The Philosophers' Gods

On Philip Goff vs. William Lane Craig

When British philosopher Philip Goff announced that he had converted to (in his own words) a “heretical” version of Christianity last year, it caused a bit of a splash in the circles where I run. After laying out his spiritual journey in an essay, he gave his “coming out” interview on the Capturing Christianity channel with Catholic YouTube apologist Cameron Bertuzzi. In the manner of Christian YouTube, this was picked up and analyzed to death on about a dozen other channels. Goff for his part was affable and more than happy to explain exactly where his views diverge from little “o” Christian orthodoxy (although he’s tried to claim his views on the resurrection chime with Eastern Orthodoxy). Not only does he freely reject basic doctrines like God’s omnipotence and the Virgin Birth, but as a panpsychist, he has even weirder ideas about exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about God.

I observed all this with decidedly mixed feelings. Goff rejects the particular flavor of reductive materialism that Christian apologists are used to arguing against, which has given them something new and shiny to talk about. But there was a much too eager rush to say that Goff is therefore “moving in the right direction.” Rather than making progress along the path towards a little “o” orthodoxy, Goff as I see him is cheerfully progressing along his own bespoke orthogonal path. It’s certainly leading…somewhere or other, but that somewhere isn’t really any closer to where he should be.

In particular, it became clear that Goff’s conception of Jesus’ resurrection is importantly divergent from the received Christian tradition. For inspiration, he’s claimed the scholar Dale Allison, who emphatically rejects the idea that Jesus appeared to his followers in a tangible, physical body. Yet as I’ll expand on in a moment, there’s also been a strange tolerance for Allison in some Christian apologetics spaces. The common thread, in my opinion, is a temptation for more conservative Christians to seek as much overlap as possible with scholars who hold mainstream credibility. I want to caution my fellow Christians against “finding” such overlap where none actually exists. I think this is a function of seeing scholars like Allison or Goff as potential “gets,” or trophies, or feathers in our cap. That frame of mind not only fails to consider these men as they already actually, distinctively are, but risks fuzzifying our thinking about our own doctrine.

All to say, I think it was a good idea for Justin Brierley to orchestrate a dialogue where some of Goff’s ideas could be forthrightly challenged by another philosopher. Understandably, he chose William Lane Craig. Whether Craig was the actual best-prepared philosopher to make that challenge is something I’ll unpack in this review, particularly on the resurrection, where I’m most familiar with the debate and where I think he’s weakest. Readers know I favor the “maximal data” as opposed to “minimal facts” approach, which, like Wesley Huff and other scholars, I think is insufficient. While Craig doesn’t always claim to be a “minimal facts” proponent strictly, he at least relies on what could fairly be called a “minimalist” argument, with N. T. Wright’s work his main fallback. I haven’t specifically discussed Wright’s work before, but I think it will be helpful to explain why I see it as an insufficient substitute for the kind of maximalist work done by scholars like Peter J. Williams, Lydia McGrew (yes, she’s my mom), and others, including of course the many older scholars who stand behind them.

However, since I’m also a philosophy nerd more generally, I won’t be able to resist saying a few things about the other fascinating topics Goff and Craig touched on in philosophy of mind and religion. I realize for some people “all charms fly/At the mere touch of cold philosophy,” I’ve just never been one of them.

To begin with, I find it interesting that Goff, like so many people, points to the finetuning argument as his favorite argument for theism, the one that really turned the tide for him when he overhauled the debate as an adult atheist. This argument also features prominently in Ross Douthat’s new book (which I still need to review), featured rather prominently in Larry Sanger’s recent testimony, and has been cited by various atheists as the argument that most tempts them to believe even though it’s still not quite enough. Perhaps surprisingly, I’m rather more muted around this argument. This becomes less surprising when I mention that my folks have done technical work in the literature around the topic, acknowledging that the idea is intriguing but probing for potential flaws. It’s by no means a silly argument, it’s a philosophically serious and intuitively appealing thought that’s sparked lots of fruitful debate. The question is, are there limits to its application, particularly when we set up calculations that could mathematically cash out as a division by infinity? In which case, oops.

But I understand why it’s so popular, and I understand why it specifically appeals to scholars like Goff who are keen on a deistic, non-interventionist theism. The God who ingeniously tinkers with the universe once, just once, feels far more bearable, safer, than the God who could stretch out His hand and do a new thing at any time.

That is a running theme in Goff’s paradigm: to make God bearable. To make Him understandable, graspable. The idea of a God who makes a universe that allows for pain, suffering, and evil, then watches it play out when He could intervene, is for many an idea too alien and painful to tolerate. But if you asked Goff’s less than omnipotent God to create a world with all the good stuff minus all the bad stuff, Goff’s God is like the guy in the meme saying, “Best I can do is a world whose laws allow for bad stuff.”

I don’t want to delve too deep here, because this is very well-traveled ground and I’m not up on the literature, but I do think the claims “The only kind of universe God could create was a universe with laws allowing for bad stuff” and “The only way for God to create the universe He wanted was to create a universe with laws allowing for bad stuff” are importantly different. To say there was only one creative route to the outcome God wanted is not to limit God’s power per se. You could say this is knocking on the door of a standard free will theodicy, although that theodicy still leaves unresolved questions around natural evil and animal suffering, which I confess to not having fully resolved for myself either. Finally, Brierley and his co-host Peter Byrom were right to point out in their post-mortem that Goff’s refusal to understand Christ’s Passion and resurrection in the orthodox way closes himself off from, well, the actual best ultimate resolution—certainly the best resolution for the human problem.

On free will, divine foreknowledge, and predestination, I think the point belonged to Craig, who nicely articulated the Molinist view that God has perfect knowledge of what we might do, but we are the ones who choose what we will do. The philosophers’ disagreement seems to hinge on the question of whether God, in creating our world, has simultaneously created our world history, or whether we create our world history. My mother has coined the fun phrase “the fallacy of the clickable universe” for the former view—as if God surveyed an array of possible worlds on His divine desktop, then decided to click the one that looked like a pale blue dot. On an individual level, the idea would be God didn’t just create Adam, He created Adam’s life story. But Mom argues, and I agree, that this is the wrong way to see it. God created Adam, and that is all. And Adam was, in Milton’s words (words originally applying to Lucifer, but true here too), “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”

Of course, in Goff’s strange view, “the universe” is itself in some sense a conscious entity. Craig is quite blunt in dismissing this as an absurdity, and I don’t blame him. I did however want to make the meta-observation that here and a few other places, Goff emphasizes how much respect some of his views enjoy in recent literature (including passing mention of a paper co-written by one of my dad’s old students, funny enough). I’m sure he didn’t mean to imply that Craig is a has-been and just needs to get hep to what the kool kids are doing, but I wondered if Craig picked up that tone and was irritated by it.

The interesting thing about this to me is that while Craig is willing to part ways with the mainstream, he gives the impression of wanting to at least be in the ballpark of mainstream respectability. Hence his pressing the overly timid, minimalist framework for the resurrection, while explicitly eschewing debates around gospel reliability where the consensus is firmly against Christians. My contention has always been that Christian academics need to shed this sort of angst entirely and not give weight to where consensus opinion is clustering merely because it’s the consensus (though it might be the consensus for good reasons). An idea doesn’t magically become serious and respectable merely because it is taken seriously by a certain percentage of natively bright people with Ph.Ds. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

With that, let’s get down to the topic of the resurrection, where I award neither Goff nor Craig any points.

First, while Goff never outright begs the question, he does admit that the prior probability of a bodily resurrection is much lower on his already unorthodox view of God’s nature. It creates obvious problems if you are wedded to a picture of a God who never steps into the world and makes things happen. (The particular panpsychic way Goff tries to marry his unorthodox view of God with his unorthodox view of the resurrection gets so weird I won’t bother trying to summarize it here, but curious readers can hear it in his own words in the debate.) So these things are all bound up with each other. Goff also tries to make an especially weak argument that we need to explain the scarcity of Jesus’ resurrection appearances if he was physically raised, without clarifying how this question goes away on an “objective vision” view. If Goff is bothered by the idea of Jesus not physically visiting Pilate, Herod, etc., then why is he not equally bothered by the idea of God not beaming down holographic visions of an ascended Jesus to them?

“Holographic visions” is a rather cheeky but more or less accurate summary of Dale Allison’s view, on which the disciples really did see Jesus, just not in the way orthodox Christians believe. There was a rather odd moment in the debate where Craig insisted Goff was “misunderstanding” both Allison and Wolfhart Pannenberg, Craig’s Doktorvater, when claiming they conflate the resurrection and the ascension. Goff backpedaled very slightly to say that Allison doesn’t precisely say those two events are one and the same. But the distinction between that claim and Allison’s actual claim—that ascension happened before the resurrection appearances, meaning they were a function of Jesus’ being so to speak “beamed down” to the disciples—is a distinction without an interesting difference. On p. 261 of the latest edition of Allison’s book, he writes, “Traditionally, most Christians have believed that, at some point, Jesus passed ‘into a new mode or sphere of existence.’ I see no theological deficit in supposing that this happened before he appeared to Mary and Peter.”

As for Pannenberg, Craig himself hasn’t always been maximally helpful in presenting his views. In contexts like this online Q & A, Craig writes in an unclear way that doesn’t carefully draw out the distinction between Pannenberg’s actual view and “believing in Jesus’ bodily resurrection.” In fairness, Craig is more clear in his academic work, but that webpage will be the first point of contact for most laymen seeking a summary.

In short, Goff is essentially correct in his representation of how both these scholars diverge from the biblically orthodox view, and Craig’s oddly forceful objection boils down to a minor quibble. I wouldn’t be as concerned to linger on this brief exchange if a figure like Allison hadn’t emerged with so much strange appeal to the apologetics-sphere. Apologists like Mike Licona have outright coopted him as a “fellow believer,” for instance in this interview where Licona asks Allison to share details about his devotional practices. (Given Licona’s cavalier approach to the reliability of the gospels, coupled with his persistent habit of obfuscation about his own views, one can be excused for wondering whether he wants to create an acceptable fallback position for himself in case he’s ever converted to Allison’s perspective. That way he can still claim to be “affirming the bodily resurrection,” thus—as usual—having his cake and eating it too.)

One thing I do appreciate about Goff is that he is refreshingly blunt about being forced to simply reject key parts of the resurrection narratives. He expanded on this more in his initial discussion with Cameron Bertuzzi. With reference to, for instance, the episode where Jesus eats fish, Goff says straight up, “I’ve got to say that didn’t happen.” The physicality is simply too stark. I won’t bother trying to go into Goff’s muddy attempt to distinguish “physical” from “bodily.” The salient point for our purposes is that he doesn’t believe Jesus had a body that could be touched and handled and observed performing bodily functions. And while he tries to suggest he’s somewhere “in the ballpark” of N. T. Wright when Wright talks about Jesus’ “transphysicality,” I think that’s greatly stretching Wright, who is unambiguous about the importance of Jesus’ physical tangibility.

What Goff’s peculiar approach does underscore though, as does Dale Allison’s, is the urgent need for Christian apologists to take the forward position and argue for the whole reliability of the gospels. While I’m not saying Wright denies whole-gospel reliability, their defense doesn’t occupy the central arguments of his big resurrection book, which Craig literally holds up as the definitive resource. Rather, Wright chiefly makes an argument from the prior implausibility of a physical resurrection claim based on the disciples’ Jewish context. He argues that, as Second Temple Jews, they were predisposed towards the belief that no individual would be resurrected before the end of days, which he distinguishes from being “resuscitated” (the category where he places, e.g., Lazarus). Therefore, when they were convinced Jesus was risen, they must have demanded excellent evidence, because it was such a profound shakeup of their cultural frame.

But here one could press the point back that if the disciples were so dead set against the idea of individual “true” resurrection, who’s to say they wouldn’t have assumed Jesus was simply “resuscitated”? Further, this doesn’t address the basic epistemological point: The claim has been made that a man stood up and walked out of a grave, in a tangible, visible body. Either that happened, or it didn’t. And the evidence that determines whether or not it happened is going to swing free of precisely what theological interpretation we put on it. Practically, on the ground, the disciples had to get to that square one before they could even start to grapple with the heavy metaphysics behind it all.

One also wonders how we’re to picture their thought process when Jesus repeatedly predicted his own resurrection. Were they silently correcting the rabbi in their heads? Also, doesn’t their panicked thought that Jesus might be a ghost on the sea serve as evidence against Wright’s claim that apparitions are a purely “Greco-Roman” notion? And meanwhile, what about the religious leaders nervously setting guards at the tomb? Or Herod’s fear that Jesus was John the Baptist risen from the dead? Wright has to explain away that example with some ad hoc stuff about John the Baptist being a type of Elijah, who went to heaven in a whirlwind—never mind the fact that John most definitely didn’t. The passage rather clearly does stand as evidence against Wright’s very strong claim that the disciples would never have believed Jesus rose on weak grounds.

These are the kinds of awkward questions that begin to populate the more you interrogate Wright’s argument. They can all be simply and elegantly avoided by giving up the attempt to go around the barn and going straight for the jugular, arguing directly from the precise details that are too hot for Goff and Allison to handle. Again, to be clear, it’s not that Wright denies those details or doesn’t refer to them in his book. My point is that he simply avails himself of them without mounting a comprehensive argument for their reliability. There’s some discussion positing that they would have been more ornately embellished with supernatural detail if they were forged, but that’s not as clean, and certainly not thorough. Fortunately, that detail work has been more helpfully undertaken by scholars like Williams, McGrew, etc.

In conclusion, when Goff gets to the part where Jesus eats fish and says “I’ve got to say that didn’t happen,” this is it. This is precisely the moment where Christian apologists should be smelling blood (sorry to use a rather aggressive metaphor, but we are talking about a clash of ideas). This is the weak spot. We must home in on it. And unfortunately, that’s precisely what apologists like Craig are not prepared to do, because Craig has spent his career arguing that whole-gospel reliability is an optional prerequisite for the truth of the resurrection.

At the debate’s conclusion, Goff playfully asks Craig whether he thinks Goff is a Christian. Craig smoothly deflects with the answer that he thinks Goff’s ideas are untenable, but he can’t speak to his relationship with God. A gracious enough answer, but I don’t think it would have been ungracious for Craig to give a forthright “No.” I think what we publicly do or don’t stake ourselves on matters. What Christians have staked themselves on has historically been a matter of life or death. The words of the Creed are not “just words,” or “just propositions.” Words are living and active. Words wound and heal. Words kill and give life.

I have to disagree with the hosts in the debrief when they repeat this language of Goff “traveling in the right direction.” I certainly share their hope that Goff makes his way towards a right understanding of all these things one day. But at some point, that will inevitably involve turning the car around.