Is God a Self? Part 3 – Clayton

Philip Clayton teaches theology and philosophy at the Claremont School of theology, and at the Claremont Graduate University.

He publishes a ton, and much of his work is in the science and religion genre. Unlike many authors in that genre, Clayton isn’t a scientist – his training is in theology, religious studies, and philosophy.

He’s also a co-founder of this Big Tent Christianity project, which aims in his words “to foster a radically different understanding of the heart of Christian faith” – different, that is, from the theologically and culturally conservative and liberal camps.

But our question is: Is God a self? What saith Clayton? Check out his interview (blue button), and then click here for my take ->

Oh boy, that was a very professorial answer. I’ll try to unpack it some. Clayton undertakes to answer the question “as a metaphysician”, or from the perspective of “the philosopher of today” – as if the question were, can we know by reason alone that God is a self. (That’s a different question.)

Anyhow, in Clayton’s view the up-to-date philosopher should be very concerned about anthropomorphism – in other words, thinking about the Ultimate as too much like a human being. Clayton-as-metaphysician believes in a “ground” of the cosmos – I take it, a something-or-other which is more fundamental than the physical universe, and which explains it, or at least is in some sense or other the source of it.

But is there reason to think it a self? Well, says Clayton, “the metaphysician of today” starts with the view that the “ground” is impersonal – so he says the burden is on him (Clayton), who thinks that the ground is something like a self.

(I wonder if he means something like a self, or if he means something like a human self. The latter could be unequivocally a self. But not the former. Do you see the difference? It’s a big difference.)

Anyhow, why is the burden on the fellow who wants to think the ground isn’t totally impersonal? This part I need to explain.

So, many physicists and cosmologists have noted that there are numerous basic physical constants in the world, such that if any one of them were tweaked ever so slightly, biological life as we know it would be impossible – the cosmos would be too chaotic, too uniform, and so on. The cosmos, they say, look as if it has been “finely tuned” so as to make the evolution of life possible. But has it been?

Theists say yes – the best explanation, we say, is that there’s (at least) one provident self, who exists independently of the cosmos, who intended that the cosmos should contain biological life, and to that end, tweaked all these factors just right. This seems to blow out of the water the “explanation” that those factors just happen to be that way, or the dodge that if they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here wondering about them.

But here’s where it gets weird. There’s another explanation of that apparent fine tuning. Suppose there were some sort of random universe generator which spit out a huge number of cosmoi, each with these constants we referred to randomly tweaked in different ways. Most of these would be lifeless of course. But if there were enough of them, there would be some which were life-friendly. And this could be one of them.

It’s important to understand that this would explain the apparent fine-tuning. The question is, is it the best explanation? I agree with certain Christian philosophers – Stephen T. Davis, and Richard Swinburne come to mind, and especially Robin Collins who is coming out with a big book on this – that the theistic explanation is way better than the “multiverse” one. This, for many reasons. But just consider simplicity alone – one super self vs. an infinity or near-infinity of whole cosmoi plus some nearly inconceivable cosmos-generator thingee.

I take it that Clayton disagrees. Perhaps someone in the comments could point out in which book or article he goes into this. I’m not sure if he thinks the multiverse explanation is just better, so that the “ground” must also be this multi-cosmos-generator, or if he thinks that reason can’t decide between the theistic and multiverse explanations… I assume the former.

In any case, Clayton wants to say that the “ground” we must posit is “mind-like”, by which he means that it has (1) intentionality, (2) awareness, (3) rationality.

“I have omitted any moral dimension,” he says. It is a minimalist claim, no more than is needed to explain the multiverse. Again, this is Clayton speaking as philosopher.

He says that we should acknowledge Buddhist and Hindu theories on which the “ground” has both personal and impersonal characteristics. Really? Why? And, is this eastern insight understood as contradictory, or not?

I think, then, that Clayton’s answer is: yes. If by “God” we mean this “ground” of the multiverse, then we should think it is a self – we just can’t say, from science or metaphysics, whether this self is a good one or not. Then again… does this “ground” perform intentional actions – does it do things for reasons? If not, I’d say it isn’t a self, though it may be a mind… If and not, I think it wouldn’t be capable of entering into a personal relationship with anyone – and I assume that a capacity for that is implied by full-blown selfhood. So actually: I’m not sure.

Now I’m curious what Clayton-the-Christian-theologian’s answer is. If by “God” we mean the Bible’s one God, the God of Abraham and Paul and Jesus – is that being a self? If so, can he be the aforementioned ground? And does this fit with the Bible’s claim that people can know this cosmos to have been designed? Would a multiverse-generator count as a designer of this universe? Does the Bible not assert God to be an agent?