Our Idea of God

by Thomas Moore
Review by Jordan Henricks

Thomas Morris offers a very thorough and well-founded description of the modern viewpoints and arguments concerning matters of theology in his book Our Idea of God. However, I think if Morris had the opportunity to give the book a new title he might want to call it, “Modernity’s Idea of God” instead. In a postmodern culture Our Idea of God addresses ideas that seem dated and quite frankly uninteresting to many young thinkers. Aside from the fact that Morris uses gender exclusive language (which in my opinion dates the book more than it unveils Morris’ position towards women) and appeals to science of the twentieth century, the book fails to address the issues of theology raised by postmodern culture.

The thesis of Morris’ work is that though “creation theology and perfect being theology pick up on different strands of biblical thinking” they are in actuality “strands of thought that are deeply intertwined throughout the whole of Judeo-Christian thought” (44). ‘Creation theology’ is essentially a “method for articulating a conception of God [that] centers around the claim that God is to be understood as the ultimate creator of every reality which exists distinct from himself” (32). ‘Perfect being theology’ is the idea of adopting God as the greatest possible being, and is an idea Morris gives credit to Anselm of Canterbury for. Morris writes, “The ideas to be found in perfect being theology are not altogether original with Anselm,” but that Anselm “pioneered the clarification and use of this biblically based and philosophically attuned method of thinking about God” (35). Morris definitely plays his cards as an Anselm scholar on the table, giving Anselm the credit for many of his own ideas regarding ‘perfect being theology.’ As Morris works through the tough questions offered by modern philosophy to theologians, he leans heavily on his thesis as the foundation for his idea of God.

With his thesis grounded upon a theology of God as creator and God as the perfect being, Morris then begins to wrestle with tough philosophical questions throughout the rest of the book. First, he wrestles with whether or not God is good and offers succinct arguments for the necessity of God’s goodness. Morris compares divine goodness with moral goodness, and even goes as far as to introduce his own theory of axiological goodness, viz. a category of goodness in which God is not bound by an inherent necessity to do good but also not degraded to having the capacity to act contradictorily to good as seems to be offered by moral goodness. In regards to this Morris writes, “Axiological agency need not be thought of as logically incompatible, on every ontological level, with all forms of necessitation” (62). In other words, this is his solution to the problem of God being “morally good” without being given the opportunity to act in opposition to what is good, i.e., to sin.

Next, Morris tackles the arguments for and against God’s power and knowledge, i.e., his omnipotence and omniscience, respectively. Morris does not waste any time debunking the problem of whether or not there is some task God can create that he is incapable of doing. After attacking the counterargument, he writes, “Our informal, colloquial uses of ‘can’ and ‘cannot’ irregularly convey many different things. They do not always convey conviction about power” (72). Both of his arguments for the omnipotence and omniscience of God are founded quite firmly within the framework of perfect being theology that he is working in. If you accept his thesis, he thinks you will be quite satisfied with his arguments throughout the book.

Morris does, however, hit a little bit of a theological speed bump when he comes to the question of God’s existence in relation to time, i.e., his omnipresence. One can accept the framework of perfect being theology and either believe that God exists within time or that God exists outside of time, i.e., that God is temporal or atemporal, respectively. Morris lands on the side of viewing God as existing within time, but his argument is quite weak.

Therefore, it is hard to see how the atemporalist can plausibly claim that in knowing and relating himself to an ever-changing world, God himself never experiences any real change, but at most can be said to undergo the merely relational change, which is no genuine change at all. But if that is so, it is hard to see how the God of this world can exist outside of time. (125)

If a person uses the words “it is hard to see…” in his or her conclusion it should give you a pretty good clue that whatever that person is going to say is a weak conclusion. I believe Morris’ argument would fit into that category here. It seems to me that the atemporalist has a very strong position philosophically and I shall touch on that in my critique.

As Morris rightly points out early on in the book, and then touches on again towards the end, creation theology in specific has a lot to offer in answering tough philosophical questions. One of the most important questions is how the world came to be. Creation theology offers a very simple solution, namely that the world was created. To reject creation theology leaves one in a mess of scientific speculation and philosophical headaches. Finally, Morris concludes his work by offering readers his ideas on how perfect being theology affects specifically Christian doctrines, namely the doctrine of the Incarnation and the doctrine of the Trinity. Morris attempts to explain, much like a shorthand version of Augustine, that the Trinity is not only a logical doctrine biblically, but that it is logical philosophically.

Morris has done a lot of good work in this book. Again, he wrestles with tough questions from a philosophical perspective and seems to have decent to very good arguments for almost every point. As I notated earlier though, I must disagree with his conclusion regarding God’s existence in relation to time. Consider this example: If a star explodes in the year 2010 (relative to time on earth) the light from that explosion may not be visible to humans until 2015, 2020, 2050? (depending on how far away the star was from the earth). It might take decades if not centuries before we are able to witness this type of explosion. Thus, the question arises, at the time when we witness the star’s explosion, is it happening ‘now’, relatively speaking?

Now, we will throw in another piece to the puzzle. If a separate star were to explode in 2012 (relative to time on earth) but we were to witness its explosion before the other because this star was closer to the earth, which star exploded first? Clearly, one would want to say that the star that exploded in 2010 exploded first, but because we are farther away from the event in the space-time manifold we do not experience the event first. However, the important question then becomes, from what position is a being able to make this statement, namely to declare which event happened first? We are left with two possibilities. Either time is always relative and God is in time, meaning that we are in just as good of a position as he is to explain which star exploded first, or God exists outside of time and knows the ordering of events within the space-time manifold. Also, if one takes the position that God is in time, one must also then ask where God is relative to space-time manifold? A good answer would have to be Jerusalem if you were a Jew or Christian, or at least I would think. It seems to me, however, much more plausible that God exists outside of time, and is unrestrained by the limits of existing within time.

Morris might try to argue with this position by suggesting that God is more limited existing outside of time because he would be unable to act within time if that was the case. I find this a very weak argument though. I would much rather think of God as outside of time and less comprehensible, capable of things I cannot understand than to think of God as existing in time and capable of working in ways that I can understand within the framework of time. With recent developments in speech act theory it also seems plausible to me that if we were to consider the actions of God as speech acts, we might be able to offer some clarity to the atemporal view as well. In either case, though, it seems to me that we begin to get a little bit lost in our argumentation because the truth is, we are offering our thoughts about the nature of God. To speak with respect to Anselm, we are offering our imperfect thoughts about a perfect being. How can we really presume to ever be right?

This is where I feel the rubber meets the road with modernity’s conception of theology. Postmodernism is much more capable of accepting that there are things we cannot understand and don’t necessarily need to understand to move forward. Morris, it seems quite clear, operates with the conviction that we must work towards a philosophical understanding of God to offer a coherent theological position. I disagree with this logic. It seems to me that that is a lot of weight to place on our epistemic beliefs if we take this stance, and as an epistemological skeptic, I just do not buy into the arguments of modernism.

As far as what we can know about the universe, I stand firmly grounded in the truth that one cannot know that one is not plugged into the matrix or that one’s existence is not as a brain in a vat in some other universe. We cannot know that the perceptions that we have of this world are of reality, and thus, I operate as an epistemological skeptic. However, it is important to state very clearly that I still operate. I may not be able to “know” much about the universe, but it seems to me to be a pointless existence to not at least have a little bit of faith and trust that what I perceive and experience is in fact reality. As I wrote, I operate as an epistemological skeptic but I still operate, and I do so under the belief that there is such a thing as history and experience, and that following one’s intuition is, in fact, helpful. Intuition is definitely not a new concept. As a matter of fact, Anselm seemed to lean heavily in intuition and so does Morris throughout the book.

Thus, if I am guided by intuition, and if I take a critical look at history and both my own experience as well as the experience of others, I can’t help but have a belief that there is a God. Maybe that would be an appropriate title of a postmodern version of Morris’ book, i.e., “Our Belief of God.” And to take this idea one step further, I’m not sure that Morris theology wouldn’t fit in nicely to the chapters of that book! His thesis that creation theology and perfect being theology are intertwined I believe to be very well founded and a great point, but I also don’t think he is any closer than Descartes to making epistemologically true claims about God. Now, Morris might reply by stating that skeptics can’t get anywhere philosophically and that you have to accept reality in order to make any true claims. This is where I disagree, however. I believe that the philosopher or theologian who discounts skepticism and moves forward, purporting to have some true knowledge about the world will only end up arguing with other philosophers and theologians. However, if we have the serenity to accept the things we cannot know and move forward with what we have to work with, I think we can make progress theologically.

I think that a great example of being able to move forward by accepting what we cannot know is the conversation surrounding the inerrancy of Scripture. If people would just accept that we do not have and will never have original autographs of Old Testament and New Testament manuscripts, the whole conversation and argument would be dissolved. However, we continue to argue back and forth by offering hypothetical situations that aren’t even possible! And as crazy as that sounds, it is the same thing we do in theology as well! Much of Morris’ work is grounded in the hypothetical situations that characterize what I shall refer to as flailing for epistemic truth. I believe if we can just stop flailing and move forward with what we do in fact perceive, we can begin to develop a theology that is not based on deductive reasoning but rather that is based on history and experience, and most importantly, that is based on Scripture. As the church, let us move away from trying to reason towards the existence of God or toward a more refined definition of God and begin moving toward a more refined description of God and a better reading of Scripture.