Open Theism - Philosophical Arguments

Philosophical Arguments

Open theists maintain that some of the classical attributes of God are contradictory and unintelligible. The five main classical attributes are as follows:

• Immutability: God cannot change in any way. This does not mean that God cannot speak in time, but as Augustine says in Confessions, that when He does so, the Word is He Himself.
• Impassibility: God is not the object of actions, but the subject. ("Impassable" is from the Latin patior: suffer, undergo, endure.) Thus we cannot reach up to God without Him first coming down to us (cf. Romans 10:6), and any real interaction we have with God must be the result of God's condescension to us through the Incarnation and Pentecost. Neither impassibility nor immutability should be taken to imply we cannot actually interact with God. Classical Theist Blaise Pascal even says God has established prayer "To communicate to His creatures the dignity of causality." The Definition of Chalcedon established the orthodox doctrine that Mary is the mother of God. The Passion is called the "passion" to underscore the fact that here, the impassible One suffers on the Cross. And Alexander bishop of Alexandria says of the Crucifixion "the impassable suffers and does not avenge its own injury." (in Greek, the same root is used for "suffer" and "impassible" so perhaps a more accurate (though more wordy) translation would be "the one who does not suffer suffers and does not avenge his own injury.").
• Omnipotence: God has all power, which includes complete sovereignty over all things. Thus God's sovereign will that we be free and that our will be effective is necessarily realized; and we are free and our will is effective.
• Omnipresence: God is present everywhere, or more precisely, all things find their location in God; or alternatively God transcends space and time.
• Omniscience: God has all knowledge, including of all past, present, and future events.

Contradictions in the traditional attributes are pointed out by open theists and atheists alike. Atheist author and educator George H. Smith writes in his book Atheism: the Case Against God that if God is omniscient, meaning God knows the future, God cannot be omnipotent, meaning God can do anything, because: "If God knew the future with infallible certainty, he cannot change it – in which case he cannot be omnipotent. If God can change the future, however, he cannot have infallible knowledge of it." Likewise, if God is omnipresent, God cannot be omnipotent because God could not limit his own location. Open theists would again use the same argument here that changing his location would conflict with his immutability. A classical theist would respond to such an argument by pointing out that their position is that God is the author of the future, and thus there is no more contradiction in saying God knows the future and is sovereign over it than in saying "Shakespeare was free to make Romeo and Juliet as he would, but having made it He is not free to make it different from how he had." The classical theist would also postulate that since God is omniscient, God would also know every possible future.

Open theism also answers the question of how God can be blameless and omnipotent even though evil exists in the world. H. Roy Elseth gives an example of a parent that knows with certainty that his child would go out and murder someone if he was given a gun. Elseth argues that if the parent did give the gun to the child then the parent would be responsible for that crime. However, if God was unsure about the outcome then God would not be culpable for that act; only the one who committed the act would be guilty. This position is, however, dubious, as a parent who knows his child was probable, or likely, or even possibly going to shoot someone would be culpable; and God knew that it was likely that man would sin, and thus God is still culpable. An orthodox Christian might, on the contrary, seek to ground a Theodicy in the Resurrection, both of Christ and the general Resurrection to come, though this is not the traditional answer to evil.

Another claim made by open theists is that the traditional definition of omniscience is incompatible with a real love relationship with God. It is claimed that for someone to have a real love relationship, it must be give and take. Each member opens themselves up and becomes vulnerable. They point out that God, throughout the Bible, is shown as grieving over Israel's rebellion. They claim that if the future was known with absolute certainty, then Israel could not have freely chosen to rebel and God could not be genuinely grieving, knowing that this was the only possibility. Israel's actions would have been set in stone millennia before they were ever born. They would have been compelled by fate or providence to take those actions. This would be the same as a relationship between a programmer and computer. Open theists, such as John Sanders, claim that the only way a relationship can be real is if there is freedom to choose.

It should be noted that many open theists believe that God's infinite intelligence affords him an infinite understanding of all probabilities in the universe. Thus, to an unknown degree, God is able to "know the future" with certainty due to his understanding of the probabilities at hand. However, other open theists reply that this perspective simply reinforces the intellectual image of God which open theism is working to revise. God's knowledge that "exceeds human wisdom" should not be thought of in terms of Greek philosophical categories. Biblically speaking, this inscrutability is a confession: either of human limitation and incompleteness or else of God's care that goes beyond our horizon of comprehension.