D. Z. Phillips on God and Evil

D. Z. Phillips on God and Evilphin_1472 1..14

Brian Davies, Fordham University

AbstractThis paper notes and discusses some key arguments in Part One of TheProblem of Evil and the Problem of God by D. Z. Phillips. With an eye onsome texts of Thomas Aquinas, I reject Phillips’s view that belief in divineomnipotence leads to absurd claims concerning God, but I defend hisrejection of anthropomorphism when it comes to talk of God, and, withqualifications, I defend and elaborate on his suggestion that God is not amoral agent. I also commend his critique of certain well-known theodi-cies (e.g. that provided by Richard Swinburne), although I challenge hisappeal to what he calls “the grammar of God.”

Dewi Phillips’s most sustained treatment of the topic of God and evil is tobe found in his book The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God.1 Part Oneof this work (on which Part Two is based) comprises a sustained attack onwhat Dewi calls “Our Problematic Inheritance.” Focusing in particular onwritings by J. L. Mackie, John Hick, Richard Swinburne and AlvinPlantinga, Dewi argues that the word “omnipotent” should be avoidedwhen talking of God’s power, that God is not a moral agent, and thatmuch recent discussion of God and evil is adversely affected by a morallyabhorrent consequentialism. In what follows, I shall be concentrating onthese lines of argument.

When it comes to omnipotence, Dewi seems primarily to reject theclaims (i) that God “can do anything logically possible,” and (ii) that Godhas “all the power there is.”2 We should not, says Dewi, buy into theseways of talking.Why not? Because, says Dewi, they depend on a notion of

1. D. Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God (London: SCM Press, 2004).Dewi also wrote about God and evil in a debate with Richard Swinburne published inStuart Brown (ed.), Reason and Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). So far as Ican see, Dewi’s views on God and on evil did not change at all between his 1997 encounterwith Swinburne and what he came to write in The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God.2. Dewi finds the first claim to be upheld by Richard Swinburne, Providence and the

Problem of Evil (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) p. 3. He finds the second claim to be upheldby Stephen T. Davis, “Free Will and Evil” in Stephen T. Davis (ed.), Encountering Evil(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001) p. 136.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9205.2012.01472.xPhilosophical Investigations ••:•• •• 2012ISSN 0190-0536

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148,USA.

power that does not take account of what it might mean to speak of thepower of God. It is, Dewi argues, absurd to hold that God can do anythinglogically possible since God, not being something bodily, cannot, forexample, ride a bike or eat an ice cream. And, Dewi adds, the notion of“all power” is unintelligible since power (unlike, say, coal) is not some-thing on which some individual might have a monopoly. The problem,says Dewi, “is in the conceptually unspecifiable notion of ‘all power,’ asthough ‘power’ referred to one thing.”3

I entirely agree with Dewi that the notion “all the power there is”seems pretty meaningless, and for just the reason he gives. But is “God cando anything logically possible” as misconceived as Dewi seems to think? Itis obviously misconceived if taken to mean that one can attach to thewords “God can” any expression signifying a possible feat, and thereby endup with a true statement.That is why (abstracting from what might be saidin the light of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation), it cannotintelligibly be suggested that God can ride a bike or eat an ice cream.4 Yetone might use the sentence “God can do anything logically possible”while assuming points like this and while trying only to say that God canbring about anything that can be thought to exist without there being acontradiction involved in saying that it does exist. And why should onenot say that?

In his paper “The Power of God,”Andrew Gleeson, speaking, I assume,in defence of Dewi, offers an answer to this question. He suggests that thephrase “bring about” might be construed in such a way that “the veryground for saying that God cannot ride a bicycle is also ground for sayingthat he cannot ‘bring it about’ or ‘make it the case’ that young Jimmy ridesa bicycle.”5 Gleeson’s point here seems to be that our bringing thingsabout, or making it the case that such and such obtains, depends on usbeing physical individuals. As he explains, “How does one ‘bring it about’or ‘make it the case that’ young Jimmy rides a bicycle? Well – insofar asthese rather awkward philosophical constructions have a sense in ordinaryEnglish – the answer surely has to be something like this: one buys abicycle, gives it to him, helps him get on it, pushes him about in the yardtill he gets the hang and so on. But these are, again, all bodily doings, and

3. The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, p. 23.4. In The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, Dewi does not consider what might be

said of God in the light of the Incarnation. That seems to me to be unfortunate since, interms of orthodox Christology (that of the Council of Chalcedon, for example), there isabsolutely no problem in saying that God can ride a bike or eat an ice cream – just as thereis no problem in saying that God died. But orthodox Christology would here distinguishbetween what is true of Jesus as man and what is true of him as God while denying that,as God, he could ride a bike or eat an ice cream. I am assuming that Dewi writes with thismove in mind.5. Andrew Gleeson, “The Power of God,” Sophia 49 (4, 2010) p. 611.

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God does not have a body.”6 And I sympathise with Gleeson’s line ofreasoning here, one which he presents as directed at “anthropomorphic”philosophers of religion (as an example of which he cites Richard Swin-burne).And yet, of course, talk of God’s bringing things about, or makingit to be that such and such is the case, has been embraced by people whoare anything but what I take Gleeson to mean by “anthropomorphic.”Consider, for example, the case of Thomas Aquinas.

Aquinas denies that terms (nouns, verbs and adjectives) used of God andcreatures are to be understood as signifying “univocally.” So he denies, forexample, that “power” signifies the same thing in “I have power” and “Godhas power.” His thinking at this point depends on what he says aboutdivine simplicity (according to which power in God cannot be thought ofas something distinct from God, an “attribute” or “property” that Godhas).7 It also depends on Aquinas’s take on the notion of God as Creator(from which his notion of divine simplicity springs).According to Aquinas,everything created by God derives its being (esse) from God for as long asit exists. For Aquinas, God causes the actuality of everything in the world(whether a “substance” or an “accident”). But Aquinas does not think ofGod’s creative action as a matter of him acting on anything so as to changeit somehow. He takes it to consist in God’s making things to exist (over andagainst nothing).8 And with this thought in mind (and having denied thatGod has what he calls “passive power”), he proceeds to defend the claimthat God is omnipotent, as he does, for example, in Summa Theologiae, 1a,25, 3 (Utrum Deus Sit Omnipotens). He begins his discussion here by saying“Everyone confesses that God is omnipotent. But it seems hard to explainjust what his omnipotence amounts to since one might wonder about themeaning of ‘all’ when someone says that God can do all.”9 Yet, addsAquinas, “since power is relative to what is possible, divine power can doeverything that is possible, and that is why we call God omnipotent.”10

Does this mean that Aquinas supposes that God can eat an ice cream orphysically prop up a child on a bicycle? It does not, as we can see from theway he continues.“We should not,” he observes, “say that God is omnipo-tent because he can do everything that created natures can do.”11 Nor, he

6. Gleeson, p. 612.7. Cf. Summa Theologiae, 1a, 13, 5.8. Cf. Summa Theologiae, 1a, 45, 2.9. I quote from Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (eds.), Aquinas: SummaTheologiae, Questions

on God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) p. 273 f.10. Davies and Leftow, p. 274.11. ibid. In Summa Theologiae 1a, 25, 3, the equivalents of eating an ice cream and so on are“being moved,” being “acted on” and “sinning.”With respect to being moved or acted on,Aquinas says that God lacks passive power. With respect to sinning, Aquinas says that Godcannot sin, that he cannot fall short when it comes to perfection (as Aquinas understandsthe notion).

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adds, should we say “God is omnipotent because he can do everythingpossible to his power” since our explanation of omnipotence would thenbe circular, “stating nothing more than that God is omnipotent because hecan do all that he can do.”12 Instead, Aquinas concludes, we shouldunderstand “possible” in an “absolute” sense. We should say that God, asCreator, can make to exist anything that is “absolutely possible,” i.e.anything that can consistently be said to be.“God’s being,” he argues, “onwhich the notion of his power is based, is infinite existing, not limited toany kind of being, but possessing in itself the perfection of all existing. Sowhatever can have the nature of being falls within the range of things thatare absolutely possible, and we call God omnipotent with respect tothese.”13 In other words, if, say, “Brian Davies weighs three hundredpounds” tells us what could be true, then God can make it to be true. Orin Aquinas’s words, “Whatever does not imply a contradiction is includedin the class of possible things with respect to which we call God omnipo-tent.”14 The idea, of course, is that God makes it to be that things exist, andthat if something can be thought to be, then God can make it to be.

Is Aquinas right about God’s omnipotence? Many philosophers wouldsay that he is not. Swinburne, for example, rejects Aquinas’s notion ofdivine simplicity, and holds that terms applied both to God and creatureshave to be construed univocally.15 So, unlike Aquinas, he ends up main-taining that to speak of God acting is to speak of God invisibly goingthrough a process in time.16 Swinburne also seems prepared to speak ofGod allowing things to exist uncaused (implying that things might existwithout being created by God).17 Yet Aquinas’s treatment of omnipotencedoes seem to follow from the notion of God as Creator ex nihilo, and,

12. ibid.13. ibid.14. Davies and Leftow, p. 274 f.15. Cf. Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, revised edition (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1993) Ch. 5.16. Aquinas holds that “the action of the agent is in the patient.” He means that what hecalls “agent causation” is nothing but its action as effecting a result. How do I teach? Notby talking or whatever, but by bringing it about that someone learns (an example thatAquinas derives from Aristotle). Examples along this line can be multiplied. I break an eggonly insofar as the egg gets broken by me. Cf.Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics:“Action and passion are not two changes but one and the same change, called action in sofar as it is caused by an agent, and passion in so far as it takes place in a patient.” Here, Iquote from Timothy McDermott (ed.), Thomas Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) p. 84.17. Explaining what it means to believe in God as Creator, Swinburne writes: “The mainclaim is that God either himself brings about or makes or permits some other being tobring about (or permits to exist uncaused) the existence of all things that exist” (RichardSwinburne, The Coherence of Theism, p. 131). For a statement of a position completelyopposed to that of Swinburne here, cf. Aquinas, De Potentia, Q.3, 4 (“Whether the poweror even the act of creation is communicable to another”).



insofar as that is so, it seems to me that Dewi’s treatment of omnipotenceis flawed. Dewi appears to want to get rid of the notion of omnipotencealtogether. Arguably, the notion is not as dead in the water as he seemedto think.18 And if it is not so dead, might one not suggest that there is aproblem of evil in the following sense? (i) There is clearly a great deal ofevil around; (ii) if God is omnipotent and good, he could have made aworld containing no evil; and (iii) his not doing so is proof of his badnessor (assuming that if God exists he cannot be bad) his non-existence.

But how are we to understand the sentence “God is good”? As Dewifirmly notes, contemporary Anglo-American philosophers commonly takeit to mean that God is morally good. Some of them have offered expla-nations as to how God is this in spite of the evils in the world, and in Ch.3 and 4 of his book, Dewi subjects them to pretty severe criticism. Heasks, “Does God have morally sufficient reasons for allowing evils toexist?” He then considers a range of affirmative answers that have beenoffered to this question and finds them all wanting since, he thinks, they“suppress or ignore obvious examples of the disastrous effects suffering hashad on human beings.”19 They do not, he argues, give human suffering the“attention it deserves.”20 Hence, for example, he criticises Richard Swin-burne’s argument that naturally occurring evils provide us with chances togrow morally.21 This argument, says Dewi, treats the sufferings of others as“instrumental” and “is a clear instance where a theodicy, in the verylanguage it employs, actually adds to the evil it seeks to justify.”22

My response to this judgment is to say that I agree with it. Dewi’scritiques of various theodicies strike me as sound and for just the reasonshe gives. I think that he sometimes strikes a wrong note, as for example,when parodying the line “God allows certain evils so as to give us achance to improve morally.” He observes that we would hardly think well

18. In The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, Dewi insists that creation is not “an actof controlling power” (cf. p. 179). Working up to this conclusion, he speaks of Christhumbling himself and of Michelangelo depicting God as naked when creating Adam. Givenhis extensively developed theology of the Incarnation, I am sure that Aquinas would agreewith Dewi here. But he does ascribe power to God as Creator. He goes on to distinguishbetween what might be said of Jesus as God and of Jesus as man.This distinction, endorsedby the Council of Chalcedon (451), is never, so far as I can discover, discussed in any ofDewi’s writings. That it is not might lead readers of Dewi forgivably to conclude that hewas somewhat selective when it comes to what he looks at when trying to say what beliefin God amounts to.19. The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, p. 67.20. Cf. The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, p. 50.21. Cf. Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1998) Ch. 8 and 9.22. The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, p. 59 f.The argument of Swinburne to whichDewi is taking exception at this point can be found in Richard Swinburne, Providence andthe Problem of Evil (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) p. 100.

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of the Good Samaritan if he said “Thank you, God, for another oppor-tunity to be responsible.”23 But I take it that the position being attackedby Dewi here is simply noting that certain (good) responses on our partwould be precluded by the absence of certain evils. It seems to be of theform “X, a good, would be impossible withoutY, an evil,” which is a formof argument we can surely use in ethical discussions.Yet, having said this,my instinct is to run again to Dewi’s defence by noting what he calls the“instrumentality” involved in the position now being attacked by him.Wemay value the deeds of the Good Samaritan, and we may concede thatthey could not have occurred in a world without muggers. But whatshould we make of someone who organises or permits a mugging so thatsomeone else can act virtuously in the face of it? I’d say, not much.

When it comes to God doing such a thing, one might say that he ismerely setting up a scenario in which he would like all people to behavewell while then going in for a “hands off” policy leaving all blame withthose who go in for mugging and the like.This idea is at the core of theso-called Free-Will Defence when it comes to God and evil. As under-stood by Dewi, the defence can be expressed thus: (i) God has arrangedthat the world shall provide chances for people to be well behaved; (ii) soGod has arranged that some people might be victims, albeit with goodresults for others.

But does this line or argument amount to a decent moral defence ofGod? Even if it exonerates God from positively wanting people to sufferat the hands of others, it still seems to implicate him in planning for thempossibly doing so. And one might think that this scenario does not leavehim without blood on his hands. Supporters of the Free-Will Defencewill oppose this thought by insisting that human freedom is a good thing,something supremely valuable, indeed. They will then say that God is tobe commended for creating free people and for allowing them to act asthey choose. And this line of reasoning seems very like one which manyof us would respect in non-theological contexts. Parents, for example, maydeliberately strive to arrange for their children to end up being able tomake choices of their own, even should these end up being morallyvicious.Yet, we might approve of these parents. So why suppose that Godis morally suspect for arranging something like this scenario when itcomes to all people?

One might say that God is omniscient and should take steps to preventbad moral choices known to him in advance, as, one might add, anydecent parents should curb their offspring’s freedom should they knowthat their offspring will freely do evil (or, at least, evils of certain kinds).

23. The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, p. 59.



Notice, though, that this line of reasoning seems to presume that God issomehow causally distanced from the free choices of human beings. Andone might ask, although Dewi does not, whether this can be true. If wetake God to be the maker of all things, if we take him to be the cause ofthe existence of everything other than himself, it seems hard to see howit can be. If God is the maker of all things, then he is surely the source ofhuman free actions, not as permitting them but as making them to be. Mustwe here not say, as, for example, Herbert McCabe does, that “the creativeact of God is there immediately in my freedom . . . God is not analternative to freedom, he is the direct cause of it.We are not free in spiteof God, but because of God”?24 I think that we should say this if we thinkof God as the Creator of all things, the reason why there is somethingrather than nothing.25 So it seems to me that the Free-Will Defence ismisguided since it effectively takes God to be an observer able to inter-vene or refrain from intervening when it comes to what he is presentedwith.

The Free-Will Defence, of course, is typically offered as somehowexonerating God on the moral front. But should we even try to engage insuch exoneration? Dewi clearly thinks that we should not. In The Problemof Evil and the Problem of God, he argues that there is something badlywrong with the claim that “God is a moral agent who shares a moralcommunity with us.”26 God, says Dewi, “does not participate in a form oflife in the way he must, if talk of him as an agent among agents is to beintelligible.”27 But is Dewi right here?

Much depends on his phrase “an agent among agents.” Dewi wants tosay that God is not an agent among agents and that he is, therefore, nota moral agent. I worry about this way of talking since it seems, on thesurface, to be suggesting that it would be wrong to think of God as acting.Yet it seems pretty traditional among theists to say that God certainly acts,if to act is to produce effects. Hence, there being a universe at all is typicallytaken by theists to be a matter of God acting as Creator.28 But I suspectthat the force of Dewi’s denial that God is an agent among agents islargely an anti-anthropomorphic one. In other words, I take it that it is

24. Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987) pp. 14–15.25. I develop this thought in Ch. 5 of my The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil(London and New York: Continuum, 2006).26. The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, p. 35.27. The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, p. 148.28. Cf. my “The Action of God” in John Cottingham and Peter Hacker (eds.), Mind,Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2010). Theologians have distinguished between God’s “immanent” and “transient” action,meaning, in the first case, action that remains in God (like the love between the persons ofthe Trinity), and in the second case, action by which God makes things to exist or modifiesthem as already existing.

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used by him so as to deny that God is part of the spatio-temporal universein which things of different kinds interact with each other, as, for example,you and I do. And, although many philosophers would resist this conclu-sion, preferring a view of God as a temporal agent able to interfere withthings as a sculptor interferes with a block of stone, I agree with it. If Godis the Creator, if God makes the difference between there being somethingand nothing, then one has, I think, to say that God is non-material,non-changeable, non-temporal and in no way causally affected by any-thing. In short, one has to buy into something like the account of whatGod is not as developed by Aquinas in texts like the Summa Theologiae andthe Summa Contra Gentiles, or by St Anselm in texts like the Monologionand the Proslogion. And Dewi seems to be doing just this when, on pages150–151 of The Problem of God and the Problem of Evil, he approvinglyquotes a passage from an essay by the present Archbishop of Canterbury,Rowan Williams (to whom the book is dedicated). Here is the quote:

Plenty of theologians and philosophers have pointed out that if God isconceived as acting in a punctiliar way, the divine action is determinedby something other than itself; likewise if God is conceived as “reacting”to anything. If either of these conceptualities gets a foothold in ourthinking about God, we ascribe to God a context for God’s action: Godis (like us) an agent in an environment, who must “negotiate” purposesand desires in relation to other agencies and presences. But God is notan item in any environment, and God’s action has been held, in ortho-dox Christian thought, to be identical with God’s being.29

But, supposing that we agree with what Williams argues here, shouldwe also conclude, whether we are theists or not, that God is not a moralagent? For quite a bit of The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, Dewi,in the manner of a devil’s advocate, writes on the presumption that Godis such a thing so as to attack certain moral defences of God. As I havesaid, though, he denies that God is a moral agent. One of his reasons fordoing so lies in his adherence to the “God is not an agent among agents”principle on which I have just briefly commented. His other (and, so faras I can see, his only other reason) lies in an appeal to the Old Testamentbook of Job. Here, Dewi finds a position presented that is a mile awayfrom that of people looking at evil in the world and seriously asking “Isn’tthis what you would expect from a being of high moral excellence?”30 Ihave already said that I can agree with Dewi (to some extent, anyway) onwhat I take to be his “agent among agents” point. And there is no doubtat all that he is right when it comes to the book of Job, where God is most

29. Rowan Williams, “Redeeming Sorrows,” in D. Z. Phillips (ed.), Religion and Morality(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996) p. 143.30. The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, p. 121.



emphatically not presented as offering, or as having to offer, a moraldefence of himself for the sufferings endured by the righteous Job. In Ch.9, verse 32 of the text, Job says of God, “He is not a man as I am that Ishould answer him, and we should stand together in judgment.” And thisconfession is evidently applauded by the author of Job 38 and following,which largely consists of a striking series of contrasts between God andhuman beings.

Yet one might, I think, say a bit more than Dewi does in defence of the“God is not a moral agent” thesis.31 And one might begin to do so bynoting what is meant when it is said that someone is morally good. Ofcourse, people have bewilderingly different views as to what moral good-ness is. But one can still note some major emphases in the history ofphilosophical accounts of moral goodness (considered as truly attributableto people).32 In fact, one can say that they tend to boil down to one oftwo views, or to a combination of them. According to the first (and moreancient) of them, moral goodness primarily consists in the possession ofcertain virtues. According to the second, it consists in adherence to moralimperatives or conformity to moral duties or obligations. So should weassume that God is morally good qua virtuous or qua obedient to dutiesor obligations? I suggest that he can be morally good in neither sense, not,at least, if we take God to be the beginning and end of all things, theCreator of the universe.

An Aristotelian virtue is something acquired by a human being overtime.And it amounts to a disposition to behave in ways that contribute tothe well-being of that person (although ut in pluribus, “for the most part,”as some medieval authors would have said).33 So someone who is morallygood by broadly Aristotelian standards is someone who needs to bevirtuous in order to flourish as a human being. And morally good peopleare those who succeed on this front insofar as they have acquired virtuousdispositions. But can we think of God as something whose well-beingdepends on the possession of virtues needed by people for their

31. In what follows, I should not be taken to be positively suggesting that God is immoralor sub-moral (like a stone, say). I am concerned to say what God cannot be.32. I am here just ignoring the idea that “X is morally good” is nothing but, say, theexpression of a speaker’s preference for what X says or does (so that “X is morally good”does not contradict what someone says when declaring “X is not morally good”). I ignorethis idea since it also seems to be ignored (or rejected) by people who say that God ismorally good or by people calling God’s moral goodness into question. And, of course, itis famously subject to the observation that “X is morally good” cannot be an expression ofa preference when embedded in sentences like “If John thinks that X is morally good, hewill do it.”33. The disclaimer here is meant to flag the fact that, as seems to be acknowledged bymany in what I am calling “the Aristotelian” tradition, acting virtuously might lead one tobe killed.

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well-being? Not if we are thinking in terms of what I would call classicalChristian theism (or classical Jewish or Islamic theism). According to this,God is not a human being with human needs. Nor is God an individualexisting through time and undergoing changes, which seems to mean thatGod is not something able to have or acquire (or perhaps lose) dispositionsof any kind (on the supposition that a disposition is a tendency to behaveover time).34 So, I suggest, God is not morally good by being well behavedin accordance with Aristotelian thinking.You might reject this suggestionby noting that justice (an Aristotelian virtue) is ascribed to God in theBible and in the writings of many theologians. But, so far as I can see,biblical talk of God’s justice does not at all proceed along Aristotelianlines. Rather, in the case of Old Testament authors, it expresses theconviction that God always acts in terms of a covenant established by himwith the Jewish people (where the do’s and don’ts are laid down by him).In the New Testament, the topic of God’s justice is discussed by St Paulwhen he asks whether God’s loving Jacob but hating Esau means that Godis not just.35 Paul’s answer is an emphatic “By no means,” quickly followedby talk about how a potter has the right to make out of clay one thing forspecial use and another for ordinary use. Echoing what we find in thebook of Job, Paul asks “Who indeed are you, a human being, to argue withGod?”36 Paul does not seem here to be construing “God is just” asmeaning that God has the Aristotelian virtue of justice as exemplified byjust people.37

What of the idea that God is morally good as conforming to duties orobligations? This idea, whatever else it involves, seems to portray God assubject to imperatives or commands of some kind, ones that he is able toact on (or, perhaps, not act on). So we might ask how we are to think ofthese imperatives or commands? Do they exist in any sense? And if theydo, how should we think of God as related to them? As far as I can see,Dewi does not raise either of these questions in The Reality of God and theProblem Evil. Instead, he seems to assume that duties and obligations arewhat people are confronted with and that God is not confronted by themsince he is not an agent among agents.

Can this assumption be defended? The Bible certainly does not coun-tenance the suggestion that God is bound by imperatives or commands. It

34. Of course, there are contemporary philosophers and theologians who tell us that, forvarious reasons, God has to be a changeable and temporal individual. Historically speaking,however, their position is a relatively recent one. Basically (and in Christian circles), it ispost-Reformation.35. Romans 9:11.36. Romans 9:20.37. I try to elaborate on these matters in Ch. 4 of my The Reality of God and the Problemof Evil. See also my “Is God a Moral Agent?” in D. Z. Phillips (ed.), Whose God? WhichTradition? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).



might be said that people have obligations or duties of various kinds andthat God does so as well. Yet can the sense in which people might bethought of as having obligations or duties be a sense in which God can bethought of as having them? One reason for thinking that it cannot lies inthe fact that obligations or duties are what people have in particularcontexts in which they find themselves. Hence, for example, nurses haveobligations and duties to be understood as binding on them given theirrole as nurses. But I do not see that it makes sense to think of God,considered as the beginning and end of all things, as having a role or ashaving a job to perform (either well or badly). One might say that allpeople have certain shared obligations or duties (the obligation or dutyalways to treat people as ends and not means, for example). One mightthen add that God also has such obligations or duties.Yet how might hebe thought to know them and act on them? We might be thought tocome to know what we ought (morally) to do by going through a processof reasoning and by making choices on the basis of this. But I find it hardto see how the Creator of the Universe can intelligibly be thought of asgoing through a reasoning process and acting in the light of it. If nothingelse, such a notion would seem to be attributing change to God, whichconflicts with much that theists have traditionally wanted to say abouthim. It might be suggested that God changelessly or timelessly knowswhat his obligations and duties are, and that he acts on them withoutundergoing change. But this claim surely presumes that God is essentiallyanswerable, which seems to conflict with the notion of him being theCreator (the question here being: answerable to whom or to what?). Itmight be said that even the Creator can be answerable with a view towhat is necessary: that, just as God is “answerable” to (i.e. constrained by)logical truths, he is answerable to (constrained by) moral imperativesconsidered as being somehow like logical truths.38 But can moral impera-tives be likened to logical truths in the way that this reply seems tosuppose? I take it that a logical truth (e.g. “All triangles have three sides”)cannot be denied since its negation would have to be expressed by anindicative sentence that self-destructs because of the meaning of the wordsin it. But imperatives surely cannot self-destruct in this way since they arenot indicative statements. Perhaps they can be expressed in terms ofindicative statements like “Doing X is always wrong,” which might betaken to express necessary truths.Yet “Doing X is always wrong” does notseem to me to be akin to “All triangles have three sides” and the like sinceit invites the question “Wrong for whom, and in what context?” One

38. For a valiant attempt to defend Kant’s claim that God is not subject to obligations, seeCh. 12 of William P. Alston, Divine Nature and Human Language (Ithaca and London:Cornell University Press, 1989).

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might reply “Wrong for God.” But what could this mean? Would it nothave to mean that it would be wrong for God to do such and such givenwhat God is? But, then, are we in a position to say what God is?

Some would claim that we certainly are since God is a person and sincewe can, therefore, explain what it would and would not be wrong for himto do with reference to what is and is not wrong for us to do. Yet,although the formula “God is a person” is treated as an axiom by mostcontemporary Anglo-American philosophers of religion, it is, in fact,anything but a traditional one, except in the context of discussions of thedoctrine of the Trinity (which certainly does not assert that God is threepersons in one person). As far as I have been able to discover, “God is aperson” first occurs in English in the seventeenth century and is ascribedto a Unitarian rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity (a certain John Biddle,who in 1644 was charged with heresy for saying “God is a person”).39 AsI say, the formula is not a traditional one.

And, in any case, I think that, as Aquinas argues, there is reason to saythat we do not know what God is, a conclusion that Aquinas explicitlydefends while not just piously deferring to the (vague) idea that God is amystery. For Aquinas, we can only come to know what something is (andabstracting from what he says about artefacts, or entia per accidens in hislanguage) insofar as we can pick it out as an item in the world to be locatedand investigated in terms of genus and species, and insofar as we canproceed to a more and more accurate account of what it actually is. Is Godsuch an item? Aquinas concludes that he is not since, as Creator, heaccounts for the sheer existence of everything at any time, and is thereforenot subject to change, not an individual X,Y or Z, and not dependent onanything for his existence. Is Aquinas right so to conclude? He obviouslyis if we take God to be that which makes the difference between therebeing something and nothing. Considered as such, God cannot be amember of the universe to be picked out for anything that we might thinkof as scientific inquiry. So he cannot be thought of as one member of akind (an “individual” as we normally use the word). And it seems obviousthat if God makes everything to exist for as long as it does so, then Godowes his being to nothing.This would all seem to lead us to conclude thatwe are seriously unable to understand what God is. In the sense in whichwe might be thought to know what my cat or my dog is, we surely cannotknow what God is. One might, of course, say, and have reason for saying,things like “God is an agent” or “God is a cause.” But words like “agent”and “cause” do not signify things of any particular kind, as do words like“cat” and “dog.” If we know that X is a cat or a dog, then, in an obvious

39. For more on this, see Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes:The Doctrine of the Trinity inthe Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2003).



sense, we know what X is (even if we have much to learn about cats anddogs). Not so if all we know is that X is an agent or a cause.

So I think that Dewi’s “God is not a moral agent” thesis can bedefended even in ways that he does not himself employ. Let me, however,add that I find it curious that in The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God,Dewi never once asks if it should be said that God is good. He tells ushow he thinks “God is good” should not be understood, but he doesnot, so far as I can see, offer any analysis of “God is good.” Since Dewicontinually alludes to biblical ways of talking this, perhaps, might not seemso surprising since the phrase “God is good” occurs in only a few biblicaltexts.40 But that God is good is something that post-biblical theists havenormally insisted on at length, and one might, therefore, wonder whetherDewi’s “God is not a moral agent” conclusion is thereby refuted.

Yet why should one think this? One might do so while assuming that allgoodness is moral goodness. But that assumption is false since we can trulyand intelligibly speak of all sorts of things being good. Medieval thinkerstook “good” to be “transcendental,” i.e. a term predicable of things of verydifferent kinds.And rightly so.“Good” is, surely, a word that we use whenapproving of anything at all, not just morally good people. Notice, though,that our understanding of “good” in sentences of the form “X is good”normally seems to depend on knowledge of what the X in question is.AsPeter Geach has argued, “good” is a logically attributive adjective (like“big”).41 But if we have reasons for denying that we know what God is, wecannot think of “good” in “God is good” as a logically attributive adjective.We cannot think of it as telling us what God is considered as the such andsuch that we know him to be.And for this reason, I presume, Dewi mightagain commend to us his “God is not a moral agent” thesis.

But where does he get this idea from in the first place? I may becrudely misrepresenting him now, but it seems to me that he gets it in nosmall measure from the Bible, to which he often refers when seeking toexplicate what he called “the grammar of God.” And one can see whyDewi appealed to the Bible as much as he did when trying to say whatbelief in God amounts to (although I wonder how his analysis of belief inGod would have gone had he concentrated on the Koran). But can onesimply quote chapter and verse from the Bible when trying to think aboutGod? You might think not if only because the Bible often speaks of Godas corporeal. But the Bible does speak of God as corporeal, even if it alsospeaks of him as not being so. So why think of God as incorporeal, asDewi certainly does? Could it be by taking some biblical texts as definingthe “grammar of God” as others do not? Dewi loved the expression “the

40. For more on this, see my The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, Ch. 4.41. P. T. Geach, “Good and Evil,” Analysis 17 (1956) pp. 33–42.

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grammar of God,” but what could be one’s criterion for deciding whatdoes and does not define “the grammar of God” when it comes to all thatwe find in the Bible? It surely cannot be any particular biblical text sincethe Bible does not comment on itself and say “Read these bits of me thisway and those bits of me that way.” It gives us what it gives us, and wehave to decide which bits of it can be used when trying to engage intheological discussion today.

Many thinkers from St Augustine to the present time have said that weneed to read the Bible with an eye on what we can know of God apartfrom it. They have presumed on there being a distinction between whatcan be known of God by reason and what we might say of him on thebasis of revelation. This is a distinction that Dewi does not refer to at allin his treatment of God and evil, and I think that he does not do sobecause he rejects the notion of knowing anything about God by reason.I am sure that he would have said that reason allows us to explore “thegrammar of God” and try to say what this amounts to. But I do not seehow one can do this without taking sides when it comes to what is to becounted as “the grammar of God,” and whether or not the grammar inquestion is to be thought of as telling us what God actually is.

Why should I say that God is incorporeal? If I do so, it cannot bebecause the Bible depicts him as being so, since it also depicts him as notbeing so. One might, therefore, wonder if there might be ways to thinkabout God that do not depend on selected quotations from the Bible (orfrom authors such as Rush Rhees and Simone Weil, to whom Dewi oftenrefers with agreement) as presenting “the grammar of God.” And onemight, given the diversity of religious beliefs, and of religious believersdoing their thing in their contexts, wonder whether the phrase “thegrammar of God” names anything to which we can seriously turn ourattention. I suspect that it does not and that The Problem of Evil and theProblem of God might have been a better book than it is by havingacknowledged so. But that is matter for another discussion.42

Department of PhilosophyFordham UniversityNew York [email protected]

42. I try to raise the matter with Dewi in my “Is God a Moral Agent?” contribution toWhose God? Which Tradition? Gareth Moore does the same in his “Wittgenstein’s EnglishParson: Some Reflections on the Reception of Wittgenstein in the Philosophy of Reli-gion,” in D. Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (eds.), Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).



Documents

D. Z. Phillips on God and Evil