Theoretical
analysis proceeds through the modal aspects and so it is only possible to
analyse what is within the bounds of created reality. God is the origin of
creation including our ability to think. The forming of concepts requires
universal conditions or features that can be grasped in our thought. This means
that having a concept of God would imply that there is an order for
being-a-God, i.e. a law-for-being-a-God. Such a situation involves the
contradiction that God, the origin of all things, would be viewed as being
subject to God’s own law for creation.
This
way of thinking about God is however common and can be designated with the term
onto-theology. Ontology is the name given to philosophical theory that analyses
the basic characteristics of reality, of what there is. Onto-theology then
includes the being of God in this analysis. This can be traced back to
Parmenides who made an all-encompassing connection between thinking and being such
that the structure of being and the structure of thought are believed to mirror
each other. Apart from the problems that arise through separating being and
thinking and then trying to understand how and why they might correspond to
each other, this position should be rejected on the basis that thinking belongs
within being. The consequence of an
onto-theological approach is that questions about God are discussed and
incorporated into the general theoretical framework of an ontology where being
is analysed in terms of concepts and logic. On such a view philosophical
thought is considered competent to discover structures to which God himself is
subject. This involves taking a stance that is supposedly outside of the
creator-creation relationship and so must take us beyond any creatureliness. Reformational
philosophy does not recognise such a competence for philosophy, nor does it
accept the possibility of such a stance outside creation. Philosophy cannot
judge reality, it must discover, analyse, understand and respect what is given,
this applies even more so to God’s self-revelation.
One
way this onto-theological approach gets worked out is in the so-called proofs
of God’s existence. Dooyeweerd gives a brief discussion of the cosmological
arguments of Thomas Aquinas (NC II, 39-42) where he shows that the argument
will either start from a metaphysical view of causality which already includes
the need for a pure actuality (identified as God), or it will understand
causality in terms of human experience and so bring God’s being the cause or
origin of the world under the conditions of a particular modal sense of
causation. The former can hardly stand as a satisfactory proof and the latter
creates various problems due to subjecting God to created conditions while
simultaneously treating an aspect of creation as absolute.
A particularly clear issue where the question of God
being subjected to creational laws is at stake is the Euthyphro dilemma first
expressed by Plato in his dialogue of that name. The modern version goes like
this: "Is the morally good loved by God because it is good, or is it good
because it is loved by God". The first option makes God dependent and
subservient to morality which is then understood as a standard that exists
independently of God. The second option would seem to make morality arbitrary
such that if God willed murder then murder would be good.
The
solution to this dilemma is a correct understanding of the Christian confession
of creation. We must insist from the outset that God has created everything
that exists other than himself, and so reject the first option of the dilemma. However
we can also reject the second option because the standards for good and evil
are real factors of the world as created by God. From within creation there is
nothing arbitrary about the command against murder, when God commands us not to
murder this is revelatory of the way God made the world. The problem is
that when we ask whether God “could” have commanded murder the word “could” is
ambiguous. The only meaning it can have for us as creatures in the world God
has made is restricted to the possibilities built into this world. It is
important to see that we are here talking about the law-side of reality. We can
certainly think about different responses from the subject-side and so the
different kinds of “worlds” that would result from our choosing to murder or to
resist the temptation to violence. The dilemma can only work then, if we
project this “could” to a world of possibilities outside of this actual law-structured
world. The problem with this is that we cannot think or imagine in a way that
is completely outside of the actual law-structure since that is what gives us
the possibility to think and imagine in the first place. What we will end up
doing in the attempt to consider what is possible in an absolute sense is that
we will keep our understanding of the world and its possibilities fixed for
some creational laws while imagining a change in others. This is what is really
happening when people ask if God could have commanded us to murder, or could
God make 2+2=5, or create a round square etc. What this misses out is the
indissoluble coherence of all creational laws so that it is impossible to
conceive of a change in one creational law with all else staying fixed. A
change of one law would require changes in all the others. As such it throws us
back to the notion of a world of possibilities outside of this actual world,
and so outside our own possibility to think. We can see then that God must be
understood as the true origin of our world, and while God accommodates himself
to the world he has made, we should never understand God as being subjected to
the laws and conditions of his creation.
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