podcast 385 – Cold Case Confusion – J. Warner Wallace on the Trinity – Part 1

Dr. Tuggy:

Just listened to this episode, then to your interview with Dr. Mullins on his podcast about the upcoming Trinity debate book. Had a couple of comments about each, which I’ll try to break down by topic:

1) On This Episode & J. Warner Wallace

Something I think is interesting about your response to Wallace’s claims about shared divine properties is that it appears to me that you’ve capably demonstrated that reading omni-traits into scripture at all is a dodgy prospect. This seems particularly obvious when talking about Psalms that say things like “I could go to X or Y or Z and you’d still find me.” I don’t think this can be taken as an actual claim of omni-anything (be it power, knowledge, or presence), because it’s a claim by a human being about how all the places he could imagine hiding would not be sufficient to hide from God. But that doesn’t mean there is no place where one could (in theory) hide from God, just that the Psalmist can’t think of one. Maybe there is one, maybe there isn’t, but the human writer only knows what he knows and believes God is sufficiently capable in those instances.

It’s therefore hard to say that scripture claims that any persons whatsoever exactly share the same degree of power, knowledge, presence, benevolence, etc. As you said, creating a universe may be a difficult task, but not all that difficult on the cosmic scale; or, for all we know, it may be impossible for any being no matter their knowledge and power. In that respect, we’re taking human descriptive and observational limitations and saying “Well, it looks like things A, B, and C share the same extent of this property” when we actually have no way to determine that because all three exceed what we can reliably estimate. Given that, it seems more plausible to go with a scriptural reading where “knowing all things” is a general metaphor for “knows everything relevant that I can imagine,” since people like the disciples or the Samaritan woman are not themselves omniscient to know how much Jesus actually knows; and since Jesus himself claims not to know something the Father knows, it would appear that whatever the extent is of the Father’s knowledge, it is not shared by the Son. So at least the Son’s knowledge is finite, and even if the Father’s is as well, the Father still knows at least one thing the Son does not.

Basically, Wallace is trying to find any case he can to argue that some particular property could be seen as unbounded, and from there argue that all things with an unbounded property must be God because that’s as good as any property can get. But I don’t think the poetic language of the Old and New Testaments actually supports a case for unbounded properties at all, in which case comparison enters back into the equation and human cognitive limitations prevent us from making measurements when things are well beyond our understanding. (e.g. The Son might be agreed to have so much power that he is capable of creating a universe, but this power may actually be finite and bounded by the minimum power necessary to create a universe, while the Father is understood to have “some amount of power in excess of that minimum;” unless it can be demonstrated that the Son’s maximum crosses boundaries with the Father’s minimum, it’s not even possible that their sharing the property of “tremendous power” makes them one and the same.)

Also, regarding omnipresence: Isn’t the exalted Jesus supposed to still have a physical human body, albeit a post-Resurrection one? I don’t see how he can have a body and yet also be omnipresent. If you have a body and your body isn’t present somewhere, “you” are not properly speaking fully present there. Perhaps an immaterial being can be omnipresent (though I am skeptical), but an embodied one can’t. This is kind of the Catholic argument in favor of transubstantiation, that if Jesus’s actual flesh and blood aren’t present that he’s somehow “not fully there” or something. He might have a telepathic connection to people at will, but that’s like saying Professor X is in South America with the X-Men because he’s communicating with them using Cerebro: Professor X is not “present in South America,” he’s present in the basement of the academy in North America and projecting his thoughts to South America. If Jesus is physically and bodily in Heaven (wherever that is), then even if his mind allows him to experience other locations simultaneously, he’s not really “there” so much as he is remotely observing or interacting with those locations.

Finally, I got the sense — and I admit I didn’t watch Wallace’s original video in full — that even if Wallace were right, he’d have three huge problems to deal with:

a) How is his view distinguishable from Modalism? A lot of his arguments that you excerpted could support a Modalist interpretation of God. Possibly the problem is that, as you said, he hasn’t actually defined the Trinity yet, so he can’t explain this distinction with only the evidence he’s presenting. But knowing what these distinctions are — and what justifies them as distinctions we must consider in our evaluation of the evidence — is critical to knowing what the best explanation is. If all his evidence could support either Trinitarianism or Modalism, and we charitably took his evidence as supporting only those things, he’s still got to demonstrate that the former is the better explanation than the latter. That is, he’s got to show that the framework of our consideration of the evidence must make a Trinitarian reading not only possible, but highly probable. I’m not convinced that he can do that; better Trinitarians than him have tried and failed.

b) How is this an “essential doctrine?” By his own admission it’s a conclusion that can only be reached abductively, since it is not explicit in the text. (Wallace could perhaps appeal to post-Biblical tradition to assert the doctrine was directly revealed beyond the era of the New Testament’s composition, but my understanding is he is an Evangelical Protestant and doesn’t have that move available.) Are we to believe that God expects matters critical to salvation to come down to an inference to the best explanation? One of the biggest weaknesses of abduction over deduction is that there is a lack of certainty and a degree of interpretive ambiguity that can vary from person to person. What someone finds a credible explanation may not be what another does for various reasons, for example: A store manager and a hardened counterfeiter might each listen to a convenience store clerk’s explanation for how some money disappeared from the register during his shift, and the manager might not realize that the clerk is describing the money as if it is made of regular paper and ink while the counterfeiter spots that discrepancy immediately; if something in the clerk’s story turns on the properties of the cash being exactly like regular paper, the best explanation the counterfeiter might reach is that the clerk pocketed the money and made up a story about what happened to it that had basic factual errors a non-expert wouldn’t catch when crafting the lie.

But if we were to apply this same logic to essential doctrines of religion, we’re left in the uncomfortable position that some people are ill-equipped to accept a necessary doctrine because their personal circumstances make them less credulous about it. That raises questions about arbitrariness or the message not truly being universal. It seems to me that God would want to avoid not merely the impropriety of arbitrariness, but the appearance of that impropriety: “I’ve given you the clues, now what makes the most sense to you? p.s. Getting the answer wrong will kill you, even if the answer you reach is the most plausible to you under your present circumstances” is not the sort of thing I expect a wise and benevolent God who desires people reach the truth would force those people to grapple with. The essential doctrines, whatever those are, should be explicit. And if the Trinity is not an essential doctrine, then whether or not it’s true is theologically interesting but not a matter of salvation. It seems like the inference to the best explanation in this case would be that it isn’t an essential doctrine!

c) Has he ever tested his theory that a cold reading of the New Testament would lead a reader to the conclusion that God is a triune entity? This is incredibly easy to test: Find some people who aren’t Christians or who know very little about Christianity, sit them down with the text, have them read it, and ask them what they think it’s saying. I’ll bet if you did this with even Hindus — who arguably have the theological framework to understand multifaceted divinity — most of them would not come away thinking Jesus was the same as his Father. Generally secular people would have no chance of reaching that reading because they wouldn’t even have a notion that a singular “divine being” can manifest as different “divine persons.”

Now sure, I might be wrong and Wallace might be right, but that’s the thing: We could test this and see what the actual data says. This isn’t some miraculous undertaking; it’s just testing what people who aren’t familiar with a text and tradition think the text is telling them. This could be done; but Wallace hasn’t done it, so how does he know that it’s obvious? Where’s the study showing that 95% of Hindus unfamiliar with Christianity agree the Christian God is triune? I think you’d get more Hindus saying Jesus was an avatar of Vishnu than that Jesus was a co-eternal person in a single divine essence. (Probably, most of them would think Jesus was a demigod similar to the Pandavas.)

2) On The Mullins Interview

I’m curious to read the book, and it may answer the questions I’m mulling over (no pun intended), but I want to come back to this issue between you and Craig on “overdetermined personhood.”

It’s not clear to me what Craig means for the “single soul” of God to actually be. My understanding — and from the interview, it appears yours as well — is that a “soul” is either part of a suite of “rational faculties” or the amalgamation, container, carrier, coordinator, label, or summary of those same faculties. Point being, there’s some point of interaction between the “soul” and “rational faculties” such that personhood emerges from this interaction, and it isn’t clear to me how different rational faculties can be engaged in this process at the same time. All I can glean from Craig’s argument is that God’s “soul” is “some singular thing which can be associated with sets of rational faculties,” but that stikes me as dangerously close to begging the question on Trinitarianism. “Soul,” so far as I can tell, is just defined by Craig as “the thing that allows three rational faculties to be counted as a single thing,” but since I don’t know what that thing is, I don’t know why I should accept that there even is such a thing!

The question of overdetermined personhood further appears to lead to either Tritheism or the persons not being God if we take Craig literally, and I’m not sure how else to take him because of the above. To get around my prior issue, one possible analogy I can think of to explain this idea of a single “soul” resulting in overdetermined personhood is as follows:

Imagine a supercomputer so powerful that it can run three separate General AIs (AIs with true rational faculties, rather than current predictive models) in parallel. Each AI is implemented through a unique program suite that is unique to that AI and not shared with the others. Each AI meets the necessary conditions for personhood, in that they have software that grants them the ability to think and act rationally and access to hardware that maintains the software and permits their consciousnesses to continue operating constantly. But all three AIs happen to share the same hardware: The supercomputer they’re all running on.

In the above example, the “soul” is the hardware and the “rational faculties” are the AI software packages. Setting aside the obvious disanalogy that each AI is using a portion of the hardware’s resources rather than all of them using the entire supercomputer simultaneously, this appears to be vaguely what Craig is gesturing at. But we clearly have three “people” here, as each AI is a separate person: Their rational faculties are distinct such that if you talked to one of them in secret, the others wouldn’t know about the conversation. The data of that conversation is indeed all there on the hardware, but the AI programs cannot access data their own software isn’t handling.

We could instead shift it up a level and say the supercomputer itself “knows” everything all the AIs know insofar as the data for all three is located in its physical memory, but the supercomputer isn’t a person because it doesn’t rationally evaluate the contents of data or the operations its CPU runs; it doesn’t “know” things in the same way a person with rational faculties knows things. The AIs could rationally evaluate data or engage in operations and calculations as a form of cognition, but that’s because they possess all the necessary rational faculties for personhood in their software; and their software doesn’t have access to all the data that’s physically on the machine, only whatever data their software is keeping track of and accessing. The supercomputer is a piece of hardware which is constantly executing data operations for three rational persons in parallel, but it doesn’t know it’s doing it because it is not itself a person with rational faculties. It would make no sense to say the supercomputer on the whole is “the one true AI in three persons,” nor would it make sense to say the supercomputer is an “overdetermined person.” It’s not a person in any respect: The supercomputer is a medium or substrate within which three AI persons exist, in the same sense the physical universe is where living human persons exist. Nobody would say the physical universe is an overdetermined human because it’s where billions of human brains happen to exist. My house isn’t a person just because my family’s bodies all live in it.

These problems parallel with the Trinitarian understanding I think Craig seems to be presenting here: He’s describing God’s “soul” as if it is the computer upon which the Divine Person “programs” run, then calling the hardware itself God; and your objection appears to be — I’m probably way off, so I apologize in advance — that he’s actually pointing at one computer running three programs simultaneously and calling that three computers. My concern is that, without disambiguating what he means by “God’s soul,” Craig is ascribing divinity to a non-personal substrate, which is like ascribing artificial intelligence to a silicon wafer. An AI is not the computer it runs on but rather is a specific operation of computational hardware that emulates rational faculties to the point the running program suite can be called a person. It’s emergent in the same sense that a human person is not merely a functioning brain but the constant mutual cooperation of the brain, nervous system, sensory organs, and muscles.

But if Craig thinks that the Father, Son, and Spirit “emerge from” an impersonal divine essence, then he’s denying aseity and ontological priority to the Father. For the “Father program” to be running, the “computer” needs to have been booted up first; that is definitely not either the New Testament or post-Nicene conciliar view! And even if this somehow works to explain his Trinitarian model, I’m still seeing three different people here. They’re just three people who happen to mutually share a medium of existence in the same way you and I share the medium of physical reality, or the three AIs share the medium of the supercomputer hardware. This isn’t a totally alien idea to people in antiquity, but I think they would have said that if three consciousnesses emerge from a divine essence, then there are three gods. They would not have said that the divine essence itself is a god, because the divine essence isn’t a person. It’s where persons come from, specifically persons who are gods; each person who comes from there is uniquely a god. Humans are persons but not gods because human persons don’t come from the same place as divine persons. That’s a view that I think might have made sense to people in antiquity, and it’s also a view I think the writers of the New Testament were explicitly against on account of their monotheism: Yahweh isn’t a god because he emerged from the divine stuff but rather is God because he’s the only divine thing that ever existed at all!

And if Craig says the divine essence is a person, then he’s shot himself in the foot, because that would mean God’s soul actually possesses four rational faculties (God/Father/Son/Spirit), which contradicts his model. You’ve criticized exactly this issue with Social Trinitarianism many times before, and dodging it seems to push Craig closer to the above-mentioned “hardware” model where the divine essence is just “the place where the Father/Son/Spirit’s consciousnesses exist,” which in no way necessitates thinking those three consciousnesses are a single being. I am aware that divine simplicity would be the argument for why the substrate must also be the persons; but setting aside that I don’t believe divine simplicity is intelligible or coherent, I don’t think Craig’s model can invoke divine simplicity if it requires three distinct sets of rational faculties, which is far too complex for divine simplicity to allow.