> pp.205-229
I am on the ebook, but I assume you mean Chapter 6, which I did read but as you can imagine, the arguments are not convincing to me. I think the meaning of the terms omnipotent, omniscience, goodness, etc is quite fluid in the book, so let's try to pin those down.
I posit that an impersonal God, let's call it iGod since you nitpicked ToE, serves as a final answer coming out of the proofs. Let's grant it all the qualities that the proofs need. iGod is what causes and sustains the universe. However, since iGod is impersonal, He did not choose to create the universe. Ultimately, He does not have any will. He just is. Maybe you at least agree that atheism/science is compatible with iGod in this sense.
And that is the key difference from theism, which needs a personal God (pGod) with a sense of will. As the book says (emphasis mine):
* "Since God exists in the fullest possible way, he must have the capacity to act in the fullest possible way."
* "God apprehends all the things that could exist, and causes some of those things actually to exist while refraining from causing others of them to exist."
I don't see how this sense of a will follows from the proofs. iGod, the unmoved mover/unactualized actualizer, may not have any control over actualizing. The universe can just burst forth naturally from iGod without any sort of active decision to bring it forth. The book's defense of this sense of free will, where God is free to choose not to cause the universe, is simply that "the freedom of the divine will is mysterious to us", which I think you'll agree is not any sort of proof. If you can show me how a sense of will arises from these or other proofs, I'll reconsider my position, since this is the keystone to the rest of the qualities I'm calling personal. Without will, the meaning of the rest of the personal qualities become the same as iGod's.
Some quick comments on the rest of the qualities:
Omnipotence: I am not sure if we can extend the quality of iGod causing "any given thing to exist" just from observation of this one universe. More concretely, I am still thinking about whether the purely actual actualizer being unique holds. But in any case, if iGod's omnipotence means that it causes and sustains "any given thing to exist", that is fine. But this is a passive power. If pGod's omnipotence means that He has the power to cause anything but can withhold a subset of them based on a willful decision, then that is not an outcome of the proofs. As I said, the will part matters.
Omniscience: To give a sense of where I am coming from, I'll give two example. Base axioms in mathematics cause all the rest of the theorems to be true or false, in an eternal sort of way (as also discussed in the 3rd proof). But it's absurd to attribute omniscience (about mathematics) to mathematics. And electrons cause emergent phenomenon such as electricity and working computers, yet they don't "know" anything about these emergent levels built of top. Similarly, iGod, in an impersonal way, causes the universe, following a chain of causation. But in what sense can we attribute a sense of knowing in iGod? Again, it just is. Without proving a mind/will, using the word omniscience is I think a mistake and just leads to miscommunication.
Goodness and love: I think these only exist in an emergent level of reality, i.e., in human minds. You'll agree that atoms that constitute our physical bodies don't have these attributes, right? I posit that in the same way, iGod, the impersonal base reality which constitutes everything else, also does not have these attributes. The book (and your comment) is redefining the terms (goodness = lack of imperfection, love = "that God creates things entails that he loves them") to mean something different from how we use it in our everyday conversation and which is why I think using these terms is again a mistake. We're free to use whatever terms we like of course, but it just leads to a miscommunication that makes these discussions more murky than they need to be. In any case, goodness/love in pGod again needs a sense of will to make them useful, because otherwise by the same definitions iGod is also good and all-loving.
> God cannot possibly lack anything ... It would be impossible to cause something that you don't in some sense have yourself
I understand the sense of what you're saying here, but I want to make a distinction between base qualities and emergent qualities. For example, atoms "lack" the quality of being a table, even though a table is constituted entirely by atoms. Tableness is an emergent quality. In the same way, iGod only has the properties needed to actualize the next potential that in the causal chain gives rise to entirety of reality, including our universe. But that does not mean iGod itself can be attributed the quality of being an atom or a galaxy or a human body. Causing some quality to exist down the causal chain does not mean it is meaningful to port those qualities back up the chain. In the context of the proofs, all we can be sure of is that some First Cause base reality iGod exists. But the minimal qualities we need to attribute to iGod do not use terms like goodness, love, evil, etc without entirely redefining those terms. But theists cannot then turn around and use the same words back with their original meaning in the same context.
