Last week, Joe Heschmeyer and Matt Fradd made waves on the internet for calling members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints atheists (the podcast episode title now simply claims that their Church is incoherent). This annoyed basically everybody: members of the LDS Church, atheists, ex-LDS Catholic converts, and generic theists all agreed that Joe and Matt were wrong, arrogant, silly and intellectually weak.
This resembled a similar episode from a few months ago, when friend-of-the-blog Patrick Flynn made the same accusation of William Lane Craig, a man most famous for winning theist/atheist debates…for the theist side, as a theist. In fact, Craig is one of the most famous Christian philosophers today.
So…an atheist?
Really?
Similar accusations were leveled against Patrick, and both episodes left online commentators concluding that Classical Theists were annoying at best and arrogant and dishonest at worst.
I found both episodes interesting, because like Heschmeyer, Fradd and Flynn I am a Classical theist. In fact, I share Catholicism in common with all three men, and I admire the work all three have done and are doing. Moreover, this criticism of certain models of God has been made, in a less provocative way, by several scholars, including David Bentley Hart and Ed Feser.1
So, to be clear before we get started, I think Heschmeyer, Fradd and Flynn are incredibly smart and doing philosophy the right way: in the interest of truth and genuine wisdom.
But I also understood the pushback, and wanted to think through what leads Classical theists to make a claim like this, and why I think that the framing is both a) not totally stupid but also b) not totally helpful.
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The Gist of the Argument
My understanding is that both arguments worked more or less the same way: there are certain conceptual holes in our model of the universe that God is fundamentally supposed to fill by virtue of his being God. Some of these include being the fundamental fact of the universe, being the source of all other beings, being the source of truth, etc. This requires that God be of a fundamentally different nature than all other beings.
It is not enough that God be more powerful than the rest of us; he must be all-powerful. It is not enough that he exist. He must be existence. But if your conception of “God” does not satisfy these conditions, then you do not have a conception of God at all. You simply have an ontology that includes something like a superhero.
But if someone told you that, on their view, Superman was the greatest being in the universe…that person much more closely resembles an atheist than a theist. The conceptual holes that a theistic philosopher is trying to fill are simply not filled by Superman.
Obviously, I am painting with broad strokes here. I am not defending the position nor really arguing for it. But that is how I understand it, more or less.
The Virtues of the Argument
I think that there are several reasons that this argument should help us think hard about our philosophy of God. Leaving philosophy of language to the side for a minute, it certainly seems possible to have a view of God that is so wrong that our view no longer falls into “theistic belief.” For example, I am inclined to think that Pastafarians, even if they were serious, would not be real theists because the Flying Spaghetti Monster is so far from being anything like what God is likely to be that the term “theist” no longer applies. Similarly, if I told you that I believed in God, but that I thought God had not been created yet, and was going to be born in 3000 AD, then I think that, pending elaboration, you could tell me that I was not actually a theist at all, but was using the label “God” improperly.2
The position of Classical Theists is simply that there are a lot of questions for which the only possible answers are a) nothing or b) God. And to the extent that people who claim to be theists answer with “nothing,” or fail to answer the question at all, they do not really seem to be able to call themselves theists.
The fundamental point here is that it really matters how we model our understanding of theism. If we get the answers wrong, it renders our whole model incoherent.3 And for that reason, philosophers should be very, very careful about objecting to the basics of Classical Theism. The model exists in the way that it does based on a logical progression built from basic, highly defendable assumptions over thousands of years. It cannot be dismissed simply because a few consequence are hard to square with one intuition.4
That being said, I still think it is unwise to call non-Classical Theists atheists.
What the Argument Gets Wrong
The problem with the argument is that God does not serve only a conceptual purpose. He also serves a religious purpose. In other words, when someone refers to God, oftentimes they mean that they believe a particular being is worthy of worship.
While maybe not as conceptually fundamental, on a human and moral level, this religious purpose of God actually seems to be more fundamental. Long before Aristotle worked out the bones of Classical Theism, human beings knew that some being out there deserved honor, worship and praise. Even when the Jews had little understanding of what God was, they certainly knew that he existed, and what obligations were implied by his existence.
In fact, classically speaking, precisely the reason idolatry or culpable atheism are sins is for a lack of justice in worship, not a false metaphsyics.5
When you accuse someone of atheism, theists generally understand this to be, on some level, both a moral and intellectual failing. This is especially likely to be understood as such by people who believe that they should be worshipping God. So the argument is not just understood as a charge of incoherence; it is understood as a charge of the sin of refusing God proper worship. And it is not just that, but it is also refusing to offer God worship at all, which a member of the LDS church can affirm quite easily is not what they are doing. For that reason alone, I think it simply a reductionism to call all people with a bad, even incoherent, view of God atheists.
Moreover, this argument, even if it did work, would prove far too much. The ancient Greeks were polytheists; they were about as far from Classical Theists as it is possible to get. So were the ancient Romans. Are we to call them atheists, too?
What about Native Americans who were never given any chance to learn Greek philosophy or Christian theology?
What about the Ancient Israelites, who were very gradually brought along in their understanding of God, and almost certainly did not think of God as Pure Act or Simple while at the base of Mount Sinai?
What about the early Christians, including some Desert Fathers, who had to be taught by theologians that God had no body?
My point is not that these models of God were correct, or even good enough. Just that it seems false to call them all atheists.
Conclusion
One thing that has irked me about the response towards Joe and Pat is the assumption that Joe and Pat were making their claim out of some kind of arrogance. I do not think that to be the case. They were actually making an important philosophical point about how we think of God: many questions are answered specifically and exclusively by the God of Classical Theism.
As such, there are very good reasons philosophically to hold that the God of Classical Theism is the correct one. An imputation of arrogance is, I think, an uncharitable reading of the motivation for the argument.
But all the same, it does not work. It views the relationship we have to God reductively, and would result in implausible views about historical populations that, as far as I can tell, have never once been thought to be atheists. Thus, while I applaud and agree with Joe and Pat about defending the importance of thinking through Classical Theism critically and carefully, this particular framing of the argument is best abandoned.
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Hart famously referred to such people as “monopolytheists,” a label Feser quoted approvingly.
I think this is right, but it is not absolutely crucial to the argument. If you think that literally any conception of God is sufficient to remove the label “atheist” from somebody, or just think my example in particular is mistaken, I think that is wrong but the rest of my argument is untouched by such a claim.
Pat’s amended blog does a phenomenal job working out the consequences of this.
I realize that this does not describe the LDS reasons for rejecting Classical theism. But it does describe many philosophers’ reasons for rejecting Classical Theism.
I just want to acknowledge to the atheists in the room (I know there are some of you out there!) that I am not making the claim, at least in this article, that every atheist is culpable at this time in their non-belief in God. If you tell me that you have made every effort to look into the God hypothesis and are still unconvinced, the point of this particular essay is not to tell you you are wrong. I do not contest it here.
But surely it can be conceived by atheists that, assuming God exists, it is possible for at least some atheists to be culpable for their disbelief in God, similarly to how we generally hold people to be culpable if they disbelieve in the Holocaust.
Anyways, my point in this article is why theists would (and should) be offended by the charge of being an atheist, because they really do think it would be a sin to be so, rather than a commentary on the state of every atheist’s soul or moral state. On that, I am making no claims. Only God knows that.
Fascinating post, and easy to read. Well done Alex!
I really enjoyed how you unpacked the difference between God as a conceptual necessity and God as a being worthy of worship. Your point about early Christians, Israelites, and other cultures really clarified for me why calling non-Classical Theists atheists is misleading. I also liked how you connected Classical Theism to both philosophy and moral responsibility—it helped me see the stakes more clearly without feeling like the argument was just abstract theorizing.