What do you mean by "God"? : Part 1 - Aseity

In honor of my 10th post and just to shake things up a bit, I thought I would go into a small series of articles attacking the question of Apologetics from a different angle. Often times, people already have an idea in their head of what they think Christianity is and what we mean when we say "God." Often times, this idea is wrong. Over the next few posts I'd like to take a look at what a biblical definition of God entails and what implications can be drawn from this. If you're already a Christian, my hope is that these posts will help you gain a better understanding of God and incite the awe and worship that such knowledge naturally brings about. If you're not a believer, I would still encourage you to read the articles carefully. Not only will this help you avoid misrepresenting the Christian worldview and committing the embarrassing straw man fallacy, but I hope that by doing so you can begin to appreciate how this is a religion that values the rational mind, rather than a mere blind faith that requires you to check your brain at the door.

A-what-y?
As I mentioned, people often have very different ideas of what should constitute as "God." There are, however, several aspects generally agreed upon that are considered necessary attributes of any being trying to claim this title. Perhaps the most important of these characteristics is the attribute of "aseity." Don't feel bad if you're unfamiliar with the term or have never heard it before. In fact, even my spell checker doesn't recognize the word (which I find oddly amusing). Here's a breakdown for you. It's a two part latin term comprised of a (from) and se (self), with the suffix -ity to denote the property. 1 These phrases combined gives us the attribute of being self-generated or self existence. To put it more precisely, "the absolute self-sufficiency, independence, and autonomy of God." 2 What this means is that when we use the term God, we should be referring to an entity that does not rely on anything else. Something that is whole, complete and eternal all on it's own. The notion of something existing entirely in and of itself can be a difficult one to grasp, and indeed impossible to understand completely with our finite limitations. However, it should be noted that this is not logically in-congruent, but as we'll see shortly, necessary for there to be anything else at all. 

Defining God
Before I continue, I would like to take a quick side step to address an important issue to these upcoming posts. At this point, some of you may be thinking "Well, you can define God how you want, but not everyone will define God that way and you can't force your definition on others." In some respects that's true. Many people over the years have had different ideas in mind when they thought of "God." The danger of this sort of question is that in some ways, it begs the question by presupposing God to be an abstract concept that people get to create on their own. The purpose of this discussion is not to look at how people would create the idea of God, but whether or not God actually exists, and if so, what properties that deity would have. To illustrate the problems with arbitrarily choosing how to define God, think of how this would work on a more every day scale. For instance, take the phrase "I think Jeremy is roughly 6 foot 2 and has wings." Now, part of this statement is actually true and the other part is (sadly) false. The reason you could probably guess that this second description was in error, even if you've never actually met me before, is because you recognize that this is not an attribute possessed by something with a human nature. In the same manner, when looking to the concept of God, we should be trying to discover at least some of what would be the natural state of affairs for a being with the nature of divinity. In this case, we don't get to randomly choose characteristics and qualities of God that are appealing to us. Rather we should be trying to determine what characteristics best fit the profile of something that would be creator and sovereign of the universe.

The Un-Caused Cause.
So what does the attribute of aseity have to do with an all powerful creator of the universe? Well, to explain this we're going to look at what is perhaps the most popular (and convincing) argument for the existence of God. This argument is called the Kalaam Cosmological Argument, or sometimes the Causal Argument. Stated in it's most basic form the argument goes like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause. 3

This is pretty straightforward, but it leaves us at an interesting place. What would be necessary to be the cause of the universe? This argument is based off of what's known as the Law of Causality, that being the idea that every effect has, necessarily, a prior cause to it. It's perhaps easiest to picture as a line of dominoes. One domino falls because the one before it hit it. Let's let the dominoes in this scenario represent any event in life. Logic then dictates that this event had a prior cause, which also must have had a prior cause, which also had a cause and so on. If we were to continue ad infinitum into the past of pre-requisite prior causes, we would end up with what's referred to as an infinite regress; a big red flag in philosophical terms. If this were the case, then we would be left with no actual starting place to get the law of causality moving. Let's go back to the dominoes. If you continually add one more domino before the current one in this fashion, and kept going infinitely into the past always adding one more domino, you would never actually have a starting place to begin the process of knocking them over. What this tells us is that if we actually observe one domino falling, then we must accept that at some point, one domino fell without having a domino prior to it. This domino must, of it's own accord, have had the necessary characteristics to cause this first event.

I'm sure you see the connection now. The Kalaam argument leads us to the conclusion that if there is any event at all, at some point prior there must have been one thing that existed and had the power of causality all on it's own. This would be what Thomas Aquinas referred to as the "un-caused cause," which brings us back to the concept of aseity. It's clear that we have a universe, and that stuff happens in it. Because of this, we should then accept the fact that something had to have the property of self-existence in and of itself in order to bring about the rest of creation. For this reason, the attribute of aseity becomes one of the necessary characteristics of anything to which we would want to ascribe the tile of God. It's easy to see how this one characteristic alone will rule out many (though not all) of the world's religions in how they view what it means to be God. For me, this becomes one of the most amazing and awe-inspiring attributes of deity for the Christian faith. Not only because such a being must (out of necessity) exist on it's own, but also because this being goes one step further to reach out to the finite creation He started. In one of the earliest encounters of human beings with the divine, Moses asks God for a name which he can use to explain to other people who this God is. His simple reply echoes with all the power and authority of what we would expect an un-caused, self existent foundation for the entire universe to use as His own description.

Then Moses said to God, "Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you.' Now they may say to me, 'What is His name?' What shall I say to them?" God said to Moses "I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'"  Exodus 3:14, NASB


1 - Wikipedia - Aseity
2 - Meriam-Webster Online Definition - Aseity
3 - Reasonable Faith - In Defense of the Kalaam


Todays Recommendations

 Recommended Reading
On Guard - William Lane Craig 
There's little dispute on who to go to as the authority on the Kalaam argument. Dr. Craig's book on basic Apologetics will help you explain this and many other arguments for the existence of God to other people in a clear and understandable fashion.

Recommended Listening
The Best of the Kalaam - Reasonable Faith
A look at the highlights and best defenses for the Kalaam argument, again by Dr. Craig. Like I said, he really is the "go to" guy on the subject...

Before the Beginning - R.C. Sproul, Ligonier Ministries
A video lecture by R.C. Sproul on the attribute of God's aseity and it's implications. A little dated in it's presentation, but the information is still excellent.

Today's Challenge
Take a moment to stop and think about what would be necessary to be a cause of the universe. What other characteristics can you think of that would have to be used to describe God? Think of the Kalaam argument and what it would take to be an external, eternal, all powerful cause outside of creation. 

Contradiction: It's the Law!

If you find this picture upsetting, untrue or even the dreaded "intolerant," then I would encourage you to keep reading. Before you do though, it might be a good time to stop and ask yourself why it's offensive to you (or if)? Please realize that the intent of the picture is not to offend, but merely to illustrate a point. The main point here is that in our culture's attempt to not upset anyone, we've distorted certain notions about religion and spirituality so that all religions are seen as equally viable and any criticism is seen as bigoted or oppressive. The simple fact of the matter, however, is that not all religions are true. In fact, the truth even goes beyond that. The simpler fact of the matter is that all religions can't be true. If one continues to assert such a claim, we would not only be inconsistent within our own worldview, but we would be trying to violate one of the basic laws of logic, the law of non-contradiction.

What is the law of contradiction?
The law of non-contradiction is one of Aristotle's Laws of Logic. These laws are the Law of Identity, Law of Non-Contradiction and Law of Excluded Middle. Don't let the long titles intimidate you. These are actually things that you use everyday and probably don't give them much thought. In this post, I'll just focus on the second law, that of non-contradiction. The law of non-contradiction stated simply is that "A" and "not A" cannot both be true at the same time, in the same manner. To make it more clear, just pick some random proposition or state of affairs to fill in for "A." For example: "The universe is expanding" and "The universe is not expanding" cannot be simultaneously accurate. Either the universe is expanding, or it's not. We can disagree and debate on which we think is true, but it wouldn't make any sense to try and assert both. This is a foundational concept to how we think and is an example of what's known as a First Principle. In fact, this law is so inescapable, that you would have to use the law in order to discredit it. To deny the law of non-contradiction, you would have to state that the law is false, which is to say that it's not true rather than true (not A rather than A), which is itself an exemplification of the law and therefore circular...       Is you're head spinning yet?

Why can't they all be true?
So, what does all this have to do with religion? Well, first, I think it would help to get away from the term "religion," as it comes with a certain amount of cultural baggage all on it's own. At the heart of every religion, is a worldview that seeks to describe the metaphysics of what our world is like, so this may actually be a better place to start from. If you're unfamiliar with worldview philosophies, check out my previous post here. From this point, it becomes simple. Simply identify the claims of a particular religion (worldview) and then see if they violate the law of non-contradiction. If these claims differ, then we know that they can't both be true. This works in widely general claims, such as "does God exist?," which would be a shared claim of the great monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) but rejected by Buddhism, Jainism and Atheistic beliefs. It shows up best however in the specific claims of each worldview, such as Jesus' claim to be "the way, the truth and the life." and the sole path to reconciliation with God. John 14:6 Since no other religion makes this claim, we know that it's either true, or false. Again we can debate over which one it is, but one thing that we can be certain of is that it cannot be both true and false. Every worldview and religion in the world makes a claim to have the truth. What the second law of logic tells us is that every such claim axiomatically excludes everything else. For this reason, every religion cannot be true and in fact, denies all others in the process. In doing so, our modern notion of "tolerance" becomes not only impractical, but impossible on a fundamental basis.

What becomes of tolerance?
So how should we as rational human beings strive to coexist in light of this fact? Our current culture wants to define tolerance as "respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world's cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. 1 " While this may seem noble and understanding, because of our logical first principles it can't actually be lived out. This manner of definition essentially dictates that we cannot critique any religious worldview or even claim it as false. The twist here is that this type of tolerance becomes a narrow method of universal acceptance and any dissent is immediately seen as wrong and highly criticized. See the law of non-contradiction at work? Our culture's current view of tolerance ironically becomes the most intolerant view of all. So, how can we then be tolerant towards our fellow human beings? I suggest we go back to what was until very recently, accepted as the traditional view of the term. That being a fundamental respect for an individual, despite a complete disagreement or criticism of their worldview (rather than respecting all worldviews at the expense of the person). This classical definition is still buried in how we use the term when under non-political contexts. For example, you only tolerate something if you disagree with. If you accept an opposing view, you're no longer tolerating it, but believing it.

There is a way to be respectful yet still firmly disagree in today's culture, but it's not by allowing or accepting any ideology as it comes down the road. All religions claim a particular view of the world, and therefore deny the truth of all others. Even the modern mantra of "coexist" and "tolerance"set themselves up as the only method of respect and oppose (often vehemently) any contradictory view. If you disagree with someone, realize that it's the worldview you're disagreeing with and don't attack the person who holds it. We should be able to analyze and critique a philosophy independent of the individual. In fact, if someone is running down a cliff on a belief system that could cause harm, true respect would be to try and help that person see the flaws of their worldview, rather than assuming a standpoint of "tolerance" and allowing them to continue. The law of non-contradiction will not allow an all-accepting notion of tolerance to exist. Therefore we are left with the fact that not only are all religions not the same, but it's impossible for them all to be true. If nothing else, I hope that recognizing this becomes a step in the right direction that opens the door to the discussion so that we can then determine which religion, if any, is correct. This engagement should therefore not be seen as intolerance, but a worthwhile attempt at discovering the inescapable truth.

1 - Tolerance.org, Tolerance definition on the about page.

Today's Recommendations

Recommended Reading
True for You, But Not for Me - Paul Copan
A good starter for christian Apologetics which spends a great deal at the beginning fleshing out the implications of our cultural notions of tolerance and relativism.

Recommended Listening
Refuting Religious Pluralism - Dr. Phil Fernandes
Sadly, I haven't actually listened to this yet, but it comes from a highly recommended site, Apologetics 315.

Recommended Research
Can My Truth Be Different from Yours? - Walk Good Blog 
Good article on truth and an application of the law of non-contradiction. 

Today's Challenge
 Over the next few weeks see how many times you can notice the law of non-contradiction being overlooked for the notion of tolerance. It happens more than you think. Think of some responses to point out what's contradictory, yet with gentleness and respect for the individual making the claim. Greg Koukl's Tactics would be a great resource if your having trouble with the conversational side of the issue.