God, Knowledge & Mystery: Essays in Philosophical Theology PDF
Preview God, Knowledge & Mystery: Essays in Philosophical Theology
GOD, KNOWLEDGE, AND MYSTERY ALSO BY PETER VAN INWAGEN An Essay on Free Will Material Beings Metaphysics Alvin Plantinga (co-editor) Time and Cause: Essays Presented to Richard Taylor (editor) GOD KNOWLEDGE &MYSTERY Essays in Philosophical Theology PETER VAN INWAGEN CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON Copyright © 199 5 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1995 by Cornell University Press. @) The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39·48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Van Inwagen, Peter. God, knowledge, and mystery : essays in philosophical theology I Peter van Inwagen. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8014-2994-3 (alk. paper).-ISBN 0-8014-8186-4 (pbk. alk. paper) 1. Philosophical theology. 2. Knowledge, Theory of (Religion) I. Title. BT40.V34 1995 230'.01-dc20 95-1426 To ALVIN PLANTINGA A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. -MATTHEW 5: 14, I 5 Contents General Introduction I PART I. Chance, Evil, and Modal Skepticism Introduction II I. Ontological Arguments 22 2. The Place of Chance in a World Sustained by God 42 3· The Problem of Evil, the Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence 66 4· The Magnitude, Duration, and Distribution of Evil: A Theodicy PART II. The Bible, the Church, and Modern Knowledge Introduction I25 5. Genesis and Evolution I28 6. Critical Studies of the New Testament and the User of the New Testament 7· Non Est Hick Part III. Trinity and Incarnation Introduction 2I9 8. And Yet They Are Not Three Gods but One God 222 9· Not by Confusion of Substance, but by Unity of Person 260 Index 28I GOD, KNOWLEDGE, AND MYSTERY General Introduction THESE essays are records of the attempts of a philosopher to think about various theological questions.1 But why not leave theological questions to the theologians? This question can be met with a counterquestion: Who are the theologians? If the first question is taken to imply that only those who are members of faculties of theology or who possess a degree or diploma that some how involves the word 'theology' are theologians, then, in my view, the implication is rather restrictive. It seems to me comparable to the suggestion that only those with degrees in politics or "political science" should discuss political questions. It seems to me, moreover, that philosophers have certain advantages over most theologians (in the narrow sense of the word) when it comes to discussing theological questions. It is true that the philosopher, even the most learned historian of philosophy, will almost certainly lack the historical training-the training in the history of doctrine and in the methods of biblical studies-that is the central component of the educa- r. All the essays in this book are previously published. I list here several of my essays and reviews on theological subjects that are not included in this collection: "The Possibility of Resurrection," International journal for the Philosophy of Religion 9 (1978), II4-12r. Reprinted in Immortality, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1992), and in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, ed. Louis P. Pojman (2d ed.) (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1993). Review of 0. K. Bouwsma, Without Proof or Evi dence, in Faith and Philosophy 4 (r987), I03-ro8. Review of John Leslie, Universes, in Faith and Philosophy ro (1993), 439-443. "Quam Dilecta," God and the Philosophers, ed. Thomas V. Morris, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 3 r-60. "Reflec tions on the Essays of Draper, Gale, and Russell," in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder, forthcoming from Indiana University Press. "Doubts about Darwinism," in Darwinism: Science or Philosophy? ed. Jon Buell and Virginia Hearne (Richardson, Texas: Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 1994), pp. I77-19r. 2 General Introduction tion of present-day academic theologians. But historical trammg, though important in theological studies, is not the only thing of impor tance. Large parts of theology are really philosophy, although philoso phy carried on within the constraints of Christian or Jewish or Muslim faith. Or, if you insist that philosophy is, by definition, unfettered by theological presuppositions, it is at any rate true that the method of large parts of theology is indistinguishable from the method of philoso phy. If someone says that theology is an essentially historical discipline, and that its methods are therefore essentially the methods of the histori cal studies, I will reply that that is a natural view for someone to take whose academic training has been almost entirely historical-! am willing to bet that anyone who says this will be the product of a course of study whose content has been almost entirely historical-but I do not believe it for a minute. (It should be noted that "theological histori cism" will have to be regarded by its adherents as a thesis about the proper method of theology at certain points in the history of theology. One cannot coherently imagine a theological tradition in which theol ogy has been regarded ab initio as a study of its own history.) It must also be said that the present-day academic theologian, like the thirteenth-century theologian, is likely to have absorbed, in one way or another, a good deal of philosophy-and here I mean not the methods and techniques of philosophy but the ideas and conclusions of particular philosophers. A great deal of this philosophy will have come, directly or indirectly, from either Kant or Heidegger. Much of the philosophy that has been imported into theology seems to me to have been imperfectly understood, and, much more importantly, to have been accepted with no clear sense of how provisional and shaky all philosophical ideas and conclusions are. One advantage philoso phers bring to theology is that they know too much about philosophy to be overly impressed by the fact that a particular philosopher has said this or that. Philosophers of the present day know what Thomas Aquinas and Professor Bultmann did not know: that no philosopher is an authority. Philosophers know that if you want to pronounce on, say, the project of natural theology, you cannot simply appeal to what Kant has established about natural theology. You cannot do this for the very good reason that Kant has established nothing about natural theology. Kant has only offered arguments, and the cogency of these arguments can be (and is daily) disputed. There is a third advantage, harder to describe, that the philosopher brings to theology. It might be put this way: The philosopher is not likely to be impressed by a piece of text that looks like an argument
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