Olson contra classical theism

A reader asks me to comment on this blog post by Baptist theologian Prof. Roger Olson, which pits what Olson calls “intuitive” theology against “Scholastic” theology in general and classical theism in particular, with its key notions of divine simplicity, immutability, and impassibility.  Though one cannot expect more rigor from a blog post than the genre allows, Olson has presumably at least summarized what he takes to be the main considerations against classical theism.  And with all due respect to the professor, these considerations are about as weak as you’d expect an appeal to intuition to be.

Given his emphasis on what he claims we would come to think about the divine nature “just reading the Bible,” you might suppose that Olson’s objections are sola scriptura oriented.  However, in a combox remark he says: “I didn't say it's not true just because it's not in the Bible.  My argument was that it conflicts with the biblical portrayal of God…” (emphasis added). So, what arguments does Olson give to show that there is such a conflict?  None that is not fallacious, as far as I can see.

Consider Olson’s populist appeal to what the “ordinary lay Christian, just reading his or her Bible” would come to think.  I certainly agree with him that the average reader without a theological education would not only not arrive at notions like divine simplicity, immutability, etc., but would even reject them.  But so what?  By itself this is just a fallacious appeal to majority.  Moreover, Olson does not apply this standard consistently.  The average reader might also suppose that God has a body -- for example, that he has legs with which he walks about the garden of Eden in the cool of the day (Genesis 3:8), eyes and eyelids (Psalm 11:4), nostrils and lungs with which he breathes (Job 4:9), and so forth.  But Olson acknowledges that God does not have a body.  Since Olson gives us no explanation of why we should trust what the ordinary reader would say vis-à-vis divine simplicity, etc. but not trust him where divine incorporeality is concerned, we seem to have a fallacy of special pleading. 

One of Olson’s readers points out that Olson himself “repudiate[s] much of the biblical portrayal of God,” such as God’s “commanding capital punishment,” and asks how Olson can do so given his appeal to consistency with scripture.  Olson’s response is: “Surely, if you've read me very much, you know the answer -- Jesus.”  But of course, that is no answer at all, since whether Jesus would approve of Olson’s position (vis-à-vis capital punishment or classical theism) or that of Olson’s critic is itself part of what is at issue, so that the reply begs the question.  (Olson also tells the reader -- who, quite rightly, wasn’t satisfied with Olson’s response -- that the reader intends only “to challenge and argue and harass” Olson and lacks a “teachable spirit.”  What Olson does not do is actually answer the reader’s objection.) 

Then there is Olson’s characterization of classical theism, which is a straw man.  He accuses the classical theist of “start[ing] down the road of de-personalizing” God.  But Scholastic classical theists argue that we must attribute intellect and will to God, and these are the essential personal attributes.  To be sure, Olson also says that “feelings and emotions are part of being personal,” that classical theism portrays God as “unemotional,” and that “scholastic theology tends to portray the image of God as reason ruling over emotion, being apathetic.”  But this is a tangle of confusions.  First of all, by itself the claim that “feelings and emotions are part of being personal” just begs the question.  Second, the claim that there is some connection between “reason ruling over emotion” and “being apathetic” is just a non sequitur. 

Third, the claim that classical theism makes God out to be “unemotional” is ambiguous.  If by an “emotion” we mean a state that comes upon us episodically, that varies in its intensity, that has physiological aspects like increased heart rate and bodily sensations, etc., then it is certainly true that the classical theist maintains that God cannot possibly have such states.  However, if the insinuation is that classical theism makes God out to be “unemotional” in a way that entails that he cannot be said to love us, to be angry at sin, etc., then that is certainly false.  To love is to will the good of another, and for the classical theist God certainly wills our good, acts providentially so that we attain what is good for us, etc.  Hence he loves us.  The classical theist also holds that God wills that sin be punished, and acts so that those who are unrepentant are in fact punished.  Hence he is in that sense wrathful at sin.  And so forth.  Hardly “apathetic.”

Now, a response sometimes made to this (though not by Olson) is that the “intellect,” “will,” “love,” “wrath,” and the like that the classical theist attributes to God are bloodless and inferior to the thinking, willing, love, anger, etc. that human beings experience.  They are (so it is claimed) like the coldly mechanical processes we might attribute to a computer.  But this is based on confusion.  To see how, consider the following analogies.  A vine “seeks” to reach water with its roots and it “tries” to grow toward the light, but of course it does not do so in the way an animal seeks and tries to do things.  There is clearly an analogy between the vine’s “seeking” and “trying” and that of the animal, but given the sentience associated with the animal’s seeking and trying, they are, equally clearly, radically different.  There is also a clear analogy between the seeking and trying that non-human animals exhibit and that which human beings exhibit, but, no less clearly, the conceptual content that human beings bring to bear on the objects of their seeking and trying make what they are capable of radically different from what the animal does. 

Now, given the radical differences between them, there is no way a plant can understand the nature of the “seeking” and “trying” that an animal is capable of, and no way an animal can understand the “seeking” and “trying” that a human being is capable of.  But it would obviously be ridiculous for a plant to conclude (if plants could “conclude” anything in the first place) that what the animal does, given its sentience, is inferior to what the plant does.  On the contrary, it is superior to what the plant does.  Similarly, it would be ridiculous for a non-human animal to conclude (if non-human animals could “conclude” anything in the first place) that what human beings do, given the conceptualization they bring to bear on their acts of seeking and trying, is inferior to what the animal does.  On the contrary, it is superior to what the animal does.

But by the same token, it is ridiculous for human beings to think that the divine intellect, the divine will, divine love, etc. must be inferior to ours if God is immutable, impassible, incorporeal, etc.  On the contrary, they are unimaginably higher and nobler than our thinking, willing, loving, etc. precisely because they are not tied to the limits of created things.  God does not have to reason through the steps of an argument or to make careful observations in order to know something; his love does not vary in intensity given alterations in blood sugar levels, the state of the nerves, over-familiarity, etc.

This does not make him like a computer, because (contrary to the muddleheaded fantasies of computationalists -- which I’ve discussed here, here, here, here, here and elsewhere) a computer is sub-rational.  It is far less than a human intellect, whereas God is far more than a human intellect.  When we project our own experiences or machine metaphors onto God as conceived of by the classical theist, we are doing something like what a plant would be doing if it modeled animal sentience on what plants do or on what stones do; or like what an animal would be doing if it modeled human conceptual abilities on what animals do or what plants do.  (Imagine a dog saying: “Humans ‘conceptualize’ what they perceive?  That’s like what a plant does when it ‘seeks’ the light!  How cold and bloodless!”  That’s about as clueless as some “theistic personalist” characterizations of classical theism are.)

Hence -- to return to Olson -- when Olson writes that classical theism is “spiritually deadening” and “leaves one cold as ice with God seeming to be unfeeling and anything but relational,” he is aiming his attack at a caricature.  He is also arguably committing a fallacy of appeal to emotion, since whether we feel moved by a certain view about God’s nature by itself tells us nothing about whether that view is true or whether the arguments for it are sound.

Similarly irrelevant are the character traits (or purported character traits) of those who defend classical theism.  Olson claims that:

[V]irtually all theologians who portray God as unemotional are men and men are often inclined to view emotions as feminine and therefore unworthy of God.  Could it be that traditional scholastic theology is infected with a tendency to justify male aversion to emotions…?

Never mind the dubious pop sociology underlying this claim.  (The major theistic personalist critics of classical theism -- Plantinga, Swinburne, Hartshorne, Hasker, Basinger, Pinnock, et al. -- are also men; and the Scholastic theologians who hammered out Christian classical theism are also often accused of idolatrous devotion to a woman -- the Blessed Virgin Mary -- and of attributing near-divine authority to an institution conceived of in feminine terms, viz. Holy Mother Church.  So should we conclude that theistic personalism constitutes a “boys’ club”?  Should we judge the Scholastics to be proto-feminists?  These suggestions are silly, but I challenge anyone to show that Olson’s suggestion is any less silly.)  The more important point, of course, is that even if classical theists were motivated by a “male aversion to emotions,” that wouldn’t show that classical theist arguments are mistaken.  To suppose otherwise would be to commit an ad hominem fallacy. 

Finally, Olson fails even to consider, much less respond to, the reasons why classical theists have insisted on divine simplicity, immutability, etc.  As I have explained many times elsewhere (e.g. at length here), the classical theist argues that if God is in any way composite -- if he is a mixture of actuality and potentiality, for example, or of an essence or nature together with a distinct act of existence, or a substance which instantiates various properties distinct from it -- then he will require a cause of his own, and thus fail to be the first cause of all things (contrary not only to sound philosophical theology but also to biblical revelation).  But if he is capable of change or of being affected by anything outside him, then he will be a mixture of actuality and potentiality, and will thus be composite rather than simple, and will thus require a cause of his own.  Etc. 

Now these are, of course, reasons of the sort that have led philosophical theologians, including Christian philosophical theologians, to deny also that God can be corporeal -- a denial Olson endorses.  Olson and other critics of classical theism thus owe us an explanation of why such considerations should not lead us to embrace the rest of the classical theist package, and of how their alternative “theistic personalist” position can avoid making of God a creature in just the way attributing corporeality to him would.

An appeal to what is “intuitive” does not suffice (especially not if backed with fallacious arguments).  If the “intuitions” are sound, then it should be possible rationally to justify them with sound arguments -- in which case the intuitions fall away as unneeded.  And if there are no good arguments in defense of the intuitions, while there are good (and certainly unanswered) arguments against them, then that is a reason to reject the intuitions rather than the classical theistic claims with which they conflict.