Biblical & Theological Issues, Philosophy & Science

Necessary Existence, Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence

by Charles Taliaferro –

Who or what made God? If God exists necessarily (God’s existence is not contingent or dependent or accidental), can God destroy himself? If God cannot commit suicide, do creatures who can commit suicide have a power that God does not have? If God is omnipotent, can God create a stone too heavy for anyone to lift? But if God can make a stone too heavy for anyone to lift, then there could be a stone that God could not lift. It seems, then, that God cannot be omnipotent (being able to do anything) because there is at least one thing God cannot do: either God cannot create a stone too heavy for anyone to lift or God cannot lift a stone too heavy for anyone to lift. In scripture, it is affirmed that God cannot lie (Titus 1:2). But if God cannot lie, is God omnipotent? If God is incorporeal (nonphysical), how can God know about the world? If God lacks a body, how can God know what it is like to experience bodily sensations? If God is not spatial, how can God be everywhere or omnipresent?

Such paradoxical arguments and questions about the divine attributes have been the object of enormous, sophisticated philosophical reflection since the advent of theism in the history of ideas. Today, they are the focus of both theistic and atheistic as well as agnostic philosophers. Atheists like Nicholas Everitt and Michael Martin argue that theism is incoherent because of logical conflicts about one or more divine attributes. Christian philosophers like Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga have done very substantial, lucid work on the coherence of the divine attributes, while the agnostic Anthony Kenny has sought to balance the relevant arguments for and against the coherence of theism.¹ One reason why atheists have focused so much on the coherence of the very concept of God is that if they can block theism at the beginning by showing that the idea of God makes no sense (or is nonsense), then they have a way of blocking a whole host of sizable arguments for God’s existence. If the concept of God turns out to be like the concept of a square circle (an evident impossible object as a square circle would have to have four sides and lack them at the same time), then atheists do not need to worry if they have no account of why our cosmos exists or what accounts for the emergence of consciousness or what seem to be authentic experiences of God or, if there is no God, how we may account for the normativity of ethics. An atheist may not have an answer to such matters, but if the atheist has established that it is impossible for there to be God, then whatever the answer to such matters turns out to be it will not involve God. In Sir Arthur Canon Doyle’s novels, Sherlock Holmes wisely advised: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth.” If God can be eliminated, it will not matter whether atheism is highly improbable.

There is another reason why there is so much focus on divine attributes: there is a famous argument for God’s existence going back to St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) to the effect that if one even acknowledges the possibility that God exists, there is a powerful reason for thinking that God does exist. I have argued for this position elsewhere and there is not space even to sketch it, but arguments in the spirit of Anselm (the line of reasoning is often called the ontological argument) have been defended by two of the most powerful, influential philosophers in the modern era: Descartes and Leibniz.² The worry that recognizing the possibility of God’s existence may lead to the recognition of God’s actual existence has led many atheist philosophers to take their stand over the coherence of the concept of God.

Before focusing on divine necessity, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, I suggest three points. First, investigating the divine attributes can be a rewarding, intellectually engaging project quite apart from arguments about whether God exists or not! There are fruitful, interesting arguments and positions well worth investigating that can enrich one’s faith.

Second, I think the last resort that a Christian philosopher should contemplate is the claim that logic is merely a human invention and we should expect that the concept of God would be contradictory because God transcends human categories. I will address the nature of logic briefly below, but I note here that if you hold that God cannot even be thought about through the use of logic or “human categories” then you may find it difficult to make sense of loving or worshiping God, praying or being in union with God through Christ. One cannot love or worship or pray to or be in fellowship with a reality, X, that one cannot even conceive of or think about or form a coherent idea about. If scripture and Christian tradition make sense, God is a high, deep, extraordinary reality—a reality that we can never completely comprehend (Isaiah 59:9)—but God is also a being who speaks to us in history and who is exulted in two thousand years of praise as the almighty, wise, knowing, omnipresent, supremely good Creator. Human thought and language may be profoundly weak instruments, but they are divinely hallowed and blessed by God and employed by God in the covenantal relationship with his people (Isaiah 1:18).³

Third, I believe that many of the puzzles about the concept of God arise because of a failure to appreciate the very root of the concept of God.

Foundations and Necessity

A surprising number of New Atheists seem to think that a good objection to theism is that there is no account of how it is that God came into existence. They seem to think that if there is a God, then there must be some kind of external cause that brought God into being. That is essentially Richard Dawkins’ point in The God Delusion. He winds up treating the concept of God as though God is a super biological organism.⁴ Daniel Dennett does no better, when he supposes that if God exists, God must have created himself. Contra Dawkins and Dennett, the concept of God is the concept of a supremely perfect, uncreated being whose existence is not owed to any other reality. God does not exist in virtue of some law of nature or super God or any force. God possesses self-existence or aseity. Employing terminology from Thomas Aquinas, for us our essence (what we are) does not contain existence. That is, the concept of being a human is not the concept of a necessarily existing being. We are contingent. At one point we did not exist and at another point (without God’s grace) we may cease to be. But for God, the essence of God (or what God is) is God’s existence.

The affirmation that God exists necessarily is not found explicitly in scripture. But at the center of scripture is the affirmation of the unsurpassable praise-worthiness of God. There is no creator or god higher than God. To suppose that God somehow needs to praise some higher god for bringing about his existence cuts against the grain of the whole Christian understanding of the divine. Acknowledging God’s unsurpassable greatness leads to acknowledging God’s necessity, for which reality would have a greater excellence: a divine being with necessary existence (one whose existence is not contingent on any external factors) and who has omnipotence and so on, or a being that is omnipotent and so on but is contingent. I suggest that the attribute of necessary existence is an excellence and a divine, great making property. In fact the other divine attributes in this article also flow from the foundational, underlying precept that God is unsurpassably excellent. What would be more excellent: a being of limited power or one with all power or omnipotence? A being that is ignorant or one that is all knowing or omniscient? A being that is highly restricted in space, or one that is everywhere? The necessity, power, knowledge, and omnipresence of this being are features of divine excellence and greatness. Appreciating the centrality of divine praise-worthiness will be key in addressing the puzzles that we entertained at the outset, beginning with the question of who or what made God.

As we have noted, the very concept of God is the concept of a being who exists necessarily, a being who cannot not exist. But imagine this counter-point: Aren’t you simply begging the question when you claim that God exists necessarily? If everything in the cosmos has a cause and is contingent, why make an exception for God?

Reply: it is not as though philosophers and theologians made up the name of a being “God” and then decided to attach “necessary existence” to the concept, as if one were going to make up a parallel concept like “A necessarily existing magician” (something I just made up). Rather, the very meaning of what it is to be God, a being of supreme praise-worthiness, is the idea of a being who exists necessarily or non-contingently. If someone were to claim that there is a God but this being was an ignorant, weak, contingent, giant organism that came into being because of a helium explosion, we would naturally assume the person is either jesting or does not understand the concept of God or the person is using the term “God” in a new way just as you can use the word “Milky Way” to refer either to our galaxy or to a candy.

Consider a slightly different objection before moving to the topic of omnipotence: Is the concept of God in Christian theism anthropomorphic? After all, to have power and knowledge seem to mark distinctively human attributes. Wouldn’t an unsurpassable divine reality be beyond power and knowledge?

Consider three points in reply: First, there is no reason to believe that only human beings have knowledge and power. We not only should not rule out that some nonhuman animals have knowledge and power, but we cannot rule out that there are creatures on other planets with capabilities of knowledge and power that far surpass human beings. Second, divine knowledge and power must be thought of as infinitely excelling our finite, contingent knowledge and power, so there is no restriction to human scales. Third, knowledge and power reflect excellences that, if any being lacked them, that being would lack great-making powers and be less great than a being that has knowledge and power. Imagine two beings of awesome energy and beauty and everything positive you can conceive of, but one of the beings lacked power and knowledge, whereas the other being had power and knowledge.

I submit the latter has greatness the other lacks. Or, in an alternative thought experiment, imagine any universe you like with awesome properties of titanic splendor that calls for awesome, deep reverence, but it lacks power and knowledge. What could possibly be greater than such a universe? Proposed answer: a being who can make and sustain indefinitely many such universes.⁵

Let us turn now to three divine attributes.

Omnipotence
From what we have discussed thus far, the reply to some of the puzzles of omnipotence should be getting clearer. If the concept of God is the concept of a being of unsurpassable greatness, then the concept of divine omnipotence is not an ascription of what might be called bare or naked or raw power. God’s power is, rather, what might be called perfect power, power worthy of a being of unsurpassable excellence.

So how should one address the old paradox of the stone or the notion that a human being might be more powerful than God since a human being can commit suicide whereas God, if God exists necessarily, cannot cease to be? And what about the idea of divine power and God’s ability to lie or do wicked acts?

The paradox of the stone is perhaps the easiest to address. The very concept of the stone in the paradox is nonsensical or impossible. There cannot be the following object:

A stone so heavy that a being who can lift any stone cannot lift it.

Such an object is impossible, just as the following are:

A bowl of porridge so big so that a person who can eat any porridge cannot eat it.

A bicycle so big that it cannot be ridden by a cyclist who can ride any bike whatsoever (regardless of size)

A hat so small that it cannot be worn by a being who can wear any hat, no matter how small.

And so on. If these concepts are all nonsensical (because they are contradictory), why should it be thought of as odd or unfitting if no being (no matter how powerful) cannot do them? In a sense, there actually is no “them,” for what we have are not conceivable tasks but logically contradictory notions. Should it be considered praise-worthy that God should be able to do that which is nonsensical? There may indeed be deeds that God has done or can do that we may think of as nonsensical, but surely they would have to be possible deeds for God.

What about the case of suicide? If God cannot commit suicide, is God not omnipotent? Christians who believe that God became incarnate as Jesus Christ, who lived and died a human life, can make sense of the idea of God committing suicide, but there is a better way to handle objections like this. We need to ask whether the ability to commit suicide is a great-making, praise-worthy power? There was one philosopher (I will not cite him) in the 1980s who claimed that God was not all powerful on the grounds that God cannot rape people. Again, is that truly a divine power that we want to praise God for having? I doubt it. But there is room for more than one position here in Christian philosophy.

I adopt the position that goes back to Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas, and many other Christian philosophers who believe that God is essentially good. This means that God cannot do evil. We believe that the power to do evil can be a proper reflection in human beings of the freedom to do good; for us, freely doing good involves freely electing not to do evil. Augustine and the rest of us, however, think of God’s very essence or being as goodness. As such, for God, the power to do evil would not itself be a good but a liability to weakness. But an alternative position is possible: some Christian philosophers hold that it is possible for God to do evil but God does not do so. These philosophers have further argued that one of the reasons why God is praise-worthy is because while God can do evil, God does not. I suggest that either position is promising and provides sufficient grounds for overturning the paradoxes of omnipotence.

Omniscience
The most central paradox about omniscience concerns the scope of divine knowledge and its compatibility with believing in either human or divine freedom. This is treated elsewhere. Let us focus instead on the question of how God knows the world or anything at all.

As embodied beings, our cognitive faculties function with an organic base of organs, including brains. But what of a being, like God, who is incorporeal and bodiless? God is not like some massive vertebrate (as Dawkins seems to suggest). But if God lacks organs and such, what sense can we make of the idea that God knows how things look and feel? Don’t you have to be a physical body or to have one to know what material objects feel like? John Hospers raises doubts about the very concept of an incorporeal being knowing the world. He asks us to consider a case of a human person becoming disembodied and yet the person (perhaps like a ghost) continues to see things around him.

You see –with eyes?- no, you have no eyes, since you have no body. But let that pass for a moment: you have experiences similar to what you would have if you had eyes to see with. But how can you look toward the foot of the bed or toward the mirror? Isn’t looking an activity that requires having a body? How can you look in one direction or another if you have no head to turn? And this isn’t all; we said that you can’t touch your body because there is no body there; how did you discover this?… Your body seems to be involved in every activity we try to describe even though we have tried to imagine existing without it.

Consider four replies: First, one may concede that human beings require brains and organs to have experiential perception of the world, but nothing follows from that with respect to God. Our corporeality may enable us to have certain cognitive powers, but it may also involve liabilities such as our vulnerability to disease and decomposition. We can only perceive things around us or, with instruments, things that light, gravity, the atmosphere, and so on, permit us to see. But an incorporeal being would not have these limitations.

Second, why think that one would have to be a body or have a body in order to know what bodily sensations are? There does not seem to be any logical necessity involved. You don’t need to be a number to know about numbers, you don’t need to be heavy to know what weight feels like, you don’t need to be watery to know what water is, and so on.

Third, one may challenge Hospers directly in two stages. Hospers seems to think organs are essential for knowing the world (eyes are essential for seeing). Even in our own case, does seeing things or having visual experiences require us to have eyes? Perhaps one has to have eyes to begin with, but you can have visual experiences without the use of eyes and retinal stimulation (stimulation of the visual cortex in the brain suffices), as is evident in dream experiences. But even in our own sensory awareness, organs are not always needed, nor can they be. Imagine you do need eyes to simulate the visual cortex and have a visual experience of red. Very good. Now, do you need another organ (a kind of inner eye?) to see the red sensations? No. In fact if you did need another organ we would be on to a vicious, infinite regress (do you need an organ to sense what another organ allows you to sense unless there is still another organ…). If God exists, God’s knowledge may be like our immediate awareness of our own sensations: God knows the world directly and without having to rely on receptors, tongues, ears, eyes, and so on.

Fourth, one may now move to the second stage in the direct reply to Hospers. He seems to objecting to disembodiment on the grounds that there is a problem of causal interaction between a person (soul or mind) and the physical world. This is the famous challenge of mind-body interaction from a dualist perspective. In my view, this is the most over-rated problem in the history of ideas. I will simply have to refer you to other sources for a full reply to this problem, but for now note that if you allow for mind-body interaction, there is no problem with either looking in one direction or another or, as with a God who is omnipresent, God would know all things from all possible angles.

Omnipresence
If God is incorporeal, God is presumably non-spatial. If so, what might it mean for God to be everywhere? I begin with a very minor point: some of us hold that incorporeal or non-physical things or events may be spatial. Some of us hold, for example, that visual experiences themselves are spatial but not physical. Leaving that topic for another time, let’s grant that God is both non-physical and non-spatial.

For God to be present involves the exercise of divine omniscience, omnipotence, and supreme goodness. So, for God to be present wherever you are and simultaneously present 2,500,000 light years away in the Andromeda Galaxy (AG) is that God knows all truths bearing on where you are in the Milky Way and all truths about the AG. You and all that is around you, and indeed everything in the Milky Way and in the AG and in all galaxies exist because of God’s ongoing causal conservation. Without God’s causal conservation, none of these elements would exist or continue to exist. In this respect, God’s presence is a reflection of power and knowledge. To put the point cryptically, God is present when you pray because you are known intimately by God (as well as God knowing all things) and God causally conserves you in existence, rather than it being the case that God knows you intimately and causally conserves you in existence because he is (corporeally) present. Or, more succinctly: God hears your prayers because he knows your prayers, rather than God knows your prayers because he is (corporeally) present.

For Christian theists, more needs to be added. As a God of supreme goodness, it is also the case that you, and all that is around you and throughout the Milky Way and the AG are the object of God’s love. This is not to say that God approves of all that is occurring everywhere throughout creation, but it is to affirm that God loves the creation, with a love that involves judgment and the call for redemption. In a sense, it is God’s incorporeality that allows God to be omnipresent. God does not work from any fixed place in the cosmos with machines or any tools.

I suggested at the outset that reflection of the divine attributes can be enriching. I end, then, with a more personal, and I hope helpful, brief proposal. People can be more or less present to one another. A failure to know another person (or simply not knowing another person) does not permit much personal interaction of depth. Having little or no power allows for little or no personal interaction. A failure to love another person or even to find them interesting can make one quite distant indeed. But if God is all powerful, all knowing, all loving and all present, there is a sense in which God can be more present to you and the cosmos than any created person can be present to another person or thing. Moreover, if God necessarily exists, this God who is present in love is not a merely contingent being who happens to be. God’s loving presence is, rather, rooted in a deep necessity. Meditating on such an awesome divine presence can offer us an enriched appreciation of something very important and not discussed enough in the philosophical or theological literature: the glory of God.

Charles Taliaferro (Ph.D.) is professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College. He is the author of numerous books and articles including (co-edited with Victoria Harrison and Stewart Goetz) The Routledge Companion to Theism (Routledge, forthcoming), (with Stewart Goetz) A Brief History of the Soul(Blackwell, forthcoming), (co-edited with Chad Meister) The Cambridge Companion to Christian Philosophical Theology (Cambridge University),Philosophy of Religion: A Beginners Guide (Oneworld Press), Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell), and Consciousness and the Mind of God(Cambridge University).

notes
¹Richard Swinburne’s The Coherence of Theism is highly recommended for a rigorous overview of arguments about divine attributes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
² See my Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, and “The Anselmian ontological argument as the ultimate, anti-death argument: suggestions on how to reason from possible divine perfection to actual divine perfection” Death and Anti-Death, Volume 7: Nine Hundred Years After St. Anselm, Charles Tandy (ed), Ria University Press, 2010.
³Jil Evans and I discuss the important role of images and the imagination in the philosophy of God, as well as in the general theism-naturalism debate, in The Image in Mind; Theism, Naturalism and the Imagination (London: Continuum, forthcoming).
⁴For a devastating review of Dawkins’ work, see Thomas Nagel’s Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chapter two.
⁵See my book Dialogues About God (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) and Philosophy of Religion: A Beginner’s Guide for further reflections on the concept of God, necessity, and anthropomorphism.
⁶For discussion, see my Contemporary Philosophy of Religion.
⁷A future issue of Areopagus Journal will be dedicated to this problem. In the meantime, see James K. Beilby and Paul R. Eddy, eds., Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2001). 
⁸John Hospers, “Is the notion of disembodied existence intelligible?” in Immortality, Paul Edwards (ed) (Prometheus Books, 1997), 280.
⁹I address with co-author Stewart Goetz in two publications: Naturalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 2008) and A Brief History of the Soul (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming), but see also my Consciousness and the Mind of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Hospers argument is against dualism. While dualism is widely disparaged in philosophy and theology, it has a surprising and growing number of defenders. In addition to myself and Stewart Goetz, see work by Richard Swinburne, William Hasker, Daniel Robinson, Howard Robinson, Peter Unger, J.P. Moreland, John Foster, W.D. Hart, Dean Zimmerman, Mark Baker, and others. See The Soul Hypothesis (London: Continuum, 2010) edited by Stewart Goetz and Mark Baker.
¹⁰See Consciousness and the Mind of God and A Brief History of the Soul.
¹¹I am working on a book manuscript, The Golden Cord: A Short Book on Eternity, which addresses at length the nature of God’s glory.

Questions for Charles Taliaferro’s “Divine Attributes Today”
1. What would be the consequence if atheists could show that one or more traditional divine attributes were incoherent? Why?

2. Do you agree with Taliaferro that we should avoid resorting to the view that logic is a human invention? Why or why not?

3. What does it mean to say that God is a necessary being? How does it help you to know this about God?

4. How does Taliaferro respond to the stone paradox and other paradoxes related to omnipotence? Are you satisfied with his answers? Why or why not?

5. What do you think of Taliaferro’s response to the challenges posed for omniscience? How would you respond to the following question: “Can God know what it is like to enjoy running a criminal empire?”

6. Explain Taliaferro’s understanding of God’s omnipresence. Do you agree? Why or why not?