Is the Concept of God Incoherent? (Pt. I)

Peter Atterton, a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University, had a column in the New York Times last spring in which he argued that the concept of God as held by most theists is incoherent and thus not credible.

Atterton is not the first to advance this argument, it's been around for a long time despite the fact that it fails to establish what it claims to establish.

In order to show that a concept is incoherent there has to be an explicit or implicit contradiction in the concept. For example, the concept of a square circle is incoherent since a figure cannot be both square and circular at the same time.

Here are some excerpts from Atterton's argument in the Times:

I’d like to focus on a specific question: Does the idea of a morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God make sense? Does it hold together when we examine it logically?

You’ve probably heard the paradox of the stone before: Can God create a stone that cannot be lifted? If God can create such a stone, then He is not all powerful, since He Himself cannot lift it. On the other hand, if He cannot create a stone that cannot be lifted, then He is not all powerful, since He cannot create the unliftable stone. Either way, God is not all powerful.

Surprisingly, Atterton admits that there's a possible solution to the paradox, but why mention the stone paradox as an objection to the coherence of theism if there's a plausible solution to it?

The way out of this dilemma is usually to argue, as Saint Thomas Aquinas did, that God cannot do self-contradictory things. Thus, God cannot lift what is by definition “unliftable,” just as He cannot “create a square circle” or get divorced (since He is not married). God can only do that which is logically possible.

Having answered his own argument Atterton then says that, well, there are other difficulties which make the concept of God incoherent:

[E]ven if we accept, for the sake of argument, Aquinas’ explanation, there are other problems to contend with. For example, can God create a world in which evil does not exist? This does appear to be logically possible.

Presumably God could have created such a world without contradiction. It evidently would be a world very different from the one we currently inhabit, but a possible world all the same. Indeed, if God is morally perfect, it is difficult to see why he wouldn’t have created such a world. So why didn’t He?

This is not much of an argument. It certainly doesn't show that there's a contradiction between God's attributes of omnipotence and goodness. Atterton is asking the question, if God could do something that He might've been expected to do, why didn't He do it? To which the answer is simply that He evidently had good reasons for not doing so.

As long as it's possible that God had sufficient reason not to create the world Atterton envisions then he has failed to show a contradiction in God's attributes. What Atterton needs to do to show a contradiction is to demonstrate that it's impossible or at least unlikely that God could've had good reasons for allowing evil to exist, and this would be a very difficult philosophical task. After all, how could anyone know such a thing?

The rest of his attempt to find a contradiction between the attributes of God fares little better. We'll look at another of them tomorrow.