Is God a Self? Part 2 – Flint

Tom Flint is an excellent philosopher and a winsome human being. He’s teaches Philosophy at Notre Dame, and is the current editor of Faith & Philosophy – arguably the most important philosophy of religion journal.

The interviewer suggests, and Flint agrees, that it is a “strange” question whether or not God is a person. Why? They don’t say – but I would guess that people may wonder if it is being asked if God is a human person – a dude or a lady. But what’s being asked is not that, but whether or not God is a self – this is a more abstract concept, which would be satisfied by an angel, an intelligent alien, a human, a god, etc.

Watch the interview here.

Flint smartly beats a strategic retreat on the Trinity issue. 🙂 He wants to talk instead about the generic, philosophical concepts of a person/self, and of God – the idea of God one encounters in philosophical arguments for God’s existence.

Elaborating on the classic definition of Boethius, he says that a person/self is

1. a substance/individual/entity (ultimate bearer of properties & not similarly in anything else), and
2. a mind – a knower, a thing which thinks, and
3. a willer / chooser – someone able to perform free, intentional actions.

God, though, a self, wouldn’t be a self just like us. For one, he’s perfect. Also, Flint points out that God has no extension (spatial extent), parts, matter.

They get sidetracked onto the means of God’s knowledge – Flint sketches the medieval view of God as not any sort of perceiver, but rather he knows all things through himself – through his own representations, perhaps, of what he’ll create (and if Flint is right, from knowing what any creature will freely do in any possible circumstance – in a nutshell, that’s the theory called Molinism. (Flint, by the way, has written one of the best books defending that theory.)

Towards the end, the interview asks: What does it make you feel when you think of God as a person?

Flint thinks of God as loving, involved, responsive – available for a personal relationship with us.
Anything less, he says, would be inadequate on a religious or spiritual level.

This was interesting. I’m with Flint on all of this (except the Molinism). I wondered if he was going to take a more medieval line, and say that God was really not a being at all, but rather “Being itself”, and only analogically a “person”, or something which *we can think of as* a person.

I’m curious about how he understands the Trinity doctrine, and whether it is compatible with what he says here. On most “social” theories, God is not a self. On some others, I think – in particular modalist construals of the orthodox formulas, God is a (single) self. I know he has highly developed, traditional Catholic views on the Incarnation, but I don’t know his thoughts on the Trinity.

But in any case, I give two big thumbs up to what he says here.