine of the Incarnation.