Being, Beings and God: A Few Thoughts on an Ongoing Debate

Dale Tuggy and William Vallicella have been debating whether God is a "being among beings" in a series of blog posts. Fr. Aiden Kimel has also weighed in. Tuggy posted a timeline of the debate, which appears to include everything except his most recent response.

It's an interesting debate for a number of reasons. It involves some of the most fundamental issues in metaphysics and theology. The debate is timely, because it is often said that the new atheist movement falsely supposes that God is a being among beings. It is striking to see someone on the theistic side of the fence defend a flat sort of ontology against the radical ontological distinctions that have been traditionally drawn.

I won't summarize the debate. Interested readers should just read through it chronologically. But perhaps a few comments on Tuggy's most recent response are in order. 

Roadmap for an Argument for the Existence of God

This is the second in a series of posts setting out an argument for the existence of God.

This post sets out the initial roadmap for the argument for the existence of God that will be set out in later posts. The particular argument I will be using is derived from Robert Spitzer’s New Proofs for the Existence of God and, to a lesser extent, W. Norris Clarke’s The One and the Many. Both are simplified versions of Aquinas’ Second Way, and they do not rely on any particular metaphysical view of the world. Thus, one does not need to accept Aquinas’ metaphysics to find the argument compelling.

The argument will proceed in five major steps. The first step is a proof for the thesis that at least one unconditioned reality exists. As we will see shortly in greater detail, an unconditioned reality is one that does not depend on another reality for its existence. It is an absolute reality that transcends the order of space and time.

The Problematic of Aristotle's Metaphysics

In order to orient the inquiry of the Metaphysics, Aristotle begins with the traditional opinions about the causes of things as a whole, and draws out their inherent difficulties. This, in part, follows from his general dialectical method: he does not begin with first principles and deduce from them a universal philosophy, but begins with the traditional beliefs that he has inherited. In one sense, this method takes into account the "thrownness" of the philosopher; that is, the fact that the philosopher is always historically situated and does not have immediate access to objective truths from which he can begin his philosophy. To start in any other way covertly imports one's inescapable intellectual inheritance into the inquiry, and allows this inheritance to be acknowledged and addressed up front. This gives Aristotle's dialectic an advantage over any deductive metaphysics, in that his starting points need not be incontrovertible.

Aristotle on Phusis

Aristotle does not limit motion to change of place, to growth and decay, to alteration, or the like; for motion, while it encompasses these things, cannot be thought of as one sort of motion that all other sorts of motion can be reduced to (i.e., motion cannot be alteration, while all other forms of motion can be reduced to alteration). Neither can the sorts of motion, added together, tell us what motion itself itself is -- any more than listing different virtues can answer the question of what virtue itself is -- and so Aristotle must give an account of motion that goes beyond listing different sorts of motion, or collapsing different sorts of motion into a single kind of motion; or to put it another way, Aristotle must explain motion as such.

In III:1 of the Physics, Aristotle defines motion as "the being-at-work-staying-itself of whatever is potentially, just as such" (201a10-20) and again as the "being-at-work-staying-itself of what is potentially, whenever, being fully at work, it is at work not as itself but just as movable" (201a15-30). The definition might be formulated in a more paradoxical (and troubling) way: motion is the activity of potentiality; and thus one might conclude Aristotle's definition directly contradicts itself, for actuality and potentiality ought to be opposed to one another--at least on the superficial reading.