Audio only:
In this episode Trent examines a recent attempt to broaden the definition of atheism.
To support this channel: https://www.patreon.com/counseloftrent
[NEW] Counsel of Trent merch: https://shop.catholic.com/apologists-alley/trent-horn-resources/
Be sure to keep up with our socials!
https://www.tiktok.com/@counseloftrent
https://www.twitter.com/counseloftrent
https://www.instagram.com/counseloftrentpodcast
Trent Horn (00:00):
Recently, some Christians have argued that Mormonism is a kind of philosophical atheism, and some Catholic apologists have claimed William Lane Craig is an atheist because Craig rejects some versions of divine simplicity regarding God’s nature. So in today’s episode, we’re going to answer the question, is it atheism? But first, a more important question. Have you subscribed to the Council of Trent so you don’t miss out on our great content? Click the subscribe button below and don’t forget to like today’s video no matter what you believe about the existence of God. And big thanks to philosopher Trik Lakore and Mormon apologist Jacob Hanson for reviewing today’s episode. Ironically, Christians in ancient Rome were called atheists because they didn’t worship the gods of Rome. Justin Martyr discusses this accusation in his defense of the faith to the Roman emperor and he writes, “What sober-minded man then will not acknowledge that we are not atheists, worshiping as we do the maker of this universe.” This gets paralleled today when atheists tell Christians that Christians are also atheists because Christians don’t believe in pagan gods like Zeus or Thor.
(01:03):
Atheists say they’re more consistent because they simply believe in one less God than Christians believe in. But that’s like a bachelor telling a married man, “You are a bachelor towards every other woman on earth. I just have one less wife than you. ” So we’re basically the same. Of course, there’s a huge difference between being married and being unmarried, just as there’s a huge difference between believing in any gods and believing there are no gods. Plus the God I worship as a Christian is not a re-skinned version of Zeus or Thor that I arbitrarily chose over other deities. I believe the best explanation for reality is an uncreated, infinite, perfect ground of existence. That explanation can’t be the physical universe or any finite beings in the universe, including pagan gods with a lowercase G. So any reason to believe in Zeus or Thor would have to be rooted in some other historical fact attesting to their existence, like an expedition to Mount Olympus and not a philosophical argument.
(02:02):
However, the facts of history show there is one God who exists as three persons and one of these persons, God the son, rose from the dead. Through the word of God given to us in sacred scripture and sacred tradition, we know this one God created everything and there are no other gods. First Timothy 1:17 says, God is the king of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God. And in Isaiah 44: six, God says, “I am the first and I am the last. Besides me, there is no God.” Now I should make it clear that not believing in the true God doesn’t automatically make someone an atheist. The Oxford Handbook of Atheism defines atheism as an absence of belief in the existence of a God or Gods. An intelligent atheist would say there is obviously a difference between the God of classical theism Thomas Aquinas defended and the gods of pagan religions like Zeus or Thor.
(02:54):
But regardless of that difference, he’d say he doesn’t believe in any of these divine beings. So atheists reject monotheism, worship of one God, and polytheism, worship of many gods. So people who do hold those views are not atheists. Unless you define atheism very narrowly and lose the essence of what the term is all about. The catechism of the Catholic Church even distinguishes atheism from Polytheism as different sins against the first commandment, even though both groups reject the monotheistic God. However, some people’s concept of a monotheistic God or one God is so watered down that it’s basically atheism under another name. For example, if someone says he believes Santa Claus exists, but Santa Claus just refers to the generosity of parents during Christmas, then he’s just using pretentious metaphors. He hasn’t said anything meaningful about whether Santa Claus exists because he hasn’t affirmed any of Santa’s unique attributes, like being a hefty man in a red suit, operating an impossibly fast global delivery service with questionable labor and animal treatment practices.
(03:58):
Likewise, it could be hip for people to say God exists, but what they mean by God is the material universe or simply the idea of God that exists in the minds of human beings. For example, William Lane Craig once asked John Dominic Crosson, one of the world’s most famous New Testament scholars, “If God exists.” Crossing gave a vague answer saying God is just what we believe in. So Craig asked if God existed during the Jurassic age when there were no humans to believe in him.
William Lane Craig (04:27):
During the Jurassic age, when there were no human beings, did God exist?
John Dominic Crosson (04:32):
Meaningless question.
William Lane Craig (04:34):
But surely that’s not a meaningless question. I mean, that’s a factual question. Was there a being who was the creator and sustainer of the universe during that period of time when no human beings existed? It seems to me, on your view, you’d have to say no.
John Dominic Crosson (04:49):
Well, I would probably prefer to say no because what you’re doing is trying to put yourself in the position of God and ask, “Well, how is God apart from Revelation? How is God apart from faith?” I don’t know if you can do that.
Trent Horn (05:02):
You can find a lot more of this in my previous episode on the emptiness of liberal Christianity in the link below. So if someone says they believe in God, but what they believe in has none of God’s unique attributes, including the attribute of existence outside of the mind, then that person is for all practical purposes an atheist. As a rule of thumb, if a person could draw a picture of reality illustrating what he means by God, and it looks the exact same as the picture of reality an atheist would draw, then the so- called God believer is probably an atheist.
William Lane Craig (05:35):
They’re the same picture.
Trent Horn (05:36):
So the term atheist can refer to people who say they believe in God, but what they mean by God is a mundane fact about reality, like the totality of the universe or the collective thoughts of humanity. However, just because someone is not an atheist, that doesn’t mean they believe in God with a capital G. The opposite of atheism is theism, and theism comes in many flavors. It includes perfect being theology, which says God is that which no greater can be thought, God with a capital G, if you will, but it also includes weaker versions of theism where God is just the most powerful being that exists or polytheism, where many gods with a lowercase G exist who are just much more powerful than human beings. So which of these groups believes in God? Well, one way to answer the question is to understand the sense reference distinction and philosophy.
(06:25):
For example, a member of an indigenous tribe might tell me water exists and he’s referring to water in a river, even if he doesn’t know that water is H2O. The native knows this substance he’s pointing to is water, even though he uses a different word to describe it, and he doesn’t know an important fact about water’s nature. He and I refer to the same reference, but with different senses. Likewise, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are monotheists, even though Jews and Muslims deny that God is a trinity. All three groups are talking about the same reference, one creator, God, but in different senses. At the very least, we can say Jews and Muslims are not atheists because they profess belief in God, but it’s a lot dicier to say an animist who worships spirits and rocks and trees believes in God. So how do we draw the line between God with a capital G and God with a lowercase G?
(07:18):
A 2017 paper by Thomas Bogardis and Mallory Urban describes how information about a term can be collected in what philosopher Garrett Evans calls a dossier, which is a kind of mental folder that contains the properties of the thing which uses the term. Now, people’s mental folders labeled God will have different contents. And as we’ve seen, some of those folders are embarrassingly empty. Like those who say that God is just another name for human religious activity, but you don’t have to get everything in the folder right to be referring to God with a capital G. Bogardis and Urbinas say what matters is that the folder contains the dominant information about the term. They write, “Dominance is not a function of amount of information in a dossier. What matters more is the centrality of the information to the conception of the object. As Evan says, the believer’s reasons for being interested in the term at all will weigh.” We can summarize all these lessons about dominance into one simple test.
(08:14):
We can check whether some bit of information in a name’s dossier is given sine quanan weight by asking, “What if nothing in the world answered to that bit of the dossier? Could the name still refer?” I propose at least one of the dominant traits in the dossier for the term God would be infinitude. What makes God God is that God exists without limit or is infinite. God is not limited in knowledge, power, or existence. God never came into existence or never was created. Instead, God created all things and is sovereign over all things. It’s why Saint Anselmo of Canterbury said that God is that which no greater can be thought, which is another way of describing the concept of infinity. Now, let’s use this proposal to sort through other claims about people not actually believing in God in spite of saying they believe in God.
(09:07):
In his book, The Experience of God, David Bentley Hart writes, “If one believes that God stands at the end of reasons journey toward the truth of all things, it seems obvious to me that a denial of divine simplicity is tantamount to atheism and the vast preponderance of metaphysical tradition concurs with that judgment.” Now, some Catholic apologists have taken this kind of reasoning to claim William Lang Craig is an atheist because Craig denies the doctrine of divine simplicity, but there’s three problems with this claim. First, even if that were true, all that would prove is that William Lane Craig is some other kind of theist, not that he’s an atheist. Second, Craig does not deny a modest version of divine simplicity, which says that God is not composed of separable parts. Craig just denies stronger versions of the doctrine, like Thomas Aquinas’s claim that God’s essence or what God is, is identical to God’s existence or that God is.
(09:59):
I’ve discussed the importance of divine simplicity in previous episodes, but we should remember that the Catholic church hasn’t defined the meaning of God’s simplicity as used in things like the statement of faith of the fourth ladder in council. That means theologians and philosophers can propose different models of divine simplicity, including models that depart strictly from Aquinas’s perspective. Craig even endorses a kind of anti-realism towards properties, which allows him to affirm a kind of divine simplicity by saying that metaphysical simplicity is something all objects have in general. Finally, William Lane Craig is not an atheist because he believes in the existence of a God who is infinite in knowledge, power, and existence. I mean, it would be funny if for decades the man atheist feared to debate on the existence of God turned out to be an atheist himself. Craig is not a classical theist who thinks God just is pure actuality, and so God is essentially timeless, for example.
(10:54):
Instead, Craig is what philosopher Brian Davies calls atheistic personalist. Craig, like Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne thinks that God is essentially a person who exists without external limits, and such an infinite being would still have the dominant information in the dossier labeled God. The real problem arises for defenders of finite theism. They aren’t atheists, but do they believe in God? Going back to the dossier question, we can ask, what if nothing in the world were infinite in its existence? Would anything in this world be God? Given that this state of affairs could also describe an atheistic universe, the answer is no. Atheism doesn’t preclude the existence of finite beings that appear to other beings as if they can do the naturally impossible. Like what happens when advanced interstellar civilizations meet primitive tribes, but even if these beings were absurdly powerful, their finite power and finite knowledge would make them infinitely less powerful and knowledgeable than God with a capital G.
(11:56):
The most powerful finite God with a lowercase G would be indistinguishable from an amoeba when compared to the incomprehensible infinity of God with a capital G. It’s like how a Google, a one followed by 100 zeros is insanely big compared to just one of something else. Like in this clip about the size of a Google of pollen specs. You
“How Big is a Googol” YT Video (12:19):
Have something that comes even somewhat close to the size of Google. We have to take the volume of the observable universe, a respectable four times 10 to the 71st kilometers cubed and fill it with pollen specs. This would give us a grand total of four times 10th and 95th pollen specs. In order to have one Google of pollen specs, you would need to have something in the volume of 100,000 visible universes filled with pollen.
Trent Horn (12:39):
A Google seems big until you compare the number one and a Google to an actual infinite, which would be a Google to the Google power to the Google power ad infinitum. When you put that into the comparison, the number one and the number Google, each disappear into nothingness in comparison to true infinity. Finite theists are not atheists, but they don’t believe in God because they deny one of the key attributes that makes the term God intelligible infinitude. And for finite theists who disagree with me, I would challenge them to craft a definition of God that is neither arbitrary nor deflationary when it comes to godhood. For example, if God is just the most powerful being in the universe, then some creature might be God in virtue of having merely one more physical ability than another creature, who itself has one more ability than another creature and so on and so on.
(13:35):
Being able to lift one more pound than all other weightlifters makes you special, but it doesn’t make you a God among bodybuilders. And if you say God just is a being that is much more powerful than other beings, then this opens the door for AI or aliens to be God. So why would anyone believe in finite theism over atheism? Philip Goff was a non-theist who recently embraced liberal or what he honestly calls heretical Christianity. Goff did so because he said the fine tuning of the laws of nature shows our universe has a life-centered purpose, which is incompatible with atheism. However, Goff also thinks the amount of evil and suffering in the world is incompatible with classical theism. As a compromise, Goff says that God exists and created the world, but God is not all powerful. Rabbi Harold Kushner hold a similar view in his book when bad things happen to good people.
(14:28):
He claims God hates evil as much as we do, but God isn’t powerful enough to stop all the evil in the world. Kushner applied this the odyssey to the death of his own son at the age of 14 from a rare genetic condition. He writes, “Even God has a hard time keeping chaos in check and limiting the damage that evil can do. If God is a God of justice and not of power, then he can still be on our side when bad things happen to us. Why do we have to insist on everything being reasonable? Why must everything happen for a specific reason? Why can’t we let the universe have a few rough edges?” Reducing God’s power is one way to get around the problem of evil, but it does so only at the risk of turning you into someone who is an atheist and all things except the name.
(15:10):
Even if God isn’t all powerful, most Christians who believe in a limited God would at least say God is still very powerful. But then we can ask, is this limited God powerful enough to push a child out of the way of an oncoming car? Is this God powerful enough to do a relatively simple physical act that spares tremendous suffering? If this God can do that, but chooses not to, then the finite theist has to borrow from the classical theist explanations for why God permits evil, such as God being able to bring greater good from the evils he permits. But if the finite God can’t even do that, then why put your faith in such a lame knockoff God at all? The Atheist BC Johnson writes the following, “Such a God, if not dead, is the next thing to it. And a person who believes in such a ghost of a God is practically an atheist.
(16:01):
To call such a thing a God would be to strain the meaning of the word.” And that brings us to the debate about Mormonism because most Mormons deny classical theism and say God is finite. Mormons have traditionally believed God is an embodied agent who resides somewhere in the physical universe. Some Mormons believe God used to be a man who worshiped another God. Whichever is true, Mormons believe God did not create the universe from nothing, but instead God organized the universe from preexisting eternal matter. The Mormon God isn’t just a tiny bit more powerful than us, but the Mormon God is certainly not all powerful in the classic sense of having the power to do anything that is logically possible. Indeed, what the Mormon God can or can’t do isn’t clear. All we know is that the Mormon God seems to be bound by preexisting laws of nature that exist apart from him and so limit him beyond mere logical constraints like being unable to make a square circle.
(16:58):
For example, it doesn’t seem like an exalted person in Mormonism, a Mormon who becomes as God is, as Mormons would say, would have power over any other exalted person, such as being able to harm him. Since Mormons believe in some kind of God, they aren’t atheists, at least God with a lowercase G. But Mormons also aren’t monotheists because they believe more than one God has real existence. The fifth president of the Mormon church, Lorenzo Snow once said, “As man now is, God once was. As God now is, man may be. ” Joseph Smith’s successor, Brigham Young said, “All those who are counted worthy to be exalted and to become gods, even the sons of God, will go forth and have earths and worlds like those who frame this and millions on millions of others.” While some early Mormon leaders like young explicitly taught about having worlds, the modern Mormon church says this is not official doctrine and it warns its members against speculating about the nature of the afterlife.
(17:59):
One recent official Mormon statement on the subject says, “While few Latter-day saints would identify with caricatures of having their own planet, most would agree that the awe inspired by creation hints at our creative potential in the eternities. Mormonism teaches that some human beings will be exalted and become fully divine. And so in the future, more than one God will exist. Likewise, Mormonism teaches that we were created by not just a heavenly father, but also by a heavenly mother who is God’s wife. In 1909, the Mormon Church officially recognized the existence of heavenly mother and said the following. All men and women are in the similitude of the universal father and mother and are literally the sons and daughters of deity. One would presume heavenly mother is another fully exalted person and thus another God, lowercase G. But Mormons are not permitted to worship heavenly mother.
(18:52):
All worship is to be given to heavenly father instead. Likewise, Mormons deny the Trinity, so they believe the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three separate divine beings or God’s lowercase G. However, Mormons say that different forms of worship are given to the Father than are given to the Son or the Spirit. That’s why Mormons don’t pray to Jesus Christ. It’s clear then that Mormonism is neither monotheistic, nor is it polytheistic. It is Henotheistic or Mormons practice what is called monolatry instead of Monotheism. Their worldview recognizes that many different gods exist, but it only allows the worship of one God, heavenly Father. And as I said, Mormonism is not a form of atheism, but it may be a form of naturalism. Naturalism is usually defined as the claim that reality is ultimately governed by laws of nature, and there is no supernatural being that created the laws of nature and sustains the world.
(19:52):
Nature itself and its laws are the ultimate foundation of reality. So Mormonism may fall into this category because the Gods of Mormonism seem bound by overarching laws of nature beyond their control. This reminds me of a comment Jacob Hansen made in our dialogue from last year where he rejected the classical theistic view of God, but said it was similar to another part of the Mormon worldview.
Jacob Hansen (20:16):
I often say what you guys are describing is what we describe as the eternal law. We describe it as the nature of reality itself and that what God is, God is not the greatest that which can be conceived. God is the greatest being that it is possible to be. And that being itself exists independently of God. It just …
Trent Horn (20:43):
Just is.
Jacob Hansen (20:45):
And it always has been.
Trent Horn (20:46):
First, Jacob says God is not the greatest that can be conceived, i.e. Being with unlimited infinite great-making properties, but merely the greatest a being can be, which is a powerful yet finite being. Second, if eternal law or a foundational law of nature is the ultimate grounding of Mormon reality, then Mormons might be theological naturalists. In fact, Mormon scholar David Bailey says,” The notion of a finite, naturalistic material God is an extremely appealing idea, far more easily accommodated within scientific thought than an abstract immaterial being who contravenes natural law. But Mormonism may not be naturalism given other definitions of that term. The Natheistic philosopher, Paul Draper, defines naturalism as the physical world existed prior to any mental world and caused any mental world to come into existence. While Mormons believe intelligences, the immaterial parts of us have existed for all eternity. Doctrine and Covenants 93:29 says, Man was also in the beginning with God, intelligence or the light of truth was not created or made.
(21:55):
Neither indeed can be. If the mental and the physical are both eternal and neither preceded the other, then this probably wouldn’t fit under Draper’s definition of naturalism, though it’s also an outlier for many definitions of supernaturalism. So to pull everything together, you’re only an atheist if you deny God or gods exist, and you think reality is basically the physical universe. Theism covers a wide range of beliefs from polytheism to the finite Henotheism of Mormonism, to the personal monotheism of contemporary philosophers like William Lane Craig, to the classical monotheism of St. Thomas Aquinas. I find classical theoism the most compelling, but I hope that all polytheists and Henotheists will come to worship the one true God, and all monotheists will recognize this God has been fully revealed in the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. For a good defense of God’s existence from a classical theistic perspective, see Edward Fazer’s book, Five Proofs for the Existence of God.
(22:57):
Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.