Creator Theology and the Shared Ground

The focus of this chapter is Creator Theology’s implications regarding the issues of monotheism, personhood, and embodiment. The plan is to use these primary elements as stage-setting, showing that Creator Theology has impressive advantages primarily over Perfect Being Theology on these matters, but also over Worship-Worthiness Theology. I take up each of these issues in turn, focusing on monotheism in §2, personhood in §3, and embodiment in §4. The conclusion aimed at is that Creator Theology is superior to its competitors, though in a way that is subject to important qualifications that leave room for alternative approaches to claim that the advantages are not decisive.

Categorizing Metatheologies

The approaches I am focusing on are representatives in a category scheme derived from the twentieth century concern that led to the rise of metaethics, a concern over what to make of the different kinds of declarative sentences in natural language. Some such sentences are straightforwardly descriptive (“The cat is on the mat), while others are evaluative (“Ice cream is the best dessert”), and still others are normative (“Drinking and driving is forbidden”). Here we see how these categories line up with our fundamental metatheologies, with Creator Theology being descriptive, Perfect Being Theology being evaluative, and Worship-Worthiness Theology being normative.

Shaky Ground for Anselmianism

In the last chapter, we got a glimpse of some difficulties faced by PBT. One issue is that of sustaining monotheism, and another is the issue of explaining the personhood of God. In this chapter, I want to press these points further, showing how they are related to an additional issue involving a proper understanding of contingency. We first outline the Creator Theology account of contingency and remind us of its parsimonious ontology of the divine. We then reveal the structure of Perfect Being Theology and how it culminates with an ontological argument. I then argue that this structure threatens ontological profligacy and, relatedly, invites suspicion about its understanding of contingency.

The Shared Ground Prospects for Worship-Worthiness Theology

Worship-Worthiness Theology is the least explored metatheology among our competitors, and this chapter begins the task of remedying this deficiency. Worship-Worthiness Theology begins from the idea that God is supremely worthy of the highest worship. Our task in this chapter is to consider the prospects for this theology for showing that God is a person, that there is only one God, and whether God is embodies. I argue that WWT shares some deficiencies on these issues with Perfect Being Theology (in comparison with Creator Theology), but, more surprisingly, it has advantages over Perfect Being Theology in other respects.

Creator Theology’s Disadvantages

Creator Theology has important but not decisive advantages over both Worship-Worthiness Theology and Perfect Being Theology. So it is important to see how far Creator Theology can go toward sustaining the starting points of these competitor positions. We begin by correcting the history of the discussion of this issue, for the historical discussion confuses our metaphysical issue with an epistemological one. Once this confusion is corrected, we will be in a better position to see that part of the judgement of history on Creator Theology is correct: it can’t derive the starting points of its competitors. We will also be in a position to see, however, how minimal this disability is.

Perfect Being Theology’s Difficulties

The purpose of this chapter is to consider the degree to which Perfect Being Theology has resources for generating the starting points for Creator Theology and Worship-Worthiness Theology. We first argue that Perfect Being Theology has difficulty sustaining the starting point of Creator Theology. We then look at the more complicated relationship between Perfect Being Theology and Worship-Worthiness Theology. Though our goal is more in terms of finding data at this point than drawing conclusions from it, we will see that Perfect Being Theology is considerably less adept at generating the starting points of competing metatheologies than is Creator Theology.

Worship-Worthiness and Its Drawbacks

Disappointing results from the last two chapters for alternative metatheologies can serve to make Worship-Worthiness Theology quite attractive, or at least more attractive than some would initially think it to be. On this approach, it is not merely a good idea to worship God, but it is our required response. Given this normative understanding of the nature of God, the question to be asked concerns the extent to which this viewpoint can sustain the starting points of alternative accounts, and here I will argue that Worship-Worthiness Theology does a far better job at sustaining the starting point of Perfect Being Theology than it does of Creator Theology

The Major Positions

Among the most promising beginnings for our are conceptions of God which begin from one of three initial assumptions. In brief, I label these three approaches “Creator Theology”, “Perfect Being Theology”, and “Worship Worthiness Theology”; for short, CT, PBT, and WWT, respectively. To assume one of these three standpoints is to assume that one of these three is fundamental to an adequate account of the nature of God, and that what is valuable in the other approaches can be derived from what is fundamental. An alternative to these three is metatheological anti-fundamentalism (MAF), which claims that some combination of starting point is needed..

Challenging the 'hidden' assumption in J. L. Schellenberg's hiddenness argument: an exploration into the nature of divine love

In recent years, J. L. Schellenberg has developed and defended a forceful argument for atheism. He argues that the existence of inculpable nonbelief, together with the (a priori) claim that this is not what we would expect if a perfectly loving God exists, provides probabilistic support for atheism. In response, most critics have focused on either denying the existence of inculpable nonbelief offering reasons why it is compatible with the existence of a perfectly loving God. I propose a new strategy for responding to Schellenberg's argument, however, which focuses on clarifying what perfect love entails. I claim that since Schellenberg employs perfect being theology in formulating his argument, he is thereby committed to the assumption that perfect love entails infinite love. I argue, however, that this assumption is unwarranted, and that if it can be shown that God's love is possibly not infinite, then Schellenberg's argument fails.