Refuting God's Nature

Materialist apologetics is perhaps the most powerful tool in the atheist philosopher's arsenal. There are two main ways of arguing it : the one that I present, which is to argue that everything is contingent to God's act of creation and therefore cannot be necessary, and another, to argue that God's creation is necessarily subjective and that therefore nothing can be objective in the Christian worldview.

This makes short work of any knowledge claim that any Christian may make in the course of a discussion or debate, although not always equally simply.

It is even more useful in that Christians have only one answer to it - which I call the Inherent-Property Objection. Here is a typical expression of this objection, by theologian John Frame :

Logic is neither above God nor arbitrarily decreed by God. Its ultimate basis is in God’s eternal nature. God is a rational God and necessarily so. Therefore logic is necessary.
"A Brief Response to Michael Martin's Transcendental Argument for the Non-Existence of God", John Frame

Basically, the arguer tries to escape the inherent subjectivity of God's creation by grounding God's desires in some kind of objective nature. This objection, while confounding to the uninitiated, is almost trivially easy to refute. I will now go through the main ways to do so.

1. The objection is completely irrelevant. Suppose that God is necessarily logical. Even if that's true, the existence of logic is still subjective on God's will, and is still contingent. All that the objection does is confirm how this subjectivity and contingency arises. By trying to create solid ground below his feet, the theologian is in fact only proving how brittle it is.

2. The objection is an ad hoc rationalization. Nothing about the idea of God indicates that it must be necessarily logical. Indeed, God is supposed to be omnipotent, and it would hardly be so if it couldn't do what humans can do. And yet humans can be illogical. This indicates that the objection is in fact false, if we follow the definition of God.

3. Whatever God's nature is, it is not obvious that there is any relation between that nature and its creations. Suppose that God's nature is, by some magical process, made logical. This in no way indicates that its creation will reflect logic. Once again, if human beings can be logical and yet create illogical things, then there is no reason why God couldn't.

4. All the previous replies have assumed that it makes sense at all to speak of logic as being part of God's nature. To be consistent at all, one must believe that logic is either a creation of God, or can exist without being created. If logic is a creation of God, then logic cannot be a part of God's nature before creation, thus defeating the objection. If logic exists without creation, then creation is not needed for its existence, and we don't need God at all to explain it.

5. The objection presumes that it makes sense to speak of logic as a non-material entity (so that it can be part of a being that is not material). From the materialist perspective, logic is an axiomatic fact of reality, and arises because of the fundamental nature of the material world. It makes no sense to speak of logic dissociated from matter.

But the most profound problem with the objection is the complete lack of justification for its central assertion - that anything can be declared as part of God's nature. If God is posited, first, as being infinitely powerful, then on what grounds can we declare anything at all ? It is entirely possible that God is deluding the believer into saying that logic is part of God's nature, when in fact it is a clever lie. It is also possible that God wants the believer to believe that logic is necessary, when in fact it is not. And it is also possible that God is deluding the believer into thinking every single thing he thinks ! How is the believer to argue against these possibilities ? Surely he cannot.

I discuss this and other methods of "sanding down" Christian confidence in my article "Refuting Theistic Epistemic Standards". With them, nothing based on faith can stand. Enjoy !