If I have a cheeseburger for lunch today, one cannot formulate a “General Law of Uccisore Lunching” to predict that I’ll have one tomorrow. I didn’t choose what I had for lunch today based on a general principal. In order to predict my actions, you need to know a series of particulars- my choice in food was influenced by commercials I saw, my beliefs about healthy eating, how much money I had available, the gas in my car that day vs. the distance to this or that restaurant, and many other things. One can also not ignore the ‘whim’. It seems like sometimes we do things for no reason other than we haven’t done them for a while. In short, one cannot take a few key concepts about Uccisore, such as “Uccisore is a jerk” or “Uccisore likes brown” and use them to account totally for instances of my behavior.
Now, the Christian would say that God is fundamentally like a Person. Different from humans in many respects, no doubt. But Personhood is still allegedly an accurate term to apply to God. This being the case, do God's actions fall to particulars as well? For example, consider God's salvific plan via the Ressurection. Can the reasons for God's doing this (and everything else) be determined exclusively from His Goodness, Power, Wisdom, Immortality, and so on? Perhaps God does not have particulars to take into account- Being that He knows everything. But, could He be a [i]source[/i] of particulars? Is there anything irrational, anti-Christian or blasphemous in the idea that God had a [i]range[/i] of options in how to save humanity that would have been consistant with his divine traits, and He chose the specific one He did as a matter of taste, preference, or generally [i]personal[/i] reasons?
This is related to couple ideas I have floating around in my head, related both to our capability to understand God if God is a person, and the idea that a 'generic' God (a God with only general qualities such as 'Goodness') is insuffecient for a rational theism.
Can you explain why a lack of personal attributes is insufficient for rational theism?
It seems to me that God’s ‘personal’ attributes, and whether or not they exist, are unknowable; if they do exist, there really is no basis by which to identify them. I think your distinction between particulars and general rules isn’t qualitative, but rather a result of your having a distinct identity. If we were to incorporate the totality of forces with influences upon you, we would be describing general, explicable patterns; from your perspective (and any human’s), though, these forces are too complex and far-reaching to identify.
Similarly, the possiblities even beyond the workings of our world of God’s personal attributes are too numerous and complicated to identify.
Yup! The biggest example I can think of is the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil only works, I think, because when facing it we only consider a generic God. We match Goodness, Power, and Evil, and see a discrepency. As far as we can get with a generic God is "Maybe He has some [i]reason[/i], some mitigating circumstance, to permit Evil." This answer utterly defeats the deductive problem from Evil by pointing out the lack of a necessary connection between the premises. But this solution
1.) Points to a God of particulars and
2.) Leaves the inductive Problem of Evil a very living threat if we don’t consider those particulars. Omnipotence, Omnibenevolence and Evil don’t seem to ‘sit well’ together, even if there is no explicit contradiction.
But a [i]particular[/i] God, a God that has to deal with Satan, demons, free-willing and free-wheeling humans, a desire to have a certain world, and all that stuff we'd call Christian mythology is, I find, much more [i]plausibly[/i] synced with the existence of Evil. He could well have those 'mitigating circumstances', whereas the God of deism surely has none. Combine that observation with the fact that the vast majority of theists believe in a God of particulars [i]anyways[/i], and it leads me to wonder if theistic philosophers aren't making things harder for themselves by considering only His 'generic' attributes.
And yes, I agree with you that if God has personal or particular qualities as I’m talking about, we’ve got very little chance of every figuring out what they are. However, that leads me to my next point- the way in which we can know God. Again, it stems from what should be obvious to most theists- God as a person can only be known in the way a person can be known (which is never very complete!) and too often, I think we try to know Him in the way we know nominalism, or the speed of light.
But doesn’t your answer do the same thing, since you can’t know what the mitigating circumstances are? I think the only difference is your assuming the pieces we aren’t seeing are due to God’s personal nature, whereas the ‘generic’ God stops short of that postulation.
You're right. I am assuming the pieces we aren't seeing are due to God's personal nature. But I think that's a warranted assumption, since the only reason philosophers talk about God is that religion gave us the idea, and that idea was given to us with that personal nature included. Theologians and Philosophers [i]created[/i] the generic God, I'm assuming as a step towards ecumenism, or just to simplify the concepts they were dealing with. I'm saying that many atheistic arguments work better against this fictional, generic God, than they do against the sort of God that people actually [i]believe[/i] in.