Henry Imler August 27th, 2006

Yesterday I posted about wondering about Augustine’s ideas on God. This morning I read a post at Prosblogion about the impossibility of God being changeless and creating the world out of free will. Alan Rhoda frames the argument as follows: Can a Timeless God Freely Create?

1. God is absolutely immutable.
2. God has freely created.
3. A free act proceeds from a free decision from among several mutually exclusive possibilities.
4. Therefore, God made a free decision to create from among several mutually exclusive possibilities. (2,3)
5. A free decision from among several mutually exclusive possibilities involves a change of ‘intentional stance’ from regarding something as indeterminate (as one of several possibilities) to regarding it as determinate (as the chosen course of action).
6. Therefore, in freely created God undergoes a change in his intentional stance. (4,5)
7. Therefore, God has changed in some respect. (6)
8. Therefore, God is not absolutely immutable. (7)

The lynch-pin of the argument and one of criticisms of a perfect and unchangeable God is number six. In exercising free will, one is changed, whether or not that one is a person or God. Further more, I like what Rhoda hints at towards the end of the post, where he implies that does not employ mere logic in His exercise in free will. This point was first brought to my attention by Carmen Price, a philosophy doctoral student at Washington University in her capstone paper at Columbia College: “The Necessity of Considering Motivations…”.

What are religions and philosophy’s that hold both one and two to do? Logically, I think that Rhodes has excluded the possibility of holding to both, so it seems to follow that one of them must be dumped or modified as to allow for the other. Which one takes priority over the other? I think that two takes the priority. Without it, one’s God is reduced to a being without free will, something along the lines of Aristotle’s Prime mover. Since the big three monotheistic faiths, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, all hold to a God that is active to varying degrees within It’s creation, this conclusion (Aristotle’s God) must be rejected. Instead it is better to either accept that God undergoes some sort of change in His interaction within time.

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