God in the Dock 4: On Ontotheology

In my previous post I used the strange term “ontotheology.”  This is a mash-up of “ontology” – the study of being – and theology.  So what’s the problem with suggesting that “theology” is concerned with ontology?

To be more precise, the concern is not over “being” in general, but over the “being” of God.  Ontotheology is a way of speaking and thinking about God by which God is reduced to the same kind of being as other things in the universe.  In this framework, it is as though God is a sort of superhero – a person like human persons, but with super-powers and abilities.  This sort of conception of God is often evident in modern “first mover” arguments.  This sort of argument, in the way modern people often think of it, suggests that the development of the universe since the big bang is like a row of dominoes.  There must have been a giant finger, so to speak, that tipped over the first domino and got things going.  Not only is this picture wrong concerning how physical causes work, more importantly, it is wrong concerning God.  It makes God into just another physical cause, and it is vulnerable to the famous “but who made God” retort.

We must be careful to remember that God is absolutely, infinitely beyond anything in the universe.  God is in fact not “in” the universe in the sense of derivation, containment, or limitations.  Rather, God is transcendent over the universe.  The universe is contingent on God, but God is not at all contingent on the universe. The universe depends utterly on God for its existence, but God depends on nothing.  The character of the universe is determined by God, but God is determined by nothing.[1]  The universe is circumscribed by God, but God is circumscribed by nothing outside Himself.

We must also be careful to remember that God is not part of the order of creation.  Among created things, we can speak of first-order causal relations, progressions, hierarchies, levels of being, emergence, and evolution.  A single strand of DNA, for example, is a chemical molecule.  It possesses a potential to become part of something more, but on its own it is just a molecule.  A strand of DNA, combined with other molecules in the nucleus of a mammalian egg cell, comprises an egg cell.  It, too, possesses a potential to become part of something more, but on its own it is just an egg cell.  The fusion of an egg cell with a sperm cell produces another level of being, with far greater potentialities.  A grown shrew, the fruit of that fusion of egg and sperm, has yet greater potentialities, and a group of shrews living in proximity to each other and to other animals and plants in a biosphere far greater than a single shrew.  At each increasing level of complexity, the potentiality of the system increases.  The distant evolutionary descendants of that shrew may become human beings who can build universities and study their own evolutionary past.  But the egg cell may die, the shrew may be eaten by a raptor, or the shrew’s biosphere may collapse in a volcanic eruption, and the potential for human beings may never be realized.  This realization of this potentiality is precarious.

God is not like this.  God does not emerge from lower orders of organization, because He is simple, without parts.  God does not develop into something “more,” because He is perfect.  God does not change over time, because He is timeless.  God does not evolve, because He is absolute.  In His freedom and grace God relates to His creatures, but He does not depend on those relations to become what He could be.  Nothing can frustrate God’s potentialities, which for God’s-self are always already realized and thus are always actualities.  The eschatological future in which “God will be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28) is certain because it is proleptically present to God, who transcends categories such as “past” and “future.”  God eternally is fully Himself.

All of this means that God simply cannot be an actor in a courtroom drama.  As I noted in my first post, courts are concerned with limited kinds of claims relating to particular kinds of causes and relations.  When a homicide is tried in court, for example, the jury is asked to draw on common experience of the created world to reach a verdict.  Does the forensic evidence prove that the defendant’s gun discharged the fatal bullet?  Does the convenience store’s video surveillance footage clearly show the defendant pulling the trigger and running away?  Did the money in the defendant’s pocket when he was apprehended approximate the amount missing from the store’s cash register?  Does a DNA test on hair samples found at the scene match the defendant’s DNA profile?

If all of these facts line up, the jury can reasonably conclude that the defendant is culpable for the homicide.  It is no defense to argue that the victim’s death was “God’s will.”  As a theological claim, such a statement might in some sense be true.  From the perspective of Christian theology, it is correct to state that nothing can happen outside of God’s providence.  Theologians could debate the fine points of whether God ordained or merely permitted the homicide, the problem and nature of evil, and the relation between God’s providence and human agency, but if God is God, then the homicide is not outside the bounds of His providence.  Nevertheless, the mystery of God’s providence simply is not an appropriate subject for a courtroom.  God’s providential governance of creation is not a causal relation on the same order as the perpetrator’s pulling of the trigger to discharge the bullet that killed the victim.  The courtroom deals entirely with immanent things.  It cannot judge transcendence.

At this point, a devoted materialist might say, “quite right – and let’s not bother with the ephemeral wisps of transcendence when our hands are already full trying to clear the docket of immanent claims.”  But that will not do, at least not if we truly wish to understand phenomena such as homicides.  Reducing the phenomenon of homicide to purely immanent, material causes ends up rendering the phenomenon meaningless:  it is nothing but the outworking of physical laws and molecules.  We can’t begin to speak of the moral and social meaning of homicide without reference to transcendentals such as goodness, beauty, peace, order, and love, which homicides erode.

The same is true for philosophical proofs of God derived only from observation of creation.  As attractive as it seems to suggest that the big bang shows the universe had a beginning and that the “bang” must have been set off by God, it is bad theology – it is ontotheology.  Likewise, proofs based on supposed bottlenecks in biological evolution, such as apparently irreducibly complex chemical processes or structures, require a God who periodically literally reassembles things, as though he were driving a molecular bulldozer through natural history.  The God who is the transcendent creator of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions does not need such flimsy arguments.  In all of its majesty and power, the entire creation already declares His glory (Psalm 19).  Indeed, the material creation points beyond itself, towards a majesty, power, wisdom and beauty so great as to be literally inconceivable.  That is the best original understanding of “natural theology,” a fundamentally apophatic approach utterly at odds with ontotheology and the self-righteous rhetoric of the courtroom lawyer.

Further Reading:

Merold Westphal, Overcoming Ontotheology:  Toward a Post-Modern Christian Faith (Fordham Univ. Press 2001).

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite:  The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans 2003).