Divine Attributes and the Coherence of Theism

Summary

Whether the traditional theistic conception of God is even internally coherent is a meta-question for Maslik 1: before arguing for or against God's existence, one must ask whether the concept of God being argued about is coherent. The challenge has been pressed especially in twentieth-century analytic philosophy of religion: J. L. Mackie's argument that omnipotence and the existence of evil are incompatible, debates about whether omniscience is compatible with libertarian free will, problems about whether divine atemporality is compatible with divine personal action. The Islamic kalām tradition addressed many of these issues centuries earlier under the heading of the ṣifāt (divine attributes). The framework engages both the contemporary and classical traditions as resources, treating the coherence debate as substantially defended on both sides without claiming definitive resolution.

The Question

The classical theistic conception attributes to God a cluster of properties:

Omnipotence: God can do anything (or anything possible)
Omniscience: God knows everything (or everything knowable)
Omnibenevolence: God is perfectly good
Eternity: God exists necessarily and (on most classical views) atemporally
Simplicity: God has no parts
Immutability: God does not change
Aseity: God depends on nothing else
Personhood: God is a personal being, capable of relating to creatures

Three families of problems arise.

Internal incompatibility. Some pairs or groups of these attributes are alleged to be incompatible with each other. Can a being be perfectly good and also omnipotent in a world containing evil? Can a being be omniscient (including knowledge of the future) and also leave room for libertarian human free will? Can a being be atemporal and also act personally (which seems to require temporal location)?

External incompatibility. Some attributes are alleged to be incompatible with empirical or observable features of the world. Can an omnibenevolent God allow the actual suffering observed in the world? Can an omnipotent God allow the apparent randomness of natural processes?

Definitional incoherence. Some attributes are alleged to be incoherent on inspection. The classical "stone too heavy for God to lift" problem questions whether the very notion of omnipotence is well-defined. Similar problems have been raised about omniscience and about divine simplicity.

The framework engages each family of problems.

Mackie and the Logical Problem of Evil

J. L. Mackie's "Evil and Omnipotence" (Mind, 1955) is the classic statement of the logical problem of evil. The argument:

God is omnipotent.
God is omniscient.
God is omnibenevolent.
Evil exists.

Mackie argued these four propositions form a logically inconsistent set: if God has the three attributes, evil could not exist (an omniscient God would know about it, an omnipotent God could prevent it, an omnibenevolent God would want to prevent it). Since evil clearly exists, one of the three divine attributes must be denied.

Alvin Plantinga's God, Freedom, and Evil (1974) is widely regarded as having defused the logical problem of evil through the free will defense: it is logically possible that all the evil in the world results from the free choices of creatures, and God (even an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God) cannot logically create creatures with libertarian free will whose choices God controls. The free will defense does not claim that this is actually the case, only that it is logically possible — which is sufficient to defuse the logical problem.

Most philosophers now grant that Plantinga's defense defuses the strict logical problem. The contemporary debate has shifted to the evidential problem of evil: even if no logical contradiction exists, does the quantity and distribution of evil in the world count as evidence against the existence of a theistic God? This is the question engaged in the framework's published article on the problem of evil. The framework's position is that the evidential problem is serious, that responses are available, and that the cumulative case across the six masāliks is not decisively undermined by it.

Omniscience and Free Will

A second major coherence problem concerns the compatibility of divine omniscience with libertarian human free will.

The problem: If God knows with certainty what I will do tomorrow, then it seems my action tomorrow is fixed in some way — for if it were not fixed, God could not know it. But if my action is fixed, I do not act with libertarian free will (which requires that I could have done otherwise).

Three families of response have been developed.

Boethian-Anselmian. God is atemporal; God knows all of time simultaneously rather than knowing the future as future. Therefore God's knowledge does not "precede" my free action in any sense that would constrain it. Aquinas develops this position in detail.

Molinist. God knows what every possible free creature would freely do in every possible circumstance — this is the doctrine of "middle knowledge" (scientia media). God's foreknowledge of my actual choice is grounded in this middle knowledge plus God's decision to actualize a world in which I face certain circumstances. Luis de Molina (sixteenth-century Jesuit) is the founding figure; Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig are major contemporary Molinists.

Open theist. God does not know future free choices because future free choices are not yet there to be known. God's omniscience is the knowledge of everything that is there to be known, not knowledge of metaphysically indeterminate future contingents. William Hasker and Greg Boyd are major contemporary open theists. The position is contested within the broader theistic tradition; the framework engages it as a serious option without endorsing it.

The Islamic kalām tradition addressed these issues in its own vocabulary. The Ashʿarī school typically held to divine eternal knowledge while developing the kasb ("acquisition") doctrine of human action: God creates the action but the human acquires it. The Muʿtazila preserved genuine human causation while affirming divine knowledge. The Māturīdī school developed positions between these. The framework engages the kalām tradition as offering a parallel set of resources for the coherence question.

Divine Simplicity

Classical theism, on most versions, affirms divine simplicity: God has no parts, and the divine attributes are not metaphysical components composing God but identical with God's essence.

The challenge: if omnipotence = omniscience = omnibenevolence = the divine essence, do these attributes still distinguish each other? And does divine simplicity render God too abstract to be the personal God of religious life?

Contemporary defenses (Eleonore Stump's Aquinas, 2003; William Mann's "Divine Simplicity," Religious Studies, 1982) argue that divine simplicity is coherent if interpreted carefully: the attributes are conceptually distinct as we grasp them while being ontologically one in God. The Islamic tradition's discussion of the ṣifāt worked through similar territory: the Ashʿarī formula that the attributes are "neither identical with the essence nor other than it" (lā hiya huwa wa-lā ghayruhā) tries to preserve simplicity while admitting attribute language.

The framework treats divine simplicity as a coherent theistic option, neither required nor refuted.

Atemporality and Personal Action

Classical theism (on most accounts) affirms divine atemporality. God does not exist in time; God exists outside time. The challenge: how can an atemporal being act in the world? Action seems to require temporal location — to act now, in response to circumstances as they unfold.

Contemporary defenses (Stump and Kretzmann, "Eternity," Journal of Philosophy, 1981) develop a sophisticated notion of "eternal time" that allows atemporal beings to have causal relations with temporal beings.

Critics (especially Nicholas Wolterstorff in Time and Eternity, 2017) have argued for a temporal God who exists in time, accepting some revisions to classical theism in exchange for a more straightforward account of divine personal action.

The Islamic tradition has parallel discussions, especially in kalām engagements with divine knowledge of particulars (the issue Ghazālī pressed against Ibn Sīnā; see ghazali-tahafut-and-causation).

The framework treats this as another live debate within theism rather than as a refutation of theism.

The Pattern of Coherence Debates

Several patterns recur across the coherence debates.

First, the contemporary literature has substantially defended the coherence of the major divine attributes. Where strict logical incompatibility was once asserted (Mackie's logical problem of evil), the contemporary consensus is that such incompatibility has not been demonstrated.

Second, the debates have refined rather than refuted classical theism. Positions like Molinism, eternal time, and open theism are refinements of classical theism, not alternatives to it.

Third, the Islamic kalām tradition addressed many of these issues with sophistication. The framework treats the kalām materials as a major resource that contemporary philosophy of religion has only partly engaged.

What This Article Establishes

Contributions:

A map of the major coherence problems for classical theism: incompatibility, external incompatibility, definitional incoherence.
Engagement with the most influential modern presentation (Mackie) and the most influential modern response (Plantinga).
Identification of where contemporary debate has moved (from the logical to the evidential problem of evil; from refutation to refinement of theism).
Connection to the Islamic kalām tradition's parallel treatments.

Limits:

The article does not claim definitive resolution of any coherence problem. The framework's restraint applies.
The article does not exhaust the divine attributes debate. Specific issues (especially the evidential problem of evil) are addressed in companion articles.

Connections to Other Masalik

Maslik 1 (this maslik): companion to kalam-vs-falsafa-debate, ghazali-tahafut-and-causation, ibn-sina-necessary-being.
Maslik 0 (Transversal): the evidential problem of evil belongs to transversal objections. See the published problem-of-evil.
Maslik 5 (Prophetic): the question of divine atemporality and personal action connects to the coherence of revelation. See possibility-of-revelation.

Key Distinctions

Logical problem of evil (largely defused) vs. evidential problem of evil (still contested)
Boethian atemporality vs. Molinist middle knowledge vs. open theism — three responses to foreknowledge/freedom
Divine simplicity as classical commitment vs. revisable in some contemporary theism
Atemporal God (classical) vs. temporal God (Wolterstorff)
Sifāt tradition in Islamic kalām vs. attributes debate in Western philosophy of religion — parallel treatments

Major Proponents (of the coherence of theism)

Alvin Plantinga — God, Freedom, and Evil (1974); free will defense
Richard Swinburne — The Coherence of Theism (1977, revised 1993)
Eleonore Stump — Aquinas (2003); divine simplicity
William Lane Craig — Time and Eternity (2001); Molinist defender
al-Ashʿarī — classical ṣifāt doctrine
al-Bāqillānī — al-Tamhīd
al-Ghazālī — al-Iqtisād fī al-Iʿtiqād
al-Māturīdī — Kitāb al-Tawḥīd

Major Critics (of the coherence of theism, in some

respect)

J. L. Mackie — The Miracle of Theism (1982); "Evil and Omnipotence" (1955)
Antony Flew — early career writings; later abandoned this position
Nicholas Wolterstorff — Time and Eternity (2017); critique of atemporal classical theism (constructive)
William Hasker — God, Time, and Knowledge (1989); open theism (constructive)
Some contemporary process theologians — substantial revision of classical theism