In my previous post I used the strange term \u201contotheology.\u201d\u00a0 This is a mash-up of \u201contology\u201d \u2013 the study of being \u2013 and theology.\u00a0 So what\u2019s the problem with suggesting that \u201ctheology\u201d is concerned with ontology?<\/p>\n
To be more precise, the concern is not over \u201cbeing\u201d in general, but over the \u201cbeing\u201d of God.\u00a0 Ontotheology is a way of speaking and thinking about God by which God is reduced to the same kind <\/i>of being as other things in the universe.\u00a0 In this framework, it is as though God is a sort of superhero \u2013 a person like human persons, but with super-powers and abilities.\u00a0 This sort of conception of God is often evident in modern \u201cfirst mover\u201d arguments.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There must have been a giant finger, so to speak, that tipped over the first domino and got things going.\u00a0 Not only is this picture wrong concerning how physical causes work, more importantly, it is wrong concerning God.\u00a0 It makes God into just another physical cause, and it is vulnerable to the famous \u201cbut who made God\u201d retort.<\/p>\n
We must be careful to remember that God is absolutely, infinitely beyond anything in the universe.\u00a0 God is in fact not \u201cin<\/i>\u201d the universe in the sense of derivation, containment, or limitations.\u00a0 Rather, God is transcendent<\/i> over the universe.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The character of the universe is determined by God, but God is determined by nothing.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 The universe is circumscribed by God, but God is circumscribed by nothing outside Himself.<\/p>\n We must also be careful to remember that God is not part of the order of creation.\u00a0 Among created things, we can speak of first-order causal relations, progressions, hierarchies, levels of being, emergence, and evolution.\u00a0 A single strand of DNA, for example, is a chemical molecule.\u00a0 It possesses a potential to become part of something more, but on its own it is just a molecule.\u00a0 A strand of DNA, combined with other molecules in the nucleus of a mammalian egg cell, comprises an egg cell.\u00a0 It, too, possesses a potential to become part of something more, but on its own it is just an egg cell.\u00a0 The fusion of an egg cell with a sperm cell produces another level of being, with far greater potentialities.\u00a0 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. \u00a0At each increasing level of complexity, the potentiality of the system increases.\u00a0 The distant evolutionary descendants of that shrew may become human beings who can build universities and study their own evolutionary past.\u00a0 But the egg cell may die, the shrew may be eaten by a raptor, or the shrew\u2019s biosphere may collapse in a volcanic eruption, and the potential for human beings may never be realized.\u00a0 This realization of this potentiality is precarious.<\/p>\n God is not like this.\u00a0 God does not emerge from lower orders of organization, because He is simple, without parts.\u00a0 God does not develop into something \u201cmore,\u201d because He is perfect.\u00a0 God does not change over time, because He is timeless.\u00a0 God does not evolve, because He is absolute.\u00a0 In His freedom and grace God relates to His creatures, but He does not depend on those relations to become what He could be.\u00a0 Nothing can frustrate God\u2019s potentialities, which for God\u2019s-self are always already realized and thus are always actualities.\u00a0 The eschatological future in which \u201cGod will be all in all\u201d (1 Cor. 15:28) is certain because it is proleptically present to God, who transcends categories such as \u201cpast\u201d and \u201cfuture.\u201d\u00a0 God eternally is<\/i> fully Himself.<\/p>\n All of this means that God simply cannot<\/i> be an actor in a courtroom drama.\u00a0 As I noted in my first post, courts are concerned with limited kinds of claims relating to particular kinds of causes and relations.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Does the forensic evidence prove that the defendant\u2019s gun discharged the fatal bullet?\u00a0 Does the convenience store\u2019s video surveillance footage clearly show the defendant pulling the trigger and running away?\u00a0 Did the money in the defendant\u2019s pocket when he was apprehended approximate the amount missing from the store\u2019s cash register?\u00a0 Does a DNA test on hair samples found at the scene match the defendant\u2019s DNA profile?<\/p>\n If all of these facts line up, the jury can reasonably conclude that the defendant is culpable for the homicide.\u00a0 It is no defense to argue that the victim\u2019s death was \u201cGod\u2019s will.\u201d\u00a0 As a theological<\/i> claim, such a statement might in some sense be true.\u00a0 From the perspective of Christian theology, it is correct to state that nothing can happen outside of God\u2019s providence.\u00a0 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\u2019s providence and human agency, but if God is God, then the homicide is not outside the bounds of His providence.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the mystery of God\u2019s providence simply is not an appropriate subject for a courtroom.\u00a0 God\u2019s providential governance of creation is not a causal relation on the same order as the perpetrator\u2019s pulling of the trigger to discharge the bullet that killed the victim.\u00a0 The courtroom deals entirely with immanent things.\u00a0 It cannot judge transcendence.<\/p>\n At this point, a devoted materialist might say, \u201cquite right \u2013 and let\u2019s not bother with the ephemeral wisps of transcendence when our hands are already full trying to clear the docket of immanent claims.\u201d\u00a0 But that will not do, at least not if we truly wish to understand<\/i> phenomena such as homicides.\u00a0 Reducing the phenomenon of homicide to purely immanent, material causes ends up rendering the phenomenon meaningless:\u00a0 it is nothing but the outworking of physical laws and molecules.\u00a0 We can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n The same is true for philosophical proofs of God derived only from observation of creation.\u00a0 As attractive as it seems to suggest that the big bang shows the universe had a beginning and that the \u201cbang\u201d must have been set off by God, it is bad theology \u2013 it is ontotheology.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The God who is the transcendent creator of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions does not need such flimsy arguments.\u00a0 In all of its majesty and power, the entire creation already declares His glory (Psalm 19).\u00a0 Indeed, the material creation points beyond<\/i> itself, towards a majesty, power, wisdom and beauty so great as to be literally inconceivable.\u00a0 That<\/i> is the best original understanding of \u201cnatural theology,\u201d a fundamentally apophatic approach utterly at odds with ontotheology and the self-righteous rhetoric of the courtroom lawyer.<\/p>\n Further Reading<\/span>:<\/p>\n Merold Westphal, Overcoming Ontotheology:\u00a0 Toward a Post-Modern Christian Faith<\/a> (Fordham Univ. Press 2001).<\/p>\n David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite:\u00a0 The Aesthetics of Christian Truth<\/a> (Eerdmans 2003).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n