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The Passibility of God
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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John Dewey once said of philosophical problems that they are quite different from old soldiers. Not only do they never die, but they do not even fade away. Something similar might be said about the unfavourable Divine attributes of the 1950s and 60s, timelessness or eternity, necessary existence, foreknowledge of creaturely free choices, and immutability. All have contemporary defenders. Even the puzzling, traditional tenet that God is metaphysically simple now has formidable apologists. Perhaps the least popular of the traditional theistic canon, the most likely to fade away, is the tenet that God is impassible. The recent appearance of Richard Creel's Divine Impassibility has shown that even this least popular of attributes can be powerfully articulated and defended. Roughly, the impassibility thesis is the claim that God does not undergo sensory experience including suffering and pain, nor is God subject to corruption, substantial essential change or to external agency. Creel's defence of Divine impassibilism is certainly the most balanced and sophisticated in the current literature. Any argument for passibilism must take Creel's work seriously. I intend to do just that in the course of defending the thesis that the God of Christian theism is passible in an important respect. There are substantive moral and religious reasons to believe God suffers.
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page 217 note 1 Creel, Richard, Divine Impassibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
page 218 note 1 Creel departs from one aspect of traditional impassibilism in allowing that God does not know which of many future free acts a creature may perform. Creel nonetheless insists that God does not undergo substantial volitional alteration in the course of God's relationship with creatures because God knows all acts we could do (the so-called conditionals of freedom) and has never not known and willed precisely how to respond to each at the appropriate times. God's actions unfold in the world as eternally willed, but which of the Divine acts are realized depends upon which free acts creatures perform.
page 219 note 1 Creel, , pp. 125, 126.Google Scholar
page 221 note 1 Taliaferro, Charles, ‘The Incorporeality of God’, Modern Theology, III, 2 (1987), 179–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 221 note 2 Cf. work by Robert Roberts for a balanced cognitive analysis of emotions, e.g. ‘Solomon On the Control of Emotions’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research XLIV (03 1984), 395–404.
page 221 note 3 A brief, excellent introduction to this notion of sorrow is Brentano and Intrinsic Value by Chisholm, Roderick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
page 223 note 1 For theists who do not think God has beliefs the percentage problem can be rearticulated. St Thomas offered a non-proposition and thus non-belief oriented characterization of Divine knowledge (see Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. 1, Ch. 58). St Thomas still retains talk of the magnitude and scope of Divine knowledge. What scope consists in Atlantic Ocean knowledge?
page 223 note 2 Presumably we would also insist that God's love is informed by the changing world. See Amelie Rorty's illuminating discussion of human love being formed by perceiving alternations in the beloved, ‘The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, ed. French, P., Uehling, T., and Wettstein, H., X (University of Minnesota Press, 1986).Google Scholar
page 224 note 1 I am indebted to Richard Creel for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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