“Divine Deception” Defended

In recent posts here and here my co-blogger and friend arch-nemesis Chad McIntosh has tried his hand at refuting my Divine Deception argument. I’ve already responded to numerous tries to get around it by my friend Bill Hasker here and here. But to his credit, Chad is thinking creatively and coming at it from some new angles.

First, it’s important to be be clear about the purpose of the argument.

• A lazy skimmer might think I’m accusing the Persons of the Trinity of lying. But no, the argument is directed against the sort of three-self (“social”) Trinity theory on which the “Persons” of the Trinity are so many selves (roughly: conscious agents, intelligent beings each with a first-person perspective) BUT where God, the Trinity, is not a self.
  • The targets of the argument are Trinity theories on which “God” is not a self. The inspiration for it was the theory of Richard Swinburne (see here and here). It also works against the views of Bill Hasker, who I think has the most developed Trinity theory like this (see here, here, and here.)
• The argument can be summarized like this: if the one God is a group, and whatever “God” does is really done by one or more of the divine selves, they they would (it seems) be guilty of wrongfully deceiving the ancient Jews, as they gave them plenty of reason to believe that the one God was a divine self, not a group masquerading as such. But divine selves don’t wrongfully deceive. So this sort of Trinity theory has to be incorrect. So, it’s not accusing the Persons of lying, rather, it’s accusing these three-self theories (on which God isn’t a self) of not fitting with the divine revelation we Christians believe in.

I would add that as I worked on the paper, I always knew that one could apply “skeptical theist” type moves – basically, the idea that for all we know, God might have some good purpose that require this deception, a reason which we can’t at all conceive of or understand. This is why I never considered the argument to be a knockdown refutation of those Trinity theories. (See pp. 7-8) Yeah, sure. But the deception we’re imagining here still seems wrong to us, and we’d rather not believe in it. It is a cost of any Trinity theory that implies it.

I admit that when writing it I never considered the possibility that there might be “group persons” – that is, selves which have as their parts selves, arranged or functioning in a certain way.

• This is because I didn’t and still don’t think that such are a possibility! I put them in the same category as square circles and triangles with four sides. I’m not certain that there can’t be group persons, but that’s how things seem to me. I don’t care how you organize selves, or have them causally interact. It seems to me that you’re not going to get a further self out of that.
• Sure, we often think of groups as accountable, as morally responsible.
  • But most will take this to be just a way of talking, a short-hand for talking about the responsibility of the members of the group.
  • Others will think of group responsibility as real, but reducible to the responsibilities had by the group’s members.
  • Yeah, I know, some philosophers disagree; see Chad’s paper, pp. 2-4 and the sources there.
  • I think it’s important to separate moral from legal responsibility here. For practical reasons, we certainly should and do treat, e.g. corporations as if they were morally responsible persons, making those corporations literally legally responsible. But that “as if,” in my view, is important.

But let me generously grant, against my better judgment that there not only can be but actually are “group persons,” and even (for the moment) that the ancient Israelites believed in such. Would the Father, Son, and Spirit, on these assumptions (and that the Trinity consists of three such selves, while the Trinity is an it, not a he), have deceived the Israelites? Here’s what I said in the 2004 paper:

there are passages in which Yahweh appears as a single humanoid being, in bodily form. In Genesis 3 he walks in the garden, looking for Adam and Eve. In Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1 he appears as a figure sitting on a heavenly throne.

Second, in other passages, such as the ten commandments in Exodus 20, the LORD calls himself a god, and a god is by definition a personal being. Again, in Deuteronomy 6, we read ‘Hear O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.’ (Deut 6:4) And the prophet Micah exclaims, ‘There is no other god like you, O LORD.’ (Mic 7:18, TEV)

Third, in Psalm 103 and 116, and many other places, God is praised as a wonderful, generous, kind, and father-like personal being. In Jeremiah 3 he compares himself to the father and husband of Israel. In sum, Old Testament worshippers relate to God as to a wonderful person, not a wonderful thing (or quasi-­thing), such as a community of divinities.

What sort of person, an individual person, or a group person, is suggested by these texts? I say, an individual, non-group person. These are all anthropomorphic images. And we all know that human persons are not group persons. Or at least: people do not, by default, believe that human persons are group persons. But this would need to be the case, for the texts above to suggest to people that God is a group person. We could add that Old Testament scholars say that God, in the OT, is one of the elohim, which, I add, are assumed to be individual selves.

What kind of “image” would be needed? I think, something like this (detail from the cover of Hobbes’s famous Leviathan). I don’t mean that the books of the Bible should have come with pictures. Rather, something like this would be described, seen in a vision or a dream. Or God could be imaged as a country, family, or club. But there’s nothing like this, though we’d expect there to be if God is revealing himself to be a group person. So, we infer that God hasn’t done that, via the Bible.

Now about the ancient Israelites, and ancients in general, I agree that they were not as individualistic as we are, and that much more than we do, they tended to think of people as group members, and they thought much more than we do in terms of group responsibility. If you sin, your group can be expected to suffer for it, and not only you, the sinner. But I don’t find at all convincing Robinson’s case that the Hebrews were committed to belief in literal group persons, e.g. the nation Israel. (See Chad’s paper, pp. 11-4.) Chad pushes Robinson’s point that even the gods aren’t exempt from being group persons, saying

prophets and Angels of the Lord are portrayed as real extensions of the Lord’s personality, often speaking on behalf of Yahweh in the first person. (p. 12)

Well, sure – but speaking first-person on behalf of God is just part of the job-description of a prophet or an angel! This doesn’t even hint that such beings are person-parts of God. Sure, they’re “extensions of his personality,” in the sense that God is working through them; they are God’s agents. This, and the many other biblical phenomenon Robinson cites, to me not only don’t require that the Jews believed in group persons, but they don’t even suggest it. (e.g. the demon saying “I am Legion; for we are many”, Paul saying “you are all one person in Christ”) Decrying modern “individualism” is one thing, but establishing that ancients believed in literal group persons is quite another.

This post is long, so I’ll be brief about Chad’s second post.

• I’m not a fan of the “skeptical theist” response to Rowe’s arguments for atheism. I think a better response is to deny his premise, which he foolishly assumes is obvious, that if God exists, there will be no gratuitous evils.
• My first deception argument only needs one to concede that such deception would seem wrong. Go ahead and doubt it, for very general reasons like the ones Chad gives. It’ll still seem wrong, that deception, and so you’ll still want to avoid attributing such to divine selves. Put differently, the upshot of skeptical theist moves here is just being less sure about my premise 1. But that’s consistent with worrying that the argument is sound.
• About the Father et al. having some good reason to deceive in this way, I call trinitarians bluff on this in the original paper (pp. 21-4) and in this more recent paper, pp.  194-5. To my knowledge, no one has ever given a plausible reason, i.e. a goal which to achieve it would logically require causing the ancient Jews to falsely believe that God is a self. But this needs to be done, if we’re to get beyond the limp suggestion that for all we know it is possible that there might be such a reason.

Perhaps most importantly, I don’t think my deception arguments (we’ve haven’t discussed my second, more biblical one, pp. 12-27) are all that important. The first one excites philosophers, yes, but I put more stock in what I called my “direct”, biblical argument against “social” Trinity theories. (pp. 27ff) If the deception arguments turn out to be worthless, this is untouched. I later realized that this sort of argument cuts against any Trinity theory, not just the three- or four-self kinds. Chad would have to deny premise 2 there, which is that God is identical to the Father. But then, he’s got Paul, John, Peter, James, and Jesus to contend with, not little old me.