Someone posted the following clip at YouTube, in which William Lane Craig is asked about me and about his view of the dispute between classical theism and theistic personalism:
Craig kindly cites my series of posts on Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality as having been useful to him in preparing for his debate with Rosenberg. (I’m gratified that the posts were helpful to him. I’ve long admired Craig and his work, and as I’ve noted before, his excellent book The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz was very helpful to me in coming to see how shallow the usual characterizations and criticisms of the argument are, and played a role in my abandoning atheism.)
Regarding the discussion of theistic personalism in the clip, some clarification is in order. First of all, the expression “theistic personalism” is not in fact my own. As far as I know, it was introduced by Brian Davies, who uses it in his book An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion to refer to a family of contemporary views he contrasts with the classical theism of thinkers like Augustine, Maimonides, Avicenna, and Aquinas. (Also relevant is Davies’ discussion in his book The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil of the issue of whether God is “a person.”) Davies indicates that “theistic personalism” is the same sort of thing referred to by Norman Geisler as “neotheism” in his book Creating God in the Image of Man? (See also The Battle for God by Geisler and H. Wayne House.)
As examples of thinkers who take positions characteristic of theistic personalism, Davies cites Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, John Lucas, Richard Creel, Charles Hartshorne, and Stephen T. Davis. As examples of thinkers who take positions characteristic of neotheism, Geisler and House cite Plantinga, Davis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Linda Zagzebski, and (especially) proponents of “open theism” like Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, and David Basinger. I don’t think Davies, Geisler, or House would claim that these writers are in agreement on all the relevant theological issues. But there is a family resemblance between their views that sets them all off from classical theism. I have also suggested that William Paley and contemporary “Intelligent Design” theorists work at least implicitly with an essentially theistic personalist rather than classical theist conception of God.
Contrary to the impression given by the discussion in the YouTube clip, the main issue here is not whether God is subject to a standard of goodness external to him. The difference instead concerns more general differences in how classical theists on the one hand and theistic personalists or neotheists on the other conceive of God. The classical theist tends to start from the idea that whatever else God is, he is essentially that reality which is absolutely ultimate or fundamental, and the source of all other reality. He not only does not depend in any way on anything outside him, but could not even in principle have depended on anything outside him. Nothing less than this would be God, so that to say that there is no being who is absolutely ultimate in this way is in effect to say that there is no God. Different classical theists might spell this basic idea out in different ways. The Aristotelian will emphasize the thesis that unlike everything else that exists, God is not a mixture of actuality and potentiality but is instead pure actuality or actus purus. Neoplatonism emphasizes that unlike everything else in reality, God is in no way composed of parts, either physical or metaphysical, but is absolutely One, simple, or non-composite. Thomists will emphasize that God is not “a being” alongside other beings, and does not merely “have” existence; rather his essence just is existence, he just is Subsistent Being Itself or ipsum esse subsistens. Followers of Anselm will emphasize that God is not merely the highest reality that there happens to be, but is that than which no greater can even be conceived. And of course, many classical theists will incorporate all of these notions into their account of what it is to be the ultimate reality and the source of all other reality.
Theistic personalists, by contrast, tend to begin with the idea that God is “a person” just as we are persons, only without our corporeal and other limitations. Like us, he has attributes like power, knowledge, and moral goodness; unlike us, he has these features to the maximum possible degree. The theistic personalist thus arrives at an essentially anthropomorphic conception of God. To be sure, the anthropomorphism is not the crude sort operative in traditional stories about the gods of the various pagan pantheons. The theistic personalist does not think of God as having a corporeal nature, but instead perhaps along the lines of something like an infinite Cartesian res cogitans. Nor do classical theists deny that God is personal in the sense of having the key personal attributes of intellect and will. However, classical theists woulddeny that God stands alongside us in the genus “person.” He is not “a person” alongside other persons any more than he is “a being” alongside other beings. He is not an instance of any kind, the way we are instances of a kind. He does not “have” intellect and will, as we do, but rather just is infinite intellect and will. He is not “a person,” not because he is less than a person but because he is more than merely a person.
The difference between classical theism and theistic personalism shows up in their respective attitudes toward some of the traditional divine attributes. Classical theists insist that God is absolutely simple or without parts; theistic personalists tend to reject the doctrine of divine simplicity. Classical theists also insist that God is immutable, impassible, and eternal in the sense of outside time altogether, while theistic personalists tend to reject these claims as well. These differences also affect how the two views interpret claims about God’s omniscience, will, goodness, and sovereignty, with theistic personalists tending to interpret these in a more anthropomorphic way.
I have said a lot more about this subject in a number of posts, links to which interested readers can find collected here. The question of where Craig’s own views fit is a tricky one. On the one hand, the kalām cosmological argument, of which Craig is famously a champion, seems (as Geisler points out) clearly to entail that God is eternal or non-temporal. On the other hand, Craig suggests in his book The Kalām Cosmological Argument that “God is timeless prior to creation and in time subsequent to creation” (p. 152). (But as Geisler and House point out, this statement can be read in different ways, and while on one reading it is incompatible with classical theism, it is not necessarily incompatible with it on another reading.) Craig has also been critical of the doctrine of divine simplicity. I have responded to his criticisms here.