God and agency: A point-by-point response to Kristor

He called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken.

-- John 10:35

This is a response to Kristor's Orthosphere post "God is Not Like Other Creators Such as We," expanded from a comment I left there. Kristor defends the traditional Supergod thesis and maintains that it is consistent with real human agency ("free will").

Since this post will basically be a sustained attack on the sort of Christian orthodoxy Kristor represents, let me make it clear at the outset that, while I obviously consider metaphysical and theological questions to be of great importance, I do not believe that they define Christianity. Being a true Christian is essentially a matter of love, loyalty, and taking the side of God and his Christ. It is something of which Christ said little children are not only capable but particularly capable, and therefore it has nothing to do with being a competent theologian or metaphysical philosopher. I believe that there have been not only true Christians but saints with a wide variety of metaphysical and theological beliefs -- which is emphatically not to say that all such beliefs are "equally true," but rather that erroneous beliefs and misconceptions are part and parcel of the human condition and do not disqualify one as a Christian. We must be careful not to conflate the categories heretic and apostate. So I acknowledge Kristor as a true Christian. And while, at the object level, I obviously believe that my own theological beliefs are right and his are wrong -- that is what it means for them to be my beliefs -- at the meta level I recognize that we know in part, we prophesy in part. How dim, how confused, how partial and even ludicrous must be a sheep's conception of the nature, origin, and inner life of its shepherd -- and yet his sheep know his voice, and that is what matters: not to know all the facts about God, but to know God; not to have true beliefs about him, but to be true to him.

Now, on with the sustained attack! The indented words are Kristor's, interspersed with my non-indented responses.

To think that God is limited to the same sort of creation that is possible to us stems from a category error about God, that treats him as a being like us.

To put God and Man in two utterly different and irreconcilable categories is to challenge an absolutely central Christian belief: that Jesus Christ is both Man and God. Jesus also taught that God is our Father, that we, too, are children of God -- "and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ" (Rom. 8:17). As I have written elsewhere, if God and Man are utterly different categories, then to say that a particular man is God -- not God disguised as a man, but really a man and really God -- is just as nonsensical as saying that a particular zebra is time.

We creatures can’t create free agents. To think that we can do so is the conceit at the root of strong AI. So, none of our creations can have a jot of freedom. They all express and do only our will, and not their own – however recalcitrant they might appear now and then.

On this we are agreed. Our machines do, ideally, only what we design them to do, and the occasional "recalcitrance" mentioned by Kristor is a result of the fact that we are not the sole cause of the machine's nature and functioning. We make it from pre-existing materials whose nature we can modify only within limits, and it operates in the context of a pre-existing world which provides many influences and inputs that are beyond our control. If it were possible to create a machine from nothing -- and to create not only the machine but the entire world in which it exists and operates -- then that machine would necessarily express and do only the will of its creator.

Now, it is not unusual to hear from critics of Christianity, from the New Atheists, and from apostates of various sorts, that if God created us ex nihilo, as Christians all – following Genesis 1 and John 1 – agree, then we are to him as our tools are to us: what seem to us then like our own acts are really just his acts, that we carry out the way that a computer program performs calculations we would and could perform ourselves, given time; so we have no real agency, no true freedom.

And Mormons! And Romantic Christians! But Kristor presumably classifies us as non-Christian apostates, since he states that all Christians believe that God created us ex nihilo. This doctrine is of course not in the Bible in any unambiguous form, as the proof-texts he cites demonstrate. The verb translated as create in Genesis 1 means primarily to fashion something out of existing materials, and the opening verse may also be translated, "When God began to create the heaven and the earth, the earth was without form and void" -- meaning that he created from chaos, not from nothing at all. John 1 is even more poetic and ambiguous, and it explains "all things were made by him" by adding "without him was not anything made that was made" -- leaving open the possibility that some things were never "made" at all. Of course these passages are consistent with ex nihilo creation as well, and I am not trying to use them as proof-texts of my own. My point is that the ex nihilo theory is just that, a metaphysical theory, and is very far from being a central and undeniable Christian teaching.

They point out, rightly, that the notion we are not free contradicts all our experience; and, furthermore, makes both sin and the sinner’s choice of repentance and his turn to the Lord the motions of a robot – which renders Christianity radically incoherent.

Agreed.

It is a telling argument, which has motivated many minds to depart from faith. But it fails, because it extrapolates the scope of our powers – in particular, our incompetence to create free agents – to God.

No. Extrapolation is empirical and inductive: We observe that no known being is able to create a free agent, and therefore in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we assume that all unknown beings have a similar inability. No one is making that kind of argument. The argument that no one, not even God, can create a free agent is not an extrapolation from empirical observations but rather a metaphysical argument from first principles. In fact, free will is not empirically observable, except arguably in oneself, and is therefore not susceptible to the sort of extrapolative reasoning Kristor imputes to people like me. We don't observe that none of the machines we create have free will (perhaps my computer freely chooses to do what it is programmed to do, except when it instead chooses to malfunction); we assume it on metaphysical grounds. And those grounds are not dependent on the premise that the machine was created by a finite and contingent being.

That extrapolation doesn’t work. If God is as men have always construed him – is not, i.e., a mere contingent being, thus himself caused by some other(s), at most a god like Apollo – then he is in an utterly different category of being than any other.

No, this does not follow. From the idea that God is an unmoved mover it does not follow that he is the only unmoved mover and thus "in an utterly different category of being." To have free will just is to be an unmoved mover, the terminus of chains of causation, one who acts without being caused to do so by anything or anyone else.

Classical theology essentially argues that agency must exist, because otherwise nothing would ever happen since no chain of causation would ever get started (the world would be "all dominoes and no fingers"), and concludes that there must be a First Cause to set everything in motion. Combining this insight with the reality of human free will, though, we can postulate that God is (in this respect) the same sort of being as we are -- namely, a free agent with the ability to initiate causal chains.

(Of course there is still an obvious sense in which God is, from our perspective, "in a class of his own," making it foolish to extrapolate the details of his nature from those of our own -- but, as I have said, extrapolation is not actually what we are doing in this case.)

Then from the creative limitations of such beings as we, we may not infer *anything at all* about his creative power. And there is no reason whatever to think that a being who (unlike contingent beings such as we) is necessary – and as necessary thus also eternal and the ultimate, first, unmoved mover and cause of all other things, ergo infinitely greater than we, with powers categorically different from and greater than ours – could not create free agents like us, the angels, gods, and demons. Nothing we might infer from our own powers as contingent and thus limited causal agents could possibly warrant such a conclusion about a causal agent who is unlimited.

Again, it is not an inference based on the assumption that God has similar limitations to our own. I doubt whether anyone would really reason in that way, assuming that if we mortals are unable to do a particular thing, then God -- a being vastly more powerful than ourselves -- is likely also unable to do it. Even those like myself who do not presuppose an "omnipotent" Supergod would never confidently assert that any particular thing is impossible for God unless it is logically impossible, impossible even in principle. Extrapolating from our own empirically observed limitations would be silly.

Here's why I believe that God cannot create free agents from nothing. If I am a free agent, then my actions at least are not caused by God and do not come from God. If they were caused by God, they would be his actions, not mine, and I would not be an agent. Therefore, if I am a free agent (or if anyone is), it follows that God is not, as Kristor calls him the "cause of all other things." He didn't create absolutely everything out of absolutely nothing, because at least some things (my free actions) are not his work. They come from somewhere else -- and obviously, if they are truly my actions, what they come from is me. Therefore, however true it may be to say that God is my Father and Creator, he didn't create everything about me, and he didn't create me from nothing. Some aspect of myself comes from outside God and God's creation, is an unmoved mover in its own right -- and is, in that way, like God, a god -- very much "with a small g" for the time being, but potentially a joint-heir with Christ.

None of this is comprehensible within Kristor's metaphysics, with its assumption that God is "necessary" and everything else is "contingent." I reject that whole system of classifying beings, since necessity just-is inherently relative and contingent. Everything which is necessarily true has the form of an if-then: If a is part of b, then b is necessarily greater than a; if P is true, then the negation of P is necessarily false; and so on. Absolute necessity, where the word absolute is used literally, is nonsense. The only explanation of God's supposed "necessary existence" that I have ever seen is Anselm's tautological observation that if God didn't exist, God wouldn't be God -- an example of contingent necessity (for all x, if x is God then x exists) fallaciously presented as absolute, and equally applicable to everything, since every predicate presupposes existence. I attribute the existence of God, and other agents, not to "necessity" but to agency. At bottom, each agent -- each source of free acts, the irreducible core at the heart of each Self or Soul -- exists because it chooses to. (Once an agent exists, it is impossible for it to choose not to exist, so in that sense agents do have a sort of "necessary existence." For more on all this, see my post "On the origin of agents by means of -- agency.") To refuse to accept agency as the ultimate reason for anything, to insist that it be explicable in terms or chance and necessity, is to accept metaphysical premises whose logical conclusion is that agency does not exist.

Which is fortunate, because from that conclusion much incoherence follows. To take just one of them: if our creator is a being like us, then we are beings like him, and so are Moloch, Ahriman, and Azazel. In that case, there are no categorically authoritative moral laws: reality is then rather a moral chaos, or at best a mobocracy, in which the choices and preferences of Lucifer, Adam, and Stalin are just as legitimate as those of YHWH.

If God is "a being like us" in the Osbornean sense of being "just a slob like one of us," just another being with nothing in particular to distinguish him from any other, then of course it does follow that he has no particular moral authority. But no one is making any such claim; if God does not mean, at minimum, "a being vastly greater than any of us," the word has no meaning. Kristor is actually talking about God being "like us" in one very specific sense: that he cannot create a free agent, and neither can we. Is that what makes God a source of "categorically authoritative moral laws" -- his ability to create free agents out of nothing? If there is any logical relationship at all between those two things, it is not exactly an obvious one.

What does make God a source of categorically authoritative moral laws? Well, that's a question to be answered by those who share Kristor's basic metaphysical framework. My own has no more use for "categorically authoritative moral laws" than it has for necessary vs. contingent beings. Morality, like existence, is not about absolute necessity but about agency. 

Kristor apparently believes that everyone has an absolute moral duty to serve God because God has characteristics x, y, and z (including, I gather, the ability to create free agents). My own understanding of morality is that of Joshua: "And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve" (Josh. 24:15). I love, serve, and align myself with God not because I feel myself bound by some categorical moral duty -- some absolute ought magicked up out of is-statements about God by the same logical legerdemain that pretends to derive God's very existence from the law of non-contradiction -- but because I choose to do so.

But, but, but -- isn't that moral chaos? Doesn't that mean that Satan's choices are just as legitimate as God's? Well -- yes. That's why God allows Satan to be Satan and allows us to choose to serve Satan rather than God if we wish. In human society, of course, enforcing a moral consensus is often politically necessary or expedient -- but, as Kristor himself has observed, it would be the height of folly to assume that these same human necessities apply to God. Ultimately, from God's point of view, everyone -- even Satan -- has an absolute "right" to do whatever he wishes. Ultimately, morality really is relative -- relative to one's chosen goal or end. If your goal is Heaven, you should follow Jesus Christ. If your goal is the cessation of all suffering, you should follow the Buddha. If your goal is hell, you should follow the devil. There's no arguing with those ultimate choices; God respects them, and so do I. The only absolutely wrong moral choices are the refusals to choose, the self-defeating attempts to have one's cake and eat it: "Eat, drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God . . . yea, lie a little, take the advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this; . . . and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God" (2 Ne. 28:8).

To think that God is the same sort of being as we – as the king is the same sort of being as his subjects, or as the father is the same sort of being as his son – is to reduce him to our sort of being; and that is to dethrone him qua God, and make him a thing among other things. And that ruins Christianity – ruins all other religions whatever, indeed ruins religion per se; for, it is to suppose that there is no being ultimately worthy of worship, but rather only this or that godling or daimon, whose wrath we must somehow contrive to appease.

As I have already said, "that God is the same sort of being as we . . . as the father is the same sort of being as his son" -- an idea which Kristor rejects because it "ruins Christianity" -- actually is Christianity. The whole point of Christianity is that Jesus Christ, a man, is the Son of God and is the same sort of Being as his Father. There is a religion that teaches that God is utterly and categorically different from man and that to call any man the Son of God is a blasphemy at which "the heavens almost rupture therefrom and the earth splits open and the mountains collapse in devastation" (Sura 19), but that religion is not Christianity.

As for the whole business of "worship" -- and the underlying metaphysical distinctions between dulia and latria and all that -- this is yet another thing that belongs to Kristor's metaphysical world and not my own. I cannot provide my own reasons for why God alone is "ultimately worthy of worship" any more than I can give my own account of "categorically imperative moral laws"; that is to be argued about by people who accept the assumptions that give the question meaning. I will say, though, that to equate all veneration of anyone other than Supergod with "contriving to appease the wrath of a daimon" is offensive and silly and makes no sense even within Kristor's framework. Would he say that the Virgin Mary, say, is capable of creating free agents? And since she is not, does it follow that she can be described as "a thing among another things," or a "daimon, whose wrath we must somehow contrive to appease"? The whole thing is a non sequitur.

Although this whole post is framed as a response to Kristor's, it should be clear by now that my disagreement with him really comes down to having an entirely different set of metaphysical assumptions, and that any engagement or "debate" between people who inhabit such different philosophical universes is basically impossible. I don't expect him to respond to my points or anything like that. I found his post stimulating because it made me think about why I disagree and helped me clarify some of my own metaphysical beliefs to myself. Perhaps my own post will be similarly useful to someone else.