Outline of Feser's "The Neo-Classical Challenge to Classical Theism"

 I.  Defining the positions: 

Classical Theism (CT) Distinctives:  God is simple and not composed of parts in any way; immutable; outside of time; and impassible or unable to be affected by anything outside of him.

Neo-Classical Theism (N-CT): Rejects one or all of the four putative divine attributes in CT.

There are two basic methods for spelling out the divine nature.

Perfect being theology (PBT):  Deduces various attributes from the definition of God as the GCB.

First-Cause Theology:  Infers what the cause of the world must be like given the world as an effect.

CT and N-CT can both use these methods, but disagree about where a sound application leads.

Divine simplicity holds that God is in no way composed of parts: Of form and matter, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, genus and differentia, substance and attributes, or parts of any other kind.

Aquinas held that God’s essence and existence are identical.  This is a monstrously difficult claim to understand.

From simplicity the other classical attributes can be inferred.

II. Mullins' Mischaracterization:  

Some alleged traits of Classical Theism: God has no properties at all, not even extrinsic or relational properties.  We cannot make even conceptual distinctions between parts or aspects of God.  God cannot even be said to be Lord or Creator.

We need to disambiguate what we mean by “property.”  

Thomistic Properties:  Attributes that are proper to a thing.

Modern Sense:  Anything that might be predicated of a thing.

But Thomists do not claim that God has no properties.

Thomists tend to use the term “attributes” rather than property, and they hold that God has attributes such as power, knowledge, and goodness.

Divine simplicity is committed to the identity of God’s power with his knowledge with his goodness, etc.  But this isn’t the same as denying that God has properties.

Classical theists also affirm that God has extrinsic (Cambridge) properties, such as currently being written about by me.

Classical theists also admit that there are conceptual distinctions between God’s attributes.  The different attributes differ in sense but not in reference.  They refer to the one God.

III. Two Objections to CT

The Creation Objection:  There is a state of affairs in which God exists without creation and a state of affairs in which he exists with creation.  So we must affirm that “God begins to be related to creation.”  But this implies God changes.  So God isn’t immutable or timeless.

Classical theists just reject that God “begins” to be related to creation.  In the words of Helm:

If one wishes to use the language of time to characterize the relation of a timelessly eternal God to a temporal order then it must be said that God has always stood in the relation of being the Creator of the temporal world. But this language is itself misleading, and therefore needs to be used cautiously. It is better, more accurate to eternalism, to say that God has a timelessly eternal relation with the temporal world, but a relation that is nevertheless causal and contingent. 

We can appeal to Cambridge properties.  In creating the world, God bears a Cambridge relation to it.  But this doesn’t imply an intrinsic change on God’s part.

God’s will is an intrinsic property of God, but that the created world is its effect is not.  Thus being creator of the world is not an intrinsic property of God.  

The created world bears a real relation to God, but it does not follow that God bears a real relation to creation.  Observing is a real property, for instance, but being observed is a mere Cambridge property.

Mullins alleges that the universe could not be causally dependent on God if God bears only a Cambridge relation to the world.  But, as stated above, creation does bear a real relation to God.

To say that God bears a Cambridge relation to the world does not mean that God bears a mere fictional relation.  It is true that he has a relation to us, just not an intrinsic one.

The second objection Modal Collapse Objection.  If all of God’s actions are identical to God’s existence, and if God’s existence is necessary, it would seem that all of his actions are necessary.  So creation is necessary.

Response:  Being creator is a Cambridge property and God is not identical to Cambridge properties, but only his intrinsic properties.  So the Classical Theist would not identify God’s existence with all of his actions.